Padlocks As Multivalent Objects In The African Diaspora

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The recovery of a padlock from a domestic site seems ordinary, offering mundane interpretations to a prosaic piece of material culture. However, a lock found adjacent a slave cabin door is potentially more evocative, suggesting a negotiated social relationship, conditional privacy, and limited freedoms within enslavement. Beyond their obvious utilitarian uses to secure the contents of cabins, cabinets, or other structures on the plantation landscape, the identification of locks within other social categories has not been pursued in the field of plantation archaeology. However, padlocks are routinely used in many religiosities and belief systems throughout the African continent as a supernatural object, and a key metaphor in “locking down” evil, individuals, or bodily functions. An exploration of locks as both a negotiated freedom, and as supernatural object, will be conducted within enslaved plantation contexts in the American Southeast, and compared to key African cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2022 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology