Anne Washington's Diamond Ring: Rethinking Global Commodities and the Forces of Debt in a Colonial Edge Land.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The John Washington Site on the Potomac River was excavated in the 1930s and the 1970s. The site was occupied by English colonial settlers from the 1650s until the end of the century and conforms to reigning understandings of regional architecture and assemblages: a gentry family's modest home disguising buying power well beyond what the architecture suggests. In this case though, records reveal the presence of one of the region’s most singular objects—a diamond ring. Elaborate transnational processes were at work to place such a rarity on the shores of Bridges Creek and these paralleled those that brought the region’s first enslaved Africans to this site. This paper offers a re-read and re-contextualization of the site’s assemblages and argues that existing explanatory frameworks have been too narrow in scope for this site. Instead, David Graeber’s work on debt helps set the sort of global vision needed to understand this site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow