Building a Plantation: Architecture, the Built Environment, and Living Spaces at Bacon’s Castle, Surry County, Virginia

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In North America, recent-historical archaeology and architectural history tend to occupy separate spheres compared to, for instance, buildings archaeology in the UK. Partial exceptions include places like the Chesapeake, where the two disciplines have shared roots at institutions like Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and St. Mary’s City. But at more rural sites—the majority across the region and Southern US generally—where most colonial and even pre-Civil War era structures are long gone or heavily altered, the situation is more complicated and the resulting gaps in understanding, interpretation, and representation wider. The Bacon’s Castle site in Surry County, Virginia, offers an intriguing case study. Inspired by the session theme, this paper presents recent archaeological research touching on different facets—material, social, affective, and political—of the architecture, built environment, and living spaces of Virginia’s oldest standing house and the (post)colonial plantation landscape it both signifies and, at times, obscures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Archaeology/Architecture

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow