Gullah Place-making & Racial Landscapes on Hilton Head Island, SC.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "First Steps on a Long Corridor: The Gullah Geechee and the Formation of a Southern African American Landscape" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The goal of this project is to explore ways racism, Gullah countermeasures, and reparatory actions reshaped places, spatial practices, and human relations on Hilton Head Island, from the 1800s onward. A GIS spatial analysis of maps, archival sources, oral histories, and environmental features is pursued which articulates the trajectories of island settlement, Gullah cultural landscapes, and interactions between residents and visitors. These outcomes, socially-derived behaviors, and factors were reconfigured as people negotiated land access and human rights during the transition from slavery to emancipation. Contradictions emerged along the way that call into question national narratives about concepts such as freedom. Artifacts from Hilton Head provide glimpses into potential materialities of Black justice. The spatial interpretations of our results take into account complexities discovered by archaeologists and other scholars regarding spatial ideologies, proximity, and placement processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• First Steps on a Long Corridor: The Gullah Geechee and the Formation of a Southern African American Landscape   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology