Plantation Archaeology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

La conduite de la vigne en hautain, qui consiste à faire grimper le cep et les sarments sur un arbre porteur, est une technique mentionnée par les agronomes antiques, notamment pour la Gaule (Columelle, Les arbres, XVI, et De l’agriculture, V, 7 ; Pline H.N. XVII, 35 ; Palladius, L’économie rurale, III, 10). La pratique du hautain est encore couramment employée en France à l’époque moderne, très répandue en Espagne et en Italie au XXe s., et on la trouve encore aujourd’hui en Haute-Garonne dans le piémont pyrénéen, et en Haute-Savoie, au bord du lac Léman : il s’agit des fameuses « crosses » dont il reste quelques exemplaires sur la commune de Marin, près d’Evian.
Les archéologues français recherchent depuis longtemps en Narbonnaise et dans le reste de la Gaule des traces matérielles permettant de corroborer les descriptions des auteurs antiques.
P. Boissinot disait en 2001 à propos de cette technique : « on imagine dans ce cas une profusion de fosses autour d’un réseau régulier de creusements plus volumineux. On ne connaît pas pour l’instant une telle configuration de fosses (espacements, emboîtements) dans les décapages archéologiques effectués dans le Midi ». Or il se trouve que pour l’heure seule la plantation du Grand Palais à Châteauneuf-du-Rhône, peut évoquer une telle configuration : des emboîtements de fosses d’un module de 4 pieds et de fosses de 3 pieds, ainsi que des espacements entre les autres fosses s’avérant souvent inférieurs à 2 pieds. Ce site a naturellement soulevé la question de la conduite en hautain.
Récemment, dans Archéopages, nos collègues bretons ont interprété des traces agraires mises au jour sur le site de la villa du Quiou dans les Côtes d’Armor, comme les preuves de cultures en hautain. Ces traces, qui s’organisent en une trame régulière de fosses circulaires, s’apparentent précisément à l’état le plus précoce (Ier s. av. J.-C.) des plantations du Grand Palais. Nous essaierons lors de cette présentation de livrer les arguments permettant d’accréditer ou de réfuter une telle hypothèse d’interprétation.

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- Roman Villae, Trade, Mediterranean archaeology, Agrarian Archaeology
- by Hayden Bassett
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- Historical Archaeology, Landscape Archaeology, Atlantic World, Caribbean History

The study of enslaved people's consumption practices often relies on 'fast science,' reducing these acts to a reflection of socioeconomic structures or a medium for agency and self-expression. What often gets lost is the effects these actions had. My paper builds on Édouard Glissant's discussions of the ontological and ethical aspects of 'slow science' to argue that attending to what Glissant would call the poetics of consumption-how consumers and commodities came together and the effects that radiate outward from acts of consumption-allows us to see enslaved consumers as people whose actions affected the world around them. To demonstrate this, I draw on merchants' ledgers and archaeological data from ongoing excavations at Belle Grove Plantation to discuss how enslaved people came to acquire both tea and teawares, and how this consumption affected how local economies and the institution of slavery operated in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

- by Matthew Greer
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- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, History of Slavery, Anthropology of the Senses
- by Aaron Norment and +1
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- Historical Archaeology, Plantation Archaeology, Texas Archaeology, Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life

Overlooking a 19 th-century quartering site at Belle Grove Plantation (Frederick County, Virginia) is the property's Office and Store. Placed in a strategic location on the plantation landscape this structure likely served as a panopticon, allowing the overseer and the plantation owner to surveil the enslaved community and exert control over the enslaved community's daily practices. This paper presents evidence from recent archaeological investigations at this site which suggests that instead of passively accepting this panoptic landscape, the women and men who lived here recontextualized this place through everyday practices, transforming it into a space of their own.

In August and December 2001, New South Associates conducted archaeological investigations within and around the 1818 Hickman log cabin as well as at the former cook’s house/schoolhouse at Pond Spring Plantation (Site 1LA663). New South carried out these investigations under contract with the Office of Jack Pyburn, Architect (OJPA), who is serving as a consultant for the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC).
Pond Spring is currently undergoing master planning studies as well as architectural restoration and infrastructure improvements under the direction of the OJPA.
Archaeological investigations were completed in conjunction with the restoration work of these two structures, which was conducted by Leatherwood Company of Tennessee.
It was their restoration work that precipitated the need for additional archaeological consultations at Pond Spring.
The original Hickman log cabin was a one-room pen structure that was either built by early squatters in the area or as a temporary shelter for John P. Hickman and his family. Hickman, along with Benjamin Sherrod, bought the Pond Spring property
from Leroy Pope in 1818, and Hickman was listed in the 1820 census as the household head on-site with 11 family members and 56 slaves (Brum et al. 1988:5). The east pen and dogtrot of the log cabin were added after 1818 to provide additional room for Hickman’s family. Benjamin Sherrod later acquired the property in 1827, at which time, construction began on the Sherrod House, the second of the three residences at Pond
Spring Plantation. General Joseph Wheeler’s House, which was built during the late 1860s, is the third domestic dwelling for the plantation owners residing at Pond Spring.
Initially used as a shelter for the Hickman family, the log cabin structure became the residence of the house slaves and later served as a combination kitchen and cook’s quarters (Caudle 2002:4). While both the east and west pens of the cabin feature a composite masonry exterior end chimney and interior fieldstone hearth, the kitchen has traditionally occupied the west pen, which is the older half of this structure. From
slavery until the 1930s, the house was occupied by African-Americans. During the 1930s the log cabin was utilized for storage (Melissa Beasley, Pond Spring’s Site Director, 2001, pers. comm.). While limited ethnographic and personal information is known of the former inhabitants, the apparent material remains of the African-American slaves and later tenant farmers have been recovered by the archaeological
work on the Hickman Cabin which sheds new light on the African-American presence at Pond Spring.
The cook’s house was believed to have served at least two known functions. This structure, like other out buildings around the core plantation area, was likely moved from another location, probably northeast of the Wheeler House, during the
early 1930s. This plantation management strategy of recycling and reusing structures,materials, and spatial locations was well known during Annie Wheeler’s tenure from the mid-1920s to the 1950s.
In August 2001, New South excavated the area around the eastern exterior end chimney of the Hickman log cabin in order to provide workspace for concrete footings and reinforcements to the cabin and the chimney’s foundation. Excavations were
initiated for seven new footings, which were located on the outside of the cook’s house/schoolhouse. Surface collections were also made in the below floor interiors of the cook’s house and the Hickman log cabin. In December 2001, New South returned to excavate three 1.5-m test trenches at the entranceways of the log cabin for the stairs’ concrete footings. New South also investigated both the west and east hearth boxes of the Hickman log cabin during our December visit. In these investigations, New South recovered a total of 5,245 artifacts (5,205 historic and 40 prehistoric) from the Hickman
log cabin and the cook’s house. Some of the artifacts recovered from within the hearth box may be reflective of African-American ritual beliefs and behaviors.
In addition to addressing the material remains of the former occupants of these two structures, this report will also describe some of the plantation dynamics and metamorphosis of these two buildings while illuminating the African-American presence at Pond Spring.

- by Douglas Ross
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- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Colonial America, Architectural History

Published in Trowel Volume XV 2014. An archaeological journal for students by students to drive forward future research.

Excavations in 2018 at the rear of the former ‘Avalon Inn’, High Street, Castlecomer, uncovered the north-east bastion of a large fort which was probably constructed as a government fortress in the run-up to the 1641 Rebellion. The fort was one of a series built to defend the vital
road link between Dublin and Kilkenny and it was besieged by the Confederate forces in 1641-2. Castlecomer Fort appears to have been a relatively shortlived stronghold and whilst it was probably reoccupied c. 1653 by an English garrison and perhaps again in 1680, there is no indication that it continued to function as a fort after c. 1700. The paper describes the archaeological excavations and places the fort in its broader historical context.

