A Commodity of Consequence: Rice, People, and Lowcountry Taskscapes

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.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century transformation of c. 120,000 acres of cypress and bottomland hardwood forests in the coastal region spanning southern North Carolina to northern Florida, (the Lowcountry), for commercial rice production was only possible through the forced labor of Captive Africans and Native Americans, whose unrewarded labor grossly enriched Euro-American plantation owners. Through a consideration of archaeological data from Laurel Hill and other rice plantations, documentary, and geographic evidence, we will explore the unequal, uneasy and forced co-production of rice plantation space. This discussion will include the appropriation and elision of African agricultural and engineering knowledge foundational to rice plantation success, regional and international demographic, environmental, and political impacts of rice plantations, and Gullah ethnogenesis. The perpetuation of generations of ecological damage, racist exploitation, and injustice in post-emancipation transformations of rice taskscapes will also be discussed.

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