Pub Date : 2022-07-14DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2096960
C. Welch, N. Finneran
ABSTRACT This paper contextualizes the artifact “Punch Ladle, 1773” on display in the “London, Sugar & Slavery” exhibition at Museum of London Docklands (UK). A placard identifies the ladle as once belonging to “Chatoyer, Chief of the Caribs” and as on loan by the West India Committee. Through this artifact, the largely forgotten story of Chatoyer and the so-called Black Caribs (Garifuna) is highlighted, while complexities of the artifact’s provenance are analyzed through an object biography approach. The paper also considers the ethical and curatorial implications of the current non-repatriation of the artifact and its present location within the “Slave Owner” part of the exhibition. Finally, by arguing for the artifact’s global significance through its association with Chatoyer, a historic African-Caribbean figure of colonial resistance, this article contributes to current museum decolonization debates.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-12DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2096357
R. Morgan
ABSTRACT Three archaeological sites in the South Carolina Sandhills provide insight into the opportunities and challenges associated with the archaeology of rural enslavement. A consideration of the material culture and historical context of these sites raises questions about the National Register of Historic Places’ standards of significance and integrity and their applicability in historical environments of scarcity. By examining sites with quantitatively small assemblages, but large stories to tell, this article explores prospects for expanding the histories curated in the National Register of Historic Places.
{"title":"Where There’s a Will … : Rural Enslavement and National Register of Historic Places Diversity","authors":"R. Morgan","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2022.2096357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2096357","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Three archaeological sites in the South Carolina Sandhills provide insight into the opportunities and challenges associated with the archaeology of rural enslavement. A consideration of the material culture and historical context of these sites raises questions about the National Register of Historic Places’ standards of significance and integrity and their applicability in historical environments of scarcity. By examining sites with quantitatively small assemblages, but large stories to tell, this article explores prospects for expanding the histories curated in the National Register of Historic Places.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"225 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47488794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-05DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2083858
C. Orser
ABSTRACT Archaeologists have long recognized the relationship between colonialism and the attempted erasure of Indigenous heritage by creators of the dominant ideology. Efforts to rewrite history with practices that include attempts to erase have also negatively impacted how African heritage is presented in the Americas. The Wilberforce settlement in southwestern Ontario, Canada, provides an example of attempted erasure. An archaeological perspective, when coupled with textual evidence, even in the absence of excavation, demonstrates that complete erasure by the dominant and powerful is seldom successful.
{"title":"Attempted Erasure and Recovery of the Free Black Community of Wilberforce, Ontario","authors":"C. Orser","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2022.2083858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2083858","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Archaeologists have long recognized the relationship between colonialism and the attempted erasure of Indigenous heritage by creators of the dominant ideology. Efforts to rewrite history with practices that include attempts to erase have also negatively impacted how African heritage is presented in the Americas. The Wilberforce settlement in southwestern Ontario, Canada, provides an example of attempted erasure. An archaeological perspective, when coupled with textual evidence, even in the absence of excavation, demonstrates that complete erasure by the dominant and powerful is seldom successful.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"205 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47297966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2102835
L. Marshall
From the country’s founding, the United States’ dominant European-American culture included a patriarchal ideology which imposed a simplifying gender binary of male and female. Yet, when intertwined with the impacts of enslavement and racism, this ideology classified and treated African American women starkly differently from white women; it denied them any relative privileges of their gender. Enslaved Black women in the United States routinely did the same kinds of work as their male counterparts. Many women labored in agricultural fields; they even formed the majority of fieldworkers in some cases, such as with rice cultivation in South Carolina (Jones 2010, 15). Cast into “male categories” (Gillin 2014, 13), Black women were thus blocked from participation in the U.S. cult of domesticity in which white women of enough financial means avoided physical labor as part of their claim to femininity. Black women’s de-gendering is also clearly tied to race’s increasing entrenchment as a “historically produced technology of power” (Brown 1996, 110) that was used to justify an economic system dependent on enslaved labor. Jennifer L. Morgan has argued that “the entire system of hereditary racial slavery depended on slaveowners’ willingness to ignore cultural meanings of work that had been established in England and to make Africans work in ways the English could not conceive of working themselves” (Morgan 2011, 145). Black women’s de-gendering experience under slavery remains central to the development of Black feminist thought across the disciplines; specifically, theorists argue that, thus denied their identity by enslavers, Black women formed new gender constructs and new definitions of motherhood (Battle-Baptiste 2011, 42). This last point brings up an important additional truth: there was one way in which women alone labored under slavery – as mothers. Enslavers’ claims on Black women’s labor included their reproductive capacities. The sexual coercion and abuse of enslaved women was systematic in the antebellum U.S. South. The rape of Black women by white overseers and enslavers was widespread, a feature as central to the slavery system as labor exploitation (Baptist 2001, 1619–1621). Additionally, enslaved Black men were often selected by slave owners as sexual partners or “husbands” for enslaved women against both parties’ wills (Berry 2007, 81). In both cases, children remained a key objective; enslaved women’s reproductive labor ensured the next generation of people in bondage. Once these children were born, Black mothers typically found themselves forced to quickly return to agricultural labor – the care of their infants passed off to older children or the elderly infirm. Mothers also knew that their hold on these bonds remained tenuous as their children could be, and very often were, sold away from them by their enslavers. In the United States, Black mothers under slavery lost over half of their children to early death, whether through stillbi
{"title":"Women, Slavery, and Labor in the United States","authors":"L. Marshall","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2022.2102835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2102835","url":null,"abstract":"From the country’s founding, the United States’ dominant European-American culture included a patriarchal ideology which imposed a simplifying gender binary of male and female. Yet, when intertwined with the impacts of enslavement and racism, this ideology classified and treated African American women starkly differently from white women; it denied them any relative privileges of their gender. Enslaved Black women in the United States routinely did the same kinds of work as their male counterparts. Many women labored in agricultural fields; they even formed the majority of fieldworkers in some cases, such as with rice cultivation in South Carolina (Jones 2010, 15). Cast into “male categories” (Gillin 2014, 13), Black women were thus blocked from participation in the U.S. cult of domesticity in which white women of enough financial means avoided physical labor as part of their claim to femininity. Black women’s de-gendering is also clearly tied to race’s increasing entrenchment as a “historically produced technology of power” (Brown 1996, 110) that was used to justify an economic system dependent on enslaved labor. Jennifer L. Morgan has argued that “the entire system of hereditary racial slavery depended on slaveowners’ willingness to ignore cultural meanings of work that had been established in England and to make Africans work in ways the English could not conceive of working themselves” (Morgan 2011, 145). Black women’s de-gendering experience under slavery remains central to the development of Black feminist thought across the disciplines; specifically, theorists argue that, thus denied their identity by enslavers, Black women formed new gender constructs and new definitions of motherhood (Battle-Baptiste 2011, 42). This last point brings up an important additional truth: there was one way in which women alone labored under slavery – as mothers. Enslavers’ claims on Black women’s labor included their reproductive capacities. The sexual coercion and abuse of enslaved women was systematic in the antebellum U.S. South. The rape of Black women by white overseers and enslavers was widespread, a feature as central to the slavery system as labor exploitation (Baptist 2001, 1619–1621). Additionally, enslaved Black men were often selected by slave owners as sexual partners or “husbands” for enslaved women against both parties’ wills (Berry 2007, 81). In both cases, children remained a key objective; enslaved women’s reproductive labor ensured the next generation of people in bondage. Once these children were born, Black mothers typically found themselves forced to quickly return to agricultural labor – the care of their infants passed off to older children or the elderly infirm. Mothers also knew that their hold on these bonds remained tenuous as their children could be, and very often were, sold away from them by their enslavers. In the United States, Black mothers under slavery lost over half of their children to early death, whether through stillbi","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"93 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49330977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2066427
Megan Bailey
ABSTRACT Excavations at the site of a former plantation, L’Hermitage, on the grounds of the Monocacy National Battlefield in Frederick, Maryland, revealed substantial evidence of domestic structures inhabited by enslaved people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An archaeological investigation undertaken by the National Park Service in 2010–2012 additionally indicated that these dwellings were spaced and oriented in a way that reveals careful planning and a focus on order and symmetry. The spatial layout of these quarters in relation to other buildings may reflect the way that slave owners regarded their enslaved workers and strove to exercise control over them. A strict spatial organization ensured that enslaved workers were less likely to gain power and participate in any kind of insurrection. The arrangement of structures at L’Hermitage can be interpreted as a conscious effort on the part of the slaveholders to maintain control and hierarchy on the plantation.
{"title":"Spatial Organization as Management Practice at L’Hermitage Plantation","authors":"Megan Bailey","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2022.2066427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2066427","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Excavations at the site of a former plantation, L’Hermitage, on the grounds of the Monocacy National Battlefield in Frederick, Maryland, revealed substantial evidence of domestic structures inhabited by enslaved people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. An archaeological investigation undertaken by the National Park Service in 2010–2012 additionally indicated that these dwellings were spaced and oriented in a way that reveals careful planning and a focus on order and symmetry. The spatial layout of these quarters in relation to other buildings may reflect the way that slave owners regarded their enslaved workers and strove to exercise control over them. A strict spatial organization ensured that enslaved workers were less likely to gain power and participate in any kind of insurrection. The arrangement of structures at L’Hermitage can be interpreted as a conscious effort on the part of the slaveholders to maintain control and hierarchy on the plantation.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"5 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42462253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2079251
Lydia Wilson Marshall
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the public history presented at American and Caribbean plantations has been the subject of growing scholarly critique (e.g., Carter 2016; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Modlin and Arnold 2008; Walcott-Wilson 2020). Geographers, linguists, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have decried the continuing tendency of many plantation museum tours to sanitize, minimize, or even erase slavery. The daily labor, suffering, and terror of past enslaved Black residents is masked when tours focus on the beauty of formal gardens, stately houses, and orderly landscapes. Indeed, the racial violence that was latent in such estates’ picturesque designs can easily remain obscured in the present, allowing plantations to present as beautiful spaces untethered to their painful histories. Certainly, the beauty and “orderliness” of plantations in the U.S. and the Caribbean was created intentionally by their owners. Architectural historian Dell Upton (1984) has argued that plantations were far from singular unified spaces; rather, they encompassed both white and Black landscapes in the same space, created for and experienced by different audiences. For one, plantation landscapes were tools of communication by which white owners might signal social standing (aspirational or real) to white neighbors. At the same time, as contributions to this special issue demonstrate, plantations were purposefully spatially organized to better enable the control and domination of enslaved Black residents. For decades, archaeologists have analyzed how plantation spatial organization fostered the social control of enslaved people. In previous studies, the idea of the panopticon as popularized by Michel Foucault (1977) has been particularly emphasized (e.g., Bates 2015; Delle 2011; Singleton 2001). A panopticon is a place from which total surveillance of the surrounding area is possible; crucially, the panopticon at the same time obscures the presence or absence of an observer from those who may be observed. Foucault explored this concept most extensively in his thinking about prisons and how prisoners’ uncertainty about whether they were being observed at any one time from, say, a guard tower, might lead them to monitor their behavior as if they were being watched even when, in actuality, the tower might be empty. Archaeologists working at plantations have applied the idea of a panopticon to understand how an owner’s house or an overseer’s residence could act as an actual vantage point to surveil enslaved people while also suggesting the possibility of surveillance at all times, thus causing enslaved people to monitor themselves and participate in their own subjugation even when in reality they were unwatched by overseers or enslavers. This collection builds on the insights of these previous studies with methodological and theoretical innovations that move us toward a more complete understanding of social control as spatially expressed and
自21世纪之交以来,美国和加勒比种植园的公共历史一直是越来越多的学术批评的主题(例如,Carter 2016;Eichstedt and Small 2002;Modlin and Arnold 2008;Walcott-Wilson 2020)。地理学家、语言学家、历史学家、人类学家和考古学家都谴责了许多种植园博物馆之旅持续存在的淡化、最小化甚至抹去奴隶制的倾向。过去被奴役的黑人居民的日常劳动、痛苦和恐怖被掩盖了,当游客把注意力集中在正式的花园、庄严的房屋和有序的景观之美时。事实上,这些庄园风景如画的设计中潜藏的种族暴力在现在很容易被掩盖,这使得种植园成为一个不受痛苦历史束缚的美丽空间。当然,美国和加勒比地区种植园的美丽和“有序”是它们的主人故意创造的。建筑历史学家Dell Upton(1984)认为,种植园远非单一的统一空间;相反,它们在同一个空间中包含了白色和黑色的景观,为不同的观众创造和体验。首先,种植园景观是一种沟通工具,白人所有者可以通过它向白人邻居表明社会地位(理想的或真实的)。与此同时,正如本期特刊的投稿所表明的那样,种植园被有目的地在空间上组织起来,以便更好地控制和统治被奴役的黑人居民。几十年来,考古学家一直在分析种植园空间组织如何促进对奴隶的社会控制。在之前的研究中,米歇尔·福柯(1977)推广的圆形监狱的概念得到了特别的强调(例如,Bates 2015;Delle 2011;单2001)。panopticon是一个可以对周围地区进行全面监视的地方;至关重要的是,圆形监狱同时模糊了观察者的存在或不存在于可能被观察的人之中。福柯在他对监狱的思考中最广泛地探讨了这个概念,以及囚犯如何不确定自己是否在任何时候被监视,比如在一个警卫塔上,这可能会导致他们监控自己的行为,就好像他们被监视一样,即使实际上,塔楼可能是空的。在种植园工作的考古学家运用了圆形监狱的概念来理解主人的房子或监工的住所如何成为监视奴隶的实际有利位置,同时也暗示了随时监视的可能性,从而使被奴役的人监视自己并参与自己的征服,即使在现实中他们没有被监工或奴隶监视。本文集建立在前人研究的基础上,通过方法论和理论创新,使我们更全面地理解社会控制在种植园的空间表达和实施。在马里兰州的L 'Hermitage种植园,Megan Bailey在微观世界中探索了种植园景观的潜在暴力。种植园的主人vincendi家族于18世纪90年代从圣多明各(今海地)来到马里兰州。vincendi家族的残忍和报复心在历史上被记录下来,他们的奴隶工人对他们提起了多起法律诉讼,指控他们虐待他们
{"title":"Slavery, Space, and Social Control on Plantations","authors":"Lydia Wilson Marshall","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2022.2079251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2079251","url":null,"abstract":"Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the public history presented at American and Caribbean plantations has been the subject of growing scholarly critique (e.g., Carter 2016; Eichstedt and Small 2002; Modlin and Arnold 2008; Walcott-Wilson 2020). Geographers, linguists, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have decried the continuing tendency of many plantation museum tours to sanitize, minimize, or even erase slavery. The daily labor, suffering, and terror of past enslaved Black residents is masked when tours focus on the beauty of formal gardens, stately houses, and orderly landscapes. Indeed, the racial violence that was latent in such estates’ picturesque designs can easily remain obscured in the present, allowing plantations to present as beautiful spaces untethered to their painful histories. Certainly, the beauty and “orderliness” of plantations in the U.S. and the Caribbean was created intentionally by their owners. Architectural historian Dell Upton (1984) has argued that plantations were far from singular unified spaces; rather, they encompassed both white and Black landscapes in the same space, created for and experienced by different audiences. For one, plantation landscapes were tools of communication by which white owners might signal social standing (aspirational or real) to white neighbors. At the same time, as contributions to this special issue demonstrate, plantations were purposefully spatially organized to better enable the control and domination of enslaved Black residents. For decades, archaeologists have analyzed how plantation spatial organization fostered the social control of enslaved people. In previous studies, the idea of the panopticon as popularized by Michel Foucault (1977) has been particularly emphasized (e.g., Bates 2015; Delle 2011; Singleton 2001). A panopticon is a place from which total surveillance of the surrounding area is possible; crucially, the panopticon at the same time obscures the presence or absence of an observer from those who may be observed. Foucault explored this concept most extensively in his thinking about prisons and how prisoners’ uncertainty about whether they were being observed at any one time from, say, a guard tower, might lead them to monitor their behavior as if they were being watched even when, in actuality, the tower might be empty. Archaeologists working at plantations have applied the idea of a panopticon to understand how an owner’s house or an overseer’s residence could act as an actual vantage point to surveil enslaved people while also suggesting the possibility of surveillance at all times, thus causing enslaved people to monitor themselves and participate in their own subjugation even when in reality they were unwatched by overseers or enslavers. This collection builds on the insights of these previous studies with methodological and theoretical innovations that move us toward a more complete understanding of social control as spatially expressed and ","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45642234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2022.2070349
Lisa B. Randle
ABSTRACT In recent years, historical archaeologists have employed the panoptic plantation approach to examine issues of surveillance at plantations. Despite new scholarship in the area of the panoptic plantation, few studies examine the range of the planter-elite surveillance on a regional scale. Failure to broaden the scope of studies beyond the single plantation minimizes the importance of possible shared surveillance among neighbors, especially among those who are related by birth or through marriage. This research question is addressed through the creation of models using ArcGIS 10.6.1. These Visibility Analysis models suggest that the plantations along the East Branch of South Carolina’s Cooper River exhibit a panoptic plantation landscape with shared surveillance at the regional scale. This method can serve as a model for conducting comparative studies of other plantation communities to identify the possible existence of panopticism at the regional scale.
{"title":"Panopticism Along the East Branch of the Cooper River, South Carolina: A Model for Neighbor-Assisted Surveillance","authors":"Lisa B. Randle","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2022.2070349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2022.2070349","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In recent years, historical archaeologists have employed the panoptic plantation approach to examine issues of surveillance at plantations. Despite new scholarship in the area of the panoptic plantation, few studies examine the range of the planter-elite surveillance on a regional scale. Failure to broaden the scope of studies beyond the single plantation minimizes the importance of possible shared surveillance among neighbors, especially among those who are related by birth or through marriage. This research question is addressed through the creation of models using ArcGIS 10.6.1. These Visibility Analysis models suggest that the plantations along the East Branch of South Carolina’s Cooper River exhibit a panoptic plantation landscape with shared surveillance at the regional scale. This method can serve as a model for conducting comparative studies of other plantation communities to identify the possible existence of panopticism at the regional scale.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"30 - 47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60177922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-20DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2021.2000202
Colleen Betti
ABSTRACT Play has long been understood to be a key aspect of childhood socialization into gender roles, including gendered labor. Yet, some have reasonably assumed that enslaved children on plantations in the United States had little time for play and that any toys owned by them would have been homemade and thus difficult to later identify archaeologically. Evidence from slavery-related sites in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), however, demonstrates that formal toys in the form of porcelain dolls, toy dishes, marbles, and military toys were not uncommon possessions for enslaved children in the American South. The recovery of formal toys in living quarters used by enslaved people is especially surprising given that their intended socialization messages did not align with the future gendered labor roles of enslaved children. These toys thus reveal the complicated socializing forces and messages about gendered labor that enslaved children encountered through play.
{"title":"“They Gave the Children China Dolls”: Toys, Socialization, and Gendered Labor on American Plantations","authors":"Colleen Betti","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.2000202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.2000202","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Play has long been understood to be a key aspect of childhood socialization into gender roles, including gendered labor. Yet, some have reasonably assumed that enslaved children on plantations in the United States had little time for play and that any toys owned by them would have been homemade and thus difficult to later identify archaeologically. Evidence from slavery-related sites in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), however, demonstrates that formal toys in the form of porcelain dolls, toy dishes, marbles, and military toys were not uncommon possessions for enslaved children in the American South. The recovery of formal toys in living quarters used by enslaved people is especially surprising given that their intended socialization messages did not align with the future gendered labor roles of enslaved children. These toys thus reveal the complicated socializing forces and messages about gendered labor that enslaved children encountered through play.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"97 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43518913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-20DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2021.2013711
Todd H. Ahlman, A. McKeown
ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sugar plantations in the British Caribbean struggled with falling sugar prices and increasing debts. Enslaved Africans suffered the brunt of much of this financial hardship, but they created strong social and trade networks that helped alleviate some of these hardships. Emancipation in the British Caribbean brought many changes to the lives of the formerly enslaved, but estate owners and island governments sought to enact laws that forced people to stay in plantation villages. This study examines the pre- and post-emancipation housing and ceramic assemblages from two households in a plantation village on the British Caribbean island of St. Christopher (St. Kitts) to understand how people adapted to freedom in the post-emancipation period. We find that there are differences in housing and ceramic acquisition and discard between the two households that reflect different investment strategies and agency.
{"title":"Apprentice and Wage Laborer Economies in the British Caribbean: An Examination of Post-Emancipation Material Culture and Housing on St. Kitts, West Indies","authors":"Todd H. Ahlman, A. McKeown","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.2013711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.2013711","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sugar plantations in the British Caribbean struggled with falling sugar prices and increasing debts. Enslaved Africans suffered the brunt of much of this financial hardship, but they created strong social and trade networks that helped alleviate some of these hardships. Emancipation in the British Caribbean brought many changes to the lives of the formerly enslaved, but estate owners and island governments sought to enact laws that forced people to stay in plantation villages. This study examines the pre- and post-emancipation housing and ceramic assemblages from two households in a plantation village on the British Caribbean island of St. Christopher (St. Kitts) to understand how people adapted to freedom in the post-emancipation period. We find that there are differences in housing and ceramic acquisition and discard between the two households that reflect different investment strategies and agency.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"251 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60178328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21619441.2021.2010400
E. Agorsah
ABSTRACT Today, the name “Kormantse” (alternately Coromantee) continues to evoke significant pride in numerous African diaspora societies who claim descent. Scholars have sometimes cast such heritage claims as based on an “imaginary” reference population. However, Kormantse was a real place populated by real people. This paper reviews an archaeological research project at Historic Kormantse located in coastal Ghana (Gold Coast); the project’s main objective was to examine residents’ cultural responses to the trans-Atlantic colonial encounter. We sought to explain the processes by which settlement populations negotiated their survival since European contact in the sixteenth century. Archaeological traces reflecting exchanges, trade, occupations, burial practices, resistance, and technology are examined here as indices of the community’s identity and responses to changing conditions. The challenge of fully explaining Kormantse’s role in African diaspora cultures is also discussed. While Kormantse diaspora cultural signatures are real, not imagined, our understanding of them remains elusive.
{"title":"Archaeology of Historic Kormantse and the Colonial Trans-Atlantic Encounter","authors":"E. Agorsah","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.2010400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.2010400","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Today, the name “Kormantse” (alternately Coromantee) continues to evoke significant pride in numerous African diaspora societies who claim descent. Scholars have sometimes cast such heritage claims as based on an “imaginary” reference population. However, Kormantse was a real place populated by real people. This paper reviews an archaeological research project at Historic Kormantse located in coastal Ghana (Gold Coast); the project’s main objective was to examine residents’ cultural responses to the trans-Atlantic colonial encounter. We sought to explain the processes by which settlement populations negotiated their survival since European contact in the sixteenth century. Archaeological traces reflecting exchanges, trade, occupations, burial practices, resistance, and technology are examined here as indices of the community’s identity and responses to changing conditions. The challenge of fully explaining Kormantse’s role in African diaspora cultures is also discussed. While Kormantse diaspora cultural signatures are real, not imagined, our understanding of them remains elusive.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"10 1","pages":"191 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43813277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}