M2 Pipes afro-guyanaises. Essai typologique et étude comparative

- by Antoine Suarez
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- History of Slavery, Archaeology of slavery, Clay Tobacco Pipes, French Guiana
- by Matthew Reilly and +1
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- Historical Archaeology, Latin American and Caribbean History, Landscape Archaeology, Plantation Archaeology

This article investigates the role of material culture in the strategies that were adopted by rebels, planter elites and colonial authorities during plantation labourer rebellions, situating the role of material culture within the overlap and clash of these tactics. This is shown through a study of two insurrections in Dominica, including a work stoppage and uprising by slaves in January 1791 and the violent opposition by free labourers to a census in June 1844. The study makes use of ideas drawn from the work of William Sewell, Jr and ‘eventful archaeology’ to make sense of the short- and long-term material impact of these forms of resistance.

- by Steve Lenik
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- Slavery, Caribbean History, Caribbean Archaeology, Plantation Archaeology

Recent archaeological excavations at Estate Bethlehem, St. Croix, U. S. Virgin Islands, have uncovered a site containing both an enslaved laborer village and a “lost” cemetery. It is hypothesized that the village dates to the late eighteenth century, which is supported with historic maps, a series of post holes, and artifacts recovered from test excavations. Although the cemetery has not been excavated and appears to be unrecorded, it is hypothesized that the burial ground contains individuals of African ancestry based on historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence. The Creolization model is selected to examine the creation and maintenance of Afro-Cruzan identity. Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence permits sources and expressions of Afro-Cruzan identity to be discerned.

- by Steve Lenik
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- African Diaspora, Caribbean Archaeology, U.S. Virgin Islands, Plantation Archaeology

In November 2010, 78% of Rhode Islanders elected not to eliminate the second half of the state’s official name, “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”. The debate over removing “Providence Plantations” suggests the selective historical memory of both civic leaders and citizens, who have forgotten the impacts and legacy of colonization in the 17th century. During the early settlement of Rhode Island, planting and plantations were explicit tools of European colonization involving many forms of oppression. Evidence from the 17th-century Old House site at Greene Farm, a former plantation in Warwick, Rhode Island, depicts a multi-cultural landscape and community increasingly dominated by the Greenes, an influential English family. An examination of changes in the documentary record, material culture, and lived environment related to Greene Farm between 1642 and 1711 maps the aggressive use of plantations by English settlers to permanently colonize a place and its original inhabitants, and considers how these acts of “planting” served to reinforce the development and maintenance of their New English identity.

The Place Beyond the Fence: Slavery and Cultural Invention on a Delaware Tenant Farm ABSTRACT Information about the lives and material culture of 18th-and early 19th-century enslaved African American laborers was recovered from Locus 1 of the Rumsey/Polk Tenant/Prehistoric site (7NCF112) in St. Georges Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware. This site contained the remains of multiple slave quarters and associated cultural features, evidence of which is rarely found in Delaware. Data from the site elucidate current understanding of slave life, housing, diet and cultural practices within a northern state situated in a transition area or cultural borderland between New England and the Tidewater regions. Locus 1 exhibited aspects of cultural traditions amongst enslaved communities in both regions as slaves in this upper Mid-Atlantic state coped with the stresses of slavery, while simultaneously selectively modifying and re-inventing their own practices and customs to define themselves culturally.

John Hartwell Cocke (1780-1866), an influential planter in Fluvanna County, Virginia, was one of a handful of farmers in America to experiment with pisé de terre construction in an attempt to provide his slaves with healthier living conditions than the wooden structures of the day could provide. Pisé de terre, known simply as pisé, is a French form of adobe consisting of soil rammed into frames to create walls. While few in America experimented with this type of construction, fewer still were successful. Pisé structures are vulnerable to the elements and require sound roofs and frequent maintenance to ensure their survival. Historical records indicate that Cocke constructed two slave quarters and a garden wall in pisé at Bremo Recess in 1815, two more quarters and another garden wall at Upper Bremo in 1817, and at least one more quarter sometime around 1820 near the millpond along the "old Cocke Road.” A recent investigation of the pisé structure known as “the miller’s house” near the millpond at Upper Bremo provided an opportunity to document a deteriorating rammed earth structure reputed to be a slave quarter and archaeologically test the associated site. The data collected during this survey are relevant to questions of ethnicity, status, and progressive farm management in the Piedmont region of Virginia during the Federal period.

- by John D Metz and +1
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- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Architecture, Slavery

This report summarizes the results of archaeological investigations carried out by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation at a middling plantation in Williamsburg, VA. The site (circa 1747-1767) was once inhabited by a household composed of enslaved field hands who were owned by John Coke, a tavern owner, planter, and goldsmith. In 1769, following Coke's death, his heirs put the plantation and a number of enslaved Africans up for sale. The 200-acre plantation was subsequently purchased by the Council and became part of the Governor's Palace parkland. This report discusses the Afro-Virginian household that occupied the site, and compares the artifacts recovered with assemblages from two nearby slave quarter sites (Utopia IV and Rich Neck).

This paper explores the identification and interpretation of overseers in the archaeological record of colonial and antebellum plantations. While plantation landscapes have traditionally been split into opposing conceptions of owner and slave, white and black; this study attempts to incorporate overseers and their spaces as the intersection of those landscapes, critical to the negotiation of race and power. Archaeological studies of overseers have been relatively limited and few attempts have been made since the 1970’s to reconsider how overseers can be identified and understood archaeologically. Past attempts to distinguish between overseers, poor whites, and slaves using artifact patterns revealed the need for a more contextual and comprehensive approach. Taking examples of overseer’s sites from archaeological excavations, reports, and historic maps this paper integrates social space theory to investigate how the layout of overseer’s quarters in relation to both slave’s and owner’s dwellings correlates with and informs the relationships between those groups and the roles of overseers in plantation society.

Archaeological studies of plantations need to consider the scale of the historical circumstances which shape locally circumscribed Creole processes. These circumstances range from broad generalizations down to factors operating only at the local level of the individual estate. Recent excavations at Estate Lower Bethlehem, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, have recovered an artifact assemblage from a laborer village dating from the mid-eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, which was situated adjacent to a previously unrecorded cemetery and a large tamarind tree. This assemblage illustrates the importance of a multiscalar approach to Creolization in two ways: an analysis of the distribution of vessel forms of European pottery and “Afro-Cruzan” earthenwares; and the identification of fragments of lead-glazed slip-decorated redware pottery produced by Moravians.

- by Steve Lenik
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- Creolization, Caribbean Archaeology, U.S. Virgin Islands, Plantation Archaeology

A comparative analysis of artifacts recovered from three plantation quarter sites in Tidewater Virginia indicates that enslaved households varied with respect to their labor patterns and household economies. An approach which positions these households within the broader context of slavery illuminates how different labor demands on a smaller, urban versus large rural plantations resulted in household variability. Moreover , a gendered analysis of labor reveals how enslaved women's work challenges the universality of the private/public dichotomy.

From October 27, 2008 to November 24, 2008 staff from the Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), Archaeology in Annapolis Project, conducted archaeological testing on the Wye House Greenhouse (18TA314), Talbot County, Maryland. This Phase II investigation has been conducted at the request of the Greenhouse’s current owner, Mrs. Mary Tilghman, prior to planned Greenhouse foundation stabilization efforts. The project area for this Phase II archaeological investigation comprises the immediate exterior perimeter of the Wye Greenhouse foundation. Seven test units were excavated in the course of this project to evaluate archaeological integrity and to evaluate the potential effects of planned stabilization efforts on archaeological resources. In addition to questions of archaeological integrity, research questions guiding this project focused on the architectural development of the Wye Greenhouse as well as its social use, both by members of the Lloyd family and the plantation’s enslaved African-American inhabitants.
Background historical research and oral histories differ concerning the Greenhouse’s initial date of construction. Historical research suggests a construction date of the c. 1770s, while oral histories suggest an initial date of construction of c. 1740s. Archaeological testing has shown that the Greenhouse underwent two major developmental phases—with the main block of the Greenhouse having been constructed in the 1770s and the East and West Wings and hypocaust system added in the mid 1780s.
In addition to providing evidence of the Greenhouse’s structural change, levels and features excavated in the course of this project have shed light on the social use of the Wye Greenhouse throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Artifact deposits analyzed in this report detail the Lloyd family’s use of the Greenhouse as both a social space and as a symbol of 18th century opulence. Artifact analyses also shed light on the use of the Greenhouse’s north shed as a slave quarter from the 1790s through the 1840s.
Testing in the course of this project has concluded that there is a high degree of archaeological integrity within the project’s area of potential effect. In addition, testing has determined that intact archaeological resources have the distinct potential to add a considerable depth of historical knowledge concerning the Greenhouse’s structural change and social use throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Archaeological evidence detailed in this report should be read as supporting evidence for the Greenhouse’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

