This volume represented a compilation of interdisciplinary research being done throughout the American South and the Caribbean by historians, archaeologists, architects, anthropologists, and other scholars on the topic of slavery and plantations. It synthesizes materials known through the 1980s and reports on key sites of excavation and survey in the Carolinas, Barbados, Louisiana and other locations. Contributors include many of the leading figures in historical archaeology.
"A significant contribution in Caribbean archaeology. Singleton weaves archaeological and documentary evidence into a compelling narrative of the lives of the enslaved at Santa Ana de Biajacas."--Patricia Samford, author of Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia "Presents results of the first historical archaeology in Cuba by an American archaeologist since the 1950s revolution. Singleton's extensive historical research provides rich context for this and future archaeological investigations, and the entire body of her pioneering research provides comparative material for other studies of African American life and institutional slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas."--Leland Ferguson, author of God's Fields: Landscape, Religion, and Race in Moravian Wachovia "Singleton's enlightening findings on plantation slavery life will undoubtedly constitute a reference point for future studies on Afro-Cuban archaeology."--Manuel Barcia, author of The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas Cuba had the largest slave society of the Spanish colonial empire. At Santa Ana de Biajacas the plantation owner sequestered slaves behind a massive masonry wall. In the first archaeological investigation of a Cuban plantation by an English speaker, Theresa Singleton explores how elite Cuban planters used the built environment to impose a hierarchical social order upon slave laborers. Behind the wall, slaves reclaimed the space as their own, forming communities, building their own houses, celebrating, gambling, and even harboring slave runaways. What emerged there is not just an identity distinct from other North American and Caribbean plantations, but a unique slave culture that thrived despite a spartan lifestyle. Singleton's study provides insight into the larger historical context of the African diaspora, global patterns of enslavement, and the development of Cuba as an integral member of the larger Atlantic World.
LIKE MONTICELLO, Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest offers a significant archeological view of slave life at the turn of the nineteenth century in rural Virginia. In Hidden Lives, Barbara J. Heath re-creates the daily life of slaves at Jefferson's second home from 1773, the year he inherited the plantation, until 1812, when his reorganization of its landscape resulted in the destruction of a slave quarter. Drawing on census data, letters, memoranda, and other primary material, Heath describes the slave community's family ties, the agricultural cycle of work, and the sickness and health care they experienced. Her portrait is enhanced by fresh archaeological findings and a wealth of illustrations, including site and contemporary maps,../images of slaves at work and at home, artifacts, and interpretive drawings. By looking at the social meaning of buildings, yards, and artifacts, Heath presents new interpretations of how individuals used materials to create a sense of self and community, how they acquired belongings, and how they safeguarded them. For visitors to historic sites and students and scholars of archaeology, Heath's book offers a visual and textual exploration of complex relationships within the plantation and of the resulting choices, compromises, and limitations that Jefferson's slaves negotiated in the process of making a home within the confines of institutionalized slavery.
Investigating what life was like for African Americans north of the Mason-Dixon Line during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, James Delle presents the first overview of archaeological research on the topic in this book, debunking the notion that the “free” states of the Northeast truly offered freedom and safety for African Americans. Excavations at cities including New York and Philadelphia reveal that slavery was a crucial part of the expansion of urban life as late as the 1840s. Slaves cleared forests, loaded and unloaded ships, and manufactured charcoal to fuel iron furnaces. The case studies in this book also show that enslaved African-descended people frequently staffed suburban manor houses and agricultural plantations. Moreover, for free blacks, racist laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 limited the experience of freedom in the region. Delle explains how members of the African diaspora created rural communities of their own and worked in active resistance against the institution of slavery, assisting slaves seeking refuge and at times engaging in violent conflicts. The book concludes with a discussion on the importance of commemorating these archaeological sites, as they reveal an important yet overlooked chapter in African American history. Delle shows that archaeology can challenge dominant historical narratives by recovering material artifacts that express the agency of their makers and users, many of whom were written out of the documentary record. Emphasizing that race-based slavery began in the Northeast and persisted there for nearly two centuries, this book corrects histories that have been whitewashed and forgotten. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney
This volume uses archaeological and documentary evidence to reconstruct daily life at Betty’s Hope plantation on the island of Antigua, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It demonstrates the rich information that the multidisciplinary approach of contemporary historical archaeology can offer when assessing the long-term impacts of sugarcane agriculture on the region and its people. Drawing on ten years of research at the 300-year-old site, the researchers uncover the plantation’s inner workings and its connections to broader historical developments in the Atlantic World. Excavations at the Great House reveal similarities to other British colonial sites, and historical records reveal the owners’ involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and in the trade of rum and other commodities. Artifacts uncovered from the slave quarters—ceramic tokens, repurposed bottle glass, and hundreds of Afro-Antiguan pottery sherds—speak to the agency of enslaved peoples in the face of harsh living conditions. Contributors also use ethnographic field data collected from interviews with contemporary farmers, as well as soil analysis to demonstrate how three centuries of sugarcane monocropping created a complicated legacy of soil depletion. Today tourism has long surpassed sugar as Antigua’s primary economic driver. Looking at visitor exhibits and new technologies for exploring and interpreting the site, the volume discusses best practices in cultural heritage management at Betty’s Hope and other locations that are home to contested historical narratives of a colonial past. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
The moral mission archaeology set in motion by black activists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to tell the story of Americans, particularly African Americans, forgotten by the written record. Today, the archaeological study of African-American life is no longer simply an effort to capture unrecorded aspects of black history or to exhume the heritage of a neglected community. Archaeologists now recognize that one cannot fully comprehend the European colonial experience in the Americas without understanding its African counterpart. This collection of essays reflects and extends the broad spectrum of scholarship arising from this expanded definition of African-American archaeology, treating such issues as the analysis and representation of cultural identity, race, gender, and class; cultural interaction and change; relations of power and domination; and the sociopolitics of archaeological practice. "I, Too, Am America" expands African-American archaeology into an inclusive historical vision and identifies promising areas for future study.
Here is the first detailed investigation of plantation slave life in Barbados from earliest times until 1838. The authors have visited slave village sites, and their intensive excavation of a slave cemetery has yielded a wealth of material pertaining to mortuary practices and other dimensions of social and material life. Handler and Lange have also examined and extensively integrated the written records to amplify and cross-check their findings. Based on the methodologies of archaeology, history, and ethnography, Plantation Slavery in Barbados explores new ways to reconstruct the culture of a social group that left few historical records. As a description of the organization and development of the plantation system in Barbados, it is a model work in the burgeoning fields of slavery studies, historical anthropology, and Caribbean history.
Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.
Recognizing the lives of the enslaved at the historic site of Mount Clare Enslaved African Americans helped transform the United States economy, culture, and history. Yet these individuals' identities, activities, and sometimes their very existence are often all but expunged from historically preserved plantations and house museums. Reluctant to show and interpret the homes and lives of the enslaved, many sites have never shared the stories of the African Americans who once lived and worked on their land. One such site is Mount Clare near Baltimore, Maryland, where Teresa Moyer pulls no punches in her critique of racism in historic preservation. In her balanced discussion, Moyer examines the inextricably entangled lives of the enslaved, free Black people, and white landowners. Her work draws on evidence from archaeology, history, geology, and other fields to explore the ways that white privilege continues to obscure the contributions of Black people at Mount Clare. She demonstrates that a landscape's post-emancipation history can make a powerful statement about Black heritage. Ultimately she argues that the inclusion of enslaved persons in the history of these sites would honor these "ancestors of worthy life," make the social good of public history available to African Americans, and address systemic racism in America. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
