Home: Place, Space, Survival, Resistance

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 mid-nineteenth century, Spicy Baxter and siblings were emancipated by their father, George White, a freedman in Madison County, Kentucky. The family moved south, away from their northern Madison County farm to a rugged, isolated, parcel in the south of the county. Here, Spicy and her female siblings lived until the early twentieth century. But why did White move his family—namely, his female children—to this location? Using “home” as a foundation, this paper explores the lifeways of Spicy Baxter and her extended female family during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Madison County, Kentucky. Local archives and archaeological excavation along with ideas of home place (hooks 2008) and home space (Battle-Baptiste 2011) aid in the exploration of the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 1997). Critical to understanding the lives of the Baxter women is the application of theories of racial capitalism, clearance, and erasure as means of seeing a materiality of oppression and violence through what Hartman describes as “familiarizing the unfamiliar” (Hartman 1997).

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37374.0