Matters of Scale: Depositional Processes and the Archaeology of Daily Life at Bacon’s Castle

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Home to Virginia’s oldest standing house, the Bacon’s Castle site is the most visible remnant of a (post)colonial landscape, continuously occupied as such since at least the 1640s. The extant portion alone, where archaeology has concentrated, has been inhabited over multiple generations by a complex community of bound laborers, tenants, sharecroppers, as well as the plantation’s owners. Previous archaeological projects have identified features, established chronologies, and yielded a vast legacy collection. Yet, high levels of stratigraphic disturbance, and the ephemerality of the material record before ca. 1680-1700, combined with the narrow scope of most CRM projects, have conspired to leave much of the vast legacy collection unanalyzed and uncontextualized. Through an intra-site comparative analysis of several artifact assemblages recovered over the past 40+ years, I explore evidence of both gradual, cumulative processes of quotidian activities, and abrupt depositional episodes relating to specific events. Findings facilitate reimagining the colonial landscape not only as an expression of its owners’ ideology and power, but as a populated space and a multivocal product of the negotiated pluralism and rising structural inequality that reshaped the Chesapeake over the last half of the 17th century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38013.0