- by Stephanie Duensing
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- Archaeology, History of Slavery, Architectural History, Greenhouses

The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, owned plantations in the Americas to fund missionaries who proselytized among native peoples and enslaved Africans while ensuring that colonists remained Catholic. Fusing the roles of planters and missionaries, Jesuits manipulated the spatial layout of plantations as a method to exercise social control over the laborers who were enslaved at these properties, as well as to influence the European and indigenous populations inhabiting the colonies and frontiers where mission work took place. Spatial layouts of French Jesuit plantations (habitations) dating from the mid seventeenth century to the 1760s in Martinique, Dominica, and Guyane reveal some of the ways in which missionaries organized space. These Jesuit mission plantations were situated in prominent locations in order to attract gaze, and features such as crosses, churches, and gardens displayed the Society’s prestige and mission work. At the same time, maximizing efficiency and conducting direct surveillance of laborers were reduced in importance.

- by Steve Lenik
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- Historical Archaeology, African Diaspora, Caribbean Archaeology, Jesuits

Studies of plantation surveillance have provided important
understandings of the material dimensions of elite power and
control over enslaved people. These studies have emphasized
inter-visibility of managerial housing and the living/working
spaces of enslaved people, as a panoptic strategy to enforce selfdiscipline. This emphasis on inter-visibility of living and working
spaces, however, assumes a static population, rather than a
complex, industrial society in motion. Using Space Syntax
analysis, cartographic records, historic travelers’ accounts, and
landscape documentation, this study addresses surveillance and
planter control through a mobilities approach, elevating the
status of road networks, while identifying the plantation as a
carefully orchestrated landscape of movement. I demonstrate
how understanding the manner in which movement is limited or
itinerated, and for whom, represents a productive avenue of
research at the intersection of inequality, control, and mobility.
This approach is developed through a distinct archaeology of
infrastructure.

Archaeological research on two sugar plantations of the
Chapada dos Guimarães region of West Brazil, the engenhos
(sugar mills) of Rio da Casca and Água Fria, has provided an
opportunity to study the organization and use of these spaces
by planters, free laborers, and slaves. Planters organized the
plantations according to a rigidly hierarchical model in which
the planter’s house was the central location. They distributed
European-produced goods among free laborers and slaves,
aiming to reaffirm this hierarchical order. Though the slaves, in
turn, had to live within this hierarchical system, they were also
able to take advantage of opportunities to subvert this space,
using it according to their own practices and traditions. In
this sense, they invested the locally produced low-fired earthenware with sign-values and symbols related to their African
backgrounds. Thus, two sets of discourses were fitted into the
same landscape, composing a dialectic that characterized the
multicultural space of the plantations.

An unpublished Georgia/Florida history article.

- by Mark N Taylor
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- American History, History of Slavery, Florida Archaeology, Gravestones

Since the new millennium, archaeologists have increasingly focused on better understanding the material manifestations of slavery and the African American experience of enslavement in the Upper Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions. Recent excavations at the Cedar Creek Road Site and the Rumsey/Polk Tenant/Prehistoric Site in Delaware, along with a re-examination of several Delaware archaeological assemblages, elucidate aspects of slavery in this northern state. The data also provides crucial insight to disparate African, African-Caribbean and African American cultural and religious practices, racial disenfranchisement, power hierarchies, and strategies slaves employed to mitigate enslavement in Delaware. Examined site assemblages and documents also present clues on artifact and feature patterning that may be used to identify and interpret slave life in colonial and antebellum Delaware.

As some of the most frequently recovered historic artifacts on domestic sites, common coarse earthenwares have great promise as an interpretive tool. However, archaeological common coarse earthenwares are not easily attributed to a particular potter or period. The earthenware potters operating in North America, England, and elsewhere in Europe largely shared manufacturing methods, vessel forms and decoration. For over two hundred years, the process of producing common coarse earthenware went largely unchanged. Through comparative analysis of domestic site assemblages across the Chesapeake, I demonstrate that common coarse earthenwares are not homogenous, instead exhibiting both temporal and spatial patterning. Over time, the proportion of coarse earthenware in ceramic assemblages decreased, and glazing patterns changed. Certain attributes of common coarse earthenware are more common at some sites than others, indicating differential availability or functional requirements among sites and sub- regions of the Chesapeake, and are perhaps evidence of discrete production origins.

- by Lindsay Bloch
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- Archaeology, Slavery, Ceramics (Archaeology), Craft production (Archaeology)

Social relationships structure daily life in a startling, and important, variety of ways. However, when considering the social world that existed inside slave quarters across the Virginia Piedmont (and the Antebellum South), archaeologists have not been able to come to a clear consensus on how to approach the study of social networks; with some researchers focusing on social standing, seen most often through the role of material wealth to create connections, and others focusing on how interactions can be meaningfully interpreted from the archaeological record. This thesis represents an attempt to bridge these two theoretical stances, by looking to see if, in fact, wealth mattered in the social relationships within the black community at Virginia’s Montpelier plantation. By comparing the amount of costly consumer goods owned by the residents of three sites to the evidence for their social interaction with their neighbors, including gift giving, participation in intra-plantation economies, and involvement in the local spiritual community, it appears as if the amount of wealth a household displayed did not affect their social relationships within the enslaved community. Rather, a complex, overlapping, web of identity and belonging likely shaped who the women and men at Montpelier formed social connections with, and the degree these various connections mattered in their lives: influenced by, amongst other factors, gender, where these African Americans called home, and who they were “kin” to.

- by Matthew Reilly
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- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology, Race and Ethnicity, Colonialism
- by Diane Wallman and +1
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- Historical Archaeology, Zooarchaeology, African Diaspora Studies, Plantation Archaeology

This paper examines the trade relationships that the Leeward Caribbean Island of Antigua maintained with the American colonies during the American Revolution and the subsequent decade (ca. 1775-1854). The paper focuses more specifically on the trade in perishable goods, which often operated illicitly at the edges of the idealized colonial dependency that the Navigation Acts aimed to maintain. Drawing from archaeological and documentary evidence, this paper follows the transformation of long-term regional trade partnerships linking the Caribbean island of Antigua, the neighboring island of Guadeloupe and continental America during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in order to better understand how the restrictions dictated by metropolitan laws, such as the Navigation Acts, played out on in colonial contexts. The paper illustrates the enduring presence of informal trade, smuggling and illicit exchange between Antigua, Guadeloupe and the United States during periods of colonial conflict, by combining a close reading of correspondence relating to the administration of the Betty's Hope Plantation, with the analysis of material cultural evidence recovered at the Betty’s Hope Plantation archaeological site (Antigua). This diverse dataset shows that, despite metropolitan legislation aiming to restrict trade partnerships in the colonial Caribbean, Antigua continued to obtain large volumes of produce, cattle and lumber from the continental United States after the Revolution; it also consistently relied on fresh water supplies from the French colony of Guadeloupe during the severe drought that plagued Antigua throughout the eighteenth century. Implications for the history of pan-Caribbean and transatlantic trade, for example in contrast with North Atlantic fisheries, are considered.

In the early nineteenth century, members of one household of the enslaved community at Virginia’s Montpelier plantation buried their dog near the duplex they called home. This action, on its own, unfortunately does not speak directly to the broader experiences of Africans or their descendants forced into American bondage, or the specific experiences of the women and men enslaved at Montpelier. However, by contextualizing dogs in the African Atlantic and the specific landscapes of Montpelier, such narratives come into focus, allowing us to explore the roles the animal may have played in the daily life of an enslaved household.