Fort Mose: Marginality in Spanish Florida

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Fort Mose was the first legally sanctioned free black community in Spanish North America. In 1693 the Spanish governor of Florida guaranteed the legal freedom of self-emancipated Africans and African Americans if they converted to Catholicism, built and occupied a fort on the frontier of St. Augustine, and fought against Spanish enemies. These soldiers created a multicultural community of African, African American, and indigenous families. This paper analyzes archaeological evidence and historical documents to investigate the daily practices people used to enact their freedoms in a location and time where those freedoms were contested. A discussion of the sociopolitical context of the archaeological work also reveals how essential collaborative archaeology has been to challenging local racism from the 1970s into the present through locating the fort, telling the story of Fort Mose, and establishing Fort Mose State Historic Park.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Global Archaeologies of the Long Emancipation

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow