For Whom Are We Searching? Issues and Ethics of Maroon Site Location in the Southeastern United States

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of maroon societies and marronage has provided crucial insight for broader studies of the African Diaspora around the world. However, few comparative approaches have addressed the southeastern United States, where marronage manifested across a multitude of environmental, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. In part, this is due to processes of erasure and dispersion that have left little information about maroons in the Southeast and where their communities were located in these ever-changing environments. As we explore the reasons for the Southeast’s relatively few well-documented maroon archaeological sites, we illustrate how archaeologists have attempted to circumvent these issues using examples from Florida and southern Louisiana. However, as archaeologists both experienced in these efforts of site location, we evaluate the ethics involved in searching for these communities that were purposefully meant to stay withdrawn.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36134.0