Excavating Archives: Locating Enslaved Quarters and Mapping Enslaved People in New Brunswick’s Loyalist Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the popular imaginary, Canada is considered a land of freedom that is inclusive and without a colonial past. This problematic myth of Canadian exceptionalism is founded on a national history that romanticizes the Underground Railroad, while neglecting Canada’s direct participation in the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples. Although the study of Canadian slavery is a burgeoning discipline that has been analyzed by historians, archaeologists have failed to consider their role in the field. Given this paucity of archaeological research, little is known concerning the daily lives of the enslaved in Canada. My research addresses this gap and dismantles a piece of Canada’s national narrative by locating, documenting, and analyzing the enslaved quarters of Loyalists in New Brunswick (1783–1834) through the examination of archival material and by completing geographic information system (GIS) site mapping with a storymap component. By combining archaeological and historical methods with an application of Black Studies theories such as Saidiya Hartman’s theory of critical fabulation, and Katherine McKittrick and Tiffany Lethabo King’s research on Black geographies, I suggest that archival, material, and geospatial evidence can be rearranged to displace colonial accounts, challenge the cartographic erasure of slavery, and reimagine the enslaved experience in Canada.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36764.0