Taking Religion Seriously: Leland Ferguson and the Legacy of God’s Fields

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Tribute to the Legacy of Leland Ferguson: A Journey From Uncommon Ground to God's Fields", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In God’s Fields (2011) Leland Ferguson examined the interplay between religion, race, and landscape in the Moravian town of Salem, North Carolina. In doing so, he highlighted the vital role of faith in social life. By examining cultural change vis-à-vis race and landscape in a theocratic town, Ferguson joined a small but growing group of archaeologists who explicitly examined religious belief and practice. Ferguson combined archaeological and documentary evidence with a measured application of practice theory and landscape phenomenology to demonstrate how religious ideals can radically shift over time. The result was a nuanced account of the often-fraught relationship between religion and race and the complex process of racialization in one early American community. This paper examines the legacy of God’s Fields and the ways in which Ferguson’s approach informs my own analysis of Moravian ceramic production in Salem.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• A Tribute to the Legacy of Leland Ferguson: A Journey From Uncommon Ground to God's Fields

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow