Community Archeology with Descendants of the Enslaved at an Arkansas Plantation

Summary

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

The Hollywood Plantation in southeast Arkansas was a place where over 100 enslaved African Americans labored to improve the land and generate profits for their enslavers for decades following the cession of Indian lands there in 1818. Following Emancipation, the enslaver and his descendants converted the plantation into a profitable business exploiting the labor of hundreds of sharecropper and tenant families, the majority of them Black migrants from eastern states. Research conducted over the past two years started with genealogy and connecting with the descendants of this African-American community and investigating spaces associated with their ancestors away from the Big House. So far, archeological investigations have been conducted at two sites: a slave cabin and a sharecropper house. Work has also been done to rehabilitate and interpret multiple Black cemetery and church sites across the historic 12,000-acre plantation property. Investigators also partnered with Fayetteville's Pryor Center to create an online oral history channel featuring the voices of people who worked as sharecroppers on the plantation in the early 1900s. This paper will review the results so far and show how archaeologists can work with descendants to interpret the past in a way that honors their African-American heritage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39459.0