Understanding the Expressions of "UnFreedom" at the Montpelier Plantation’s Home Farm

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Montpelier Archaeology Department conducted archaeological surveys across the Home Farm at Montpelier, the plantation home of James Madison, from 2019-2022. In this paper, we will take a step back to explore how choices we–as archaeologists–made to interpret and talk about the sites and artifacts discovered within the Home Farm have erased the complex experiences of enslaved people living in the ultimate form of “unfreedom.” We will explore how site locations within the landscape speak to oversight and power; artifacts hint at shared skills, tools, and relationships; roads point towards movement that shifts our gaze beyond the boundaries of our sites to consider larger landscapes and communities. We will anchor our discussion in standpoint theory and descendant collaboration oriented within a queer theoretical framework in order to demonstrate how rethinking these spaces can begin to combat erasure, further more complete understandings of the past, and foster a re-remembering of place.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow