Cities, Seas, and Forests: Legacies of Timber and Agriculture in Chesapeake Port Cities

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

As the forests of the Chesapeake were cleared for tobacco and wheat agriculture, timber consumption reformed both agricultural and port landscapes. The systematic clearing of timber opened land for Euroamerican-style open-field agriculture while directly contributing to the development of urban ports by supplying wood for ship construction and overwater infrastructure. This timber taskscape was enmeshed in the wider agricultural and labor regimes of the Chesapeake, shaping and being shaped by both free and enslaved laborers living and working on landscapes increasingly defined by their productivity. By synthesizing historical labor accounts and historical palynological data, this paper conceptualizes the ways in which the agricultural and port landscapes of the northern Chesapeake mutually informed one another’s development. In so doing, it seeks to generate considerations of the ways in which port and agricultural labor regimes were connected through the rhizomatic transformative processes of timbering in the colonial and Early Republic periods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow