Reassembling an Assemblage to Examine the Origins of Race-Based Enslavement at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Flowerdew Hundred, a 1,000-acre plantation tract located on the south side of the James River in Virginia, was the focus of decades of excavations by the College of William and Mary and University of California, Berkeley. Three Flowerdew sites are among the earliest seventeenth-century settlements occupied by enslaved Africans, indentured laborers, and landowning elites in North America. By the time excavations had ceased in 2007, artifacts and field records were divided among multiple institutions. Since 2018, the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.DAACS.org) has worked to reunite, catalogue, and digitize field records and artifacts from these sites. This case study comprehensively examines artifact distributions from all three sites to analyze household organization in the early seventeenth-century Chesapeake. We explore how resident ethnicity, social status, and daily activities shaped living arrangements. Linking these data to early eighteenth-century sites in DAACS demonstrates that understanding the longer trajectory of occupation and spatial arrangements provides important insights into the multicultural dynamics behind the emergence and establishment of race-based enslavement in Virginia. The results also demonstrate that before archaeologists can reach meaningful conclusions about human behavior from an archaeological assemblage, they must know how the assemblage was excavated and curated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39614.0