The Archaeology Of Northern Slavery And Freedom

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

While previous research on household archaeology in the colonial Caribbean has drawn heavily on artifact analysis, this volume provides the first in-depth examination of the architecture of slave housing during this period. It examines the considerations that went into constructing and inhabiting living spaces for the enslaved and reveals the diversity of people and practices in these settings. Contributors present case studies using written descriptions, period illustrations, and standing architecture, in addition to archaeological evidence to illustrate the wide variety of built environments for enslaved populations in places including Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the islands of the Lesser Antilles. They investigate how the enslaved defined their social positions and identities through house, yard, and garden space; they explore what daily life was like for slaves on military compounds; they compare the spatial arrangements of slave villages on plantations based on type of labor; and they show how the style of traditional laborer houses became a form of vernacular architecture still in use today. This volume expands our understanding of the wide range of enslaved experiences across British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies. Contributors: Elizabeth C. Clay | James A. Delle | Todd M. Ahlman | Marco Meniketti | Kenneth Kelly | Hayden Bassett | James A. Delle | Kristen R. Fellows | Allan D. Meyers | Elizabeth C. Clay | Alicia Odewale | Meredith D. Hardy | Zachary J. M. Beier | Mark W. Hauser A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series 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.

Caribbean plantations and the forces that shaped them--slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical, sometimes deadly environment--have been studied extensively. This volume brings together alternate stories of sites that fall outside the large cash-crop estates. Employing innovative research tools and integrating data from Dominica, St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat, and the British Virgin Islands, the contributors investigate the oft-overlooked interstitial spaces where enslaved Africans sought to maintain their own identities inside and outside the fixed borders of colonialism. Despite grueling work regimes and social and economic restrictions, people held in bondage carved out places of their own at the margins of slavery's reach. These essays reveal a complex world within and between sprawling plantations--a world of caves, gullies, provision grounds, field houses, fields, and the areas beyond them, where the enslaved networked, interacted, and exchanged goods and information. The volume also explores the lives of poor whites, Afro-descendant members of military garrisons, and free people of color, demonstrating that binary models of black slaves and white planters do not fully encompass the diversity of Caribbean identities before and after emancipation. Together, the analyses of marginal spaces and postemancipation communities provide a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of those who lived in the historic Caribbean, and who created, nurtured, and ultimately cut the roots of empire. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Plantation sites, especially those in the southeastern United States, have long dominated the archaeological study of slavery. These antebellum estates, however, are not representative of the range of geographic locations and time periods in which slavery has occurred. As archaeologists have begun to investigate slavery in more diverse settings, the need for a broader interpretive framework is now clear. The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia Wilson Marshall, develops an interregional and cross-temporal framework for the interpretation of slavery. Contributors consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study it as a diachronic process from enslavement to emancipation and beyond. Essays cover the potential material representations of slavery, slave owners’ strategies of coercion and enslaved people’s methods of resisting this coercion, and the legacies of slavery as confronted by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Among the peoples, sites, and periods examined are a late nineteenth-century Chinese laborer population in Carlin, Nevada; a castle slave habitation at San Domingo and a more elite trading center at nearby Juffure in the Gambia; two eighteenth-century plantations in Dominica; Benin’s Hueda Kingdom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; plantations in Zanzibar; and three fugitive slave sites on Mauritius—an underground lava tunnel, a mountain, and a karst cave. This essay collection seeks to analyze slavery as a process organized by larger economic and social forces with effects that can be both durable and wide-ranging. It presents a comparative approach that significantly enriches our understanding of slavery.

An exploration of life on the Virgin Islands in a distinctive black community that gained its freedom from slavery more than 40 years prior to emancipation in 1848. Douglas Armstrong seeks to expand our perspective on the diversity and consequences of the African Diaspora.

Since the founding of the United States, the rights to citizenship have been carefully crafted and policed by the Europeans who originally settled and founded the country. Immigrants have been extended and denied citizenship in various legal and cultural ways. While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal perspective, historical archaeologists have yet to fully explore the material aspects of these social boundaries. The Archaeology of Citizenship uses the material record to explore what it means to be an American. Using a late-nineteenth-century California resort as a case study, Stacey Camp discusses how the parameters of citizenship and national belonging have been defined and redefined since Europeans arrived on the continent. In a unique and powerful contribution to the field of historical archaeology, Camp uses the remnants of material culture to reveal how those in power sought to mold the composition of the United States and how those on the margins of American society carved out their own definitions of citizenship.

In this expansive yet concise survey, Christopher Fennell discusses archaeological research from sites across the United States that once manufactured, harvested, or processed commodities. Through studies of craft enterprise and the Industrial Revolution, this book uncovers key insights into American history from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Exploring evidence from textile mills, glassworks, cutlery manufacturers, and tanneries, Fennell describes the complicated transition from skilled manual work to mechanized production methods, and he offers examples of how artisanal skill remained important in many factory contexts. Fennell also traces the distribution and transportation of goods along canals and railroads. He delves into sites of extraction, such as lumber mills, copper mines, and coal fields, and reviews diverse methods for smelting and shaping iron. The book features an in-depth case study of Edgefield, South Carolina, a town that pioneered the production of alkaline-glazed stoneware pottery. Fennell outlines shifts within the field of industrial archaeology over the past century that have culminated in the recognition that these locations of remarkable energy, tumult, and creativity represent the lives and ingenuity of many people. In addition, he points to ways the field can help inform sustainable strategies for industrial enterprises in the present day.

The American lumber industry helped fuel westward expansion and industrial development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, building logging camps and sawmills—and abandoning them once the trees ran out. In this book, John Franzen surveys archaeological studies of logging sites across the nation, explaining how material evidence found at these locations illustrates key aspects of the American experience during this era. Franzen delves into the technologies used in cutting and processing logs, the environmental impacts of harvesting timber, the daily life of workers and their families, and the social organization of logging communities. He highlights important trends, such as increasing mechanization and standardization, and changes in working and living conditions, especially the food and housing provided by employers. Throughout these studies, which range from Michigan to California, the book provides access to information from unpublished studies not readily available to most researchers. The Archaeology of the Logging Industry also shows that when archaeologists turn their attention to the recent past, the discipline can be relevant to today’s ecological crises. By creating awareness of the environmental deterioration caused by industrial-scale logging during what some are calling the Anthropocene, archaeology supports the hope that with adequate time for recovery and better global-scale stewardship, the human use of forests might become sustainable. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney