Archaeology of Enslaved Women’s Resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp

Abstract

ABSTRACT Under the conditions of corporate slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp, enslaved women transformed the mechanisms of capitalist exchange into resistance. Archaeological evidence from Dismal Town, a late-eighteenth-century corporate plantation, shows that enslaved women consumed ceramics and clothing adornments that signaled social equality. Their participation in mass consumption was an act of resistive consumption that allowed them to imagine and enact a life outside of slavery, despite their being considered as commodities and exploited for productive and reproductive labor under harsh conditions by the Dismal Swamp Company.