Challenges in Dating Maroon Contexts in the Great Dismal Swamp

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Speckled with mesic islands and peat hummocks, the soggy lowlands and standing water of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina were home to thousands of African and African American Maroons (ca. 1608–1863) and a significant feature of the landscape of Indigenous Americans for many centuries prior. In part due to the extensive reuse and repurposing of material culture by the Maroon communities seeking refuge deep within the Swamp, temporally diagnostic artifacts are rare. Soil conditions and possible waste disposal practices mean preserved organic materials are even more rare. These combine to create challenges archaeologists dating the occupations of individual Maroon sites and establishing a higher resolution temporal picture of Maroon activity across sites in the morass. Sayers (2014) and his Great Dismal Landscape Study successfully obtained OSL dates from a feature at one North Carolina site and more recent attempts to obtain scientific dates from two sites in Virginia have met with mixed results. This paper discusses the difficulties and what the new results can illuminate about the resistance history of the present-day Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38930.0