Enslaved Below the Temple of Liberty: Exposing the Hidden Landscape of the Temple and Icehouse at James Madison's Montpelier

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Race, Racism, and Montpelier" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

While the presence of enslaved African Americans in plantation museums is being increasingly acknowledged and presented, interpretations of their lives are still kept largely to the areas in which they lived and labored. Slave quarters, kitchen, vegetable gardens, trash deposits, and barns are data rich and provide invaluable insights into the materiality of daily life. While these studies are invaluable, and their interpretation to the public is important, they are incomplete. Enslaved experiences within the performative landscapes of ornamental gardens and picturesque lawns are often left underexplored. Lingering assumptions that these bucolic spaces were exclusively white and elite, paired with practical and ethical challenges of interpreting a sparse material assemblage representing use and perspective. Using various approaches to landscape, intersite comparison and theoretical analysis, this paper seeks to explore the previously hidden and poorly understood story of the enslaved community’s experience and perceptions of the Temple/icehouse landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Race, Racism, and Montpelier   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology