African American Household Change over Time at an Arkansas Plantation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Hollywood and Valley Plantation, located in southeast Arkansas on the banks of Bayou Bartholomew, was home to at least four waves of migrating African Americans: two forced migrations of enslaved people of color in the 1820s and 1840s, and two voluntary migrations of Black sharecroppers in the 1870s and 1900s. Preliminary excavations at two different archeological sites have uncovered three living spaces away from the surviving big house that have remnants of smaller houses built and lived in by Black families over the course of a century. Analysis of ceramic, glass, nail, and brick artifacts allow for a seriation of these three living spaces that correlates with documentary research about three of the four known migration events to this Arkansas plantation. The material culture recovered shows the materiality of enslaved African Americans living on an antebellum frontier and how this changed when sharecroppers replaced their labor and arrived along with the railroad, the development of nearby small towns, and greater access to retail shops and non-local products.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53741