Labor Coercion, Land Access, and Free Markets after Emancipation in the American Southeast and Caribbean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The use of theory and related models that explicitly lay out the causal processes that we hypothesize operated in the past to generate patterns archaeological data is a rarity in historical archaeology. It is especially hard to find examples of research that create or use models that are then tested using archaeological data. The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) works to encourage the application of theory to the dozens of archaeological sites and millions of artifacts from sites of enslavement across North America and Caribbean that are freely available through DAACS. Here we use a model of coercive labor and open markets to understand settlement patterns of newly freed enslaved laborers in the American Southeast after 1865, and on the islands of Dominica, Jamaica, Nevis, and Barbados after 1834. We track the use and discard of material culture throughout the nineteenth century in both regions. The results demonstrate that access to abundant and fertile land and free markets away from “home” plantations afforded greater opportunities and higher wages to newly freed laborers than those with restricted access to environmental resources.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41487.0