Landscapes of Black Farming: A Preliminary Investigation of Rural Life and Labor in Anderson County, SC and Madison County, NY, 1860-1880

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This poster details a pilot study investigating the rural landscapes of African American farming, focusing on the transformation of rural life and labor in the aftermath of the Civil War in upstate South Carolina and upstate New York. Our goal is to describe the relationship between farming strategies, social and economic interactions, and various landscapes of African American farmers in these two regions during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with particular attention to the ways Black farmers created and navigated post-emancipation landscapes. To do so, we use a combination of census data analysis and GIS-based spatial analyses of historical maps, archival sources, and environmental and landscape data from Anderson County, SC and Madison County, NY. This work is part of the larger Settlement Ecology of Early Rural America (SEERA) project, which seeks to understand the social, economic, and political roots of modern rural life in the United States.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 2022 SHA Poster Submissions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology