The Social Dynamics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: Inferences from Tobacco Pipe Assemblages and Their Archaeological Contexts.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

We explore how the analysis of variation in tobacco pipe assemblages among excavation contexts provides insights into social dynamics on eighteenth-century slave quarter sites in the Chesapeake. We draw on data from multiple quarter sites, available on the DAACS website (daacs.org). We apply signaling theory to build a model of the processes driving variation in stem bore diameters, stem length, and material. We use statistical models to distinguish signal from noise in variations of material patterning across a nested hierarchy of contextual levels, from features, to structures, to sites. Estimates of synchronic variation in stem length suggest social inequality among occupants of different structures within several sites. We show how the thoughtful integration of theoretical modeling and empirical data advances our understanding of the past by revealing aspects of enslaved societies that are often hidden from written history. The data and R code used to conduct the analysis will be available on Github.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021   •
• Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology