After Mose: Material Culture of British St. Augustine (1763-1784) as a Plantation Society and Periphery

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Fort Mose Above and Below: Terrestrial and Underwater Excavations at the Earliest Free Afro-Diasporic Settlement in the United States" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

St. Augustine, FL has been critical in historical archaeology’s examination of Spanish colonialism writ large. The “British Period” from 1763 to 1784 can be considered a short footnote compared to the two centuries of Spanish control surrounding it. The shift in political boundaries that ended the free Black settlement at Fort Mose brought noticeable changes to East Florida, including plantation agriculture and its slave society imported from the Carolinas and Georgia. Unlike those colonies however, British Florida remained a loyalist haven during the American Revolution and ultimately failed as a profitable economy. Revisiting collections from St. Augustine collections housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History, this paper looks to determine the visibility of this short occupation in the archaeological record. Such research can serve as a case study in understanding material culture in the context of the political boundaries in both St. Augustine and the greater Atlantic world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Fort Mose Above and Below: Terrestrial and Underwater Excavations at the Earliest Free Afro-Diasporic Settlement in the United States   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology