Joys of Archaeology

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.

Strength was a key word in Leland Ferguson’s lexicon. Awed by the survival of the people forced into slavery on plantations in the Carolinas and Virginia, Leland asked, “Where did their strength come from?” He found answers in the stories they left in the ground and nailed shut the coffin of the white supremacist view of the plantation as a "school" that helped "civilize" the enslaved. He countered with a world of cultural constructs, insights from pottery shards into the food preferences of the captives, ordinary objects embedded with religious significance, ritual items rooted in Africa, fragments of toys testifying to family life. These were the lost and discarded possessions of the Black pioneer generations, an iconography of an emerging identity. Familiar yet mysterious, the unearthed relics of slave labor camps in the American South—like recently excavated Judaica buried during the Nazi era—bring dark history into the light of day.

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