Archaeologists have studied race in Antebellum Virginia for decades. But these works have focused predominantly on Blackness, and to a lesser extent Indigeneity. Whiteness, however, has been largely ignored, and the few works that have addressed white racial identities have addressed notions of whiteness among local elites instead of the poor and middle-class households living at the margins of Virginia’s plantations. Put another way, we know relatively little about how poor and middle-class white Virginians understood whiteness or if/how they laid claim to this racialized identity. This paper uses data from seven early- to mid-19^th-century sites to explore how poor white and middle-class household used ceramic tea and tablewares to performatively enact whiteness in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley

This paper will bring attention to possible avenues of inquiry at James Madison’s Montpelier to explore the ways that whiteness was a prevalent factor on the plantation. It will explore the plantation landscape, architecture, and material culture of the Madison family and their white employees who lived at the overseer’s house on the property. These efforts will explore ways that the material life of white people on the plantation developed and supported concepts of white racial superiority, privilege, and racist ideology. Additionally, the paper will address ideas or opportunities for using archaeology to engage with visitors and program participants on the ways that whiteness has been an invisible, yet powerful, means of providing privilege and supporting inequity in our nation. And, it will address the ways that presidential homes such as Montpelier can work to address and make visible the ways whiteness has permeated and influenced their own practice

Drawing upon my research into two groups commonly described as ‘racialized’: the Irish and southern white mountaineers, I take a Black whiteness approach placing ‘degrees of whiteness’ in conversation with anti-black racism. The normalization of whiteness as a monolithic category obscures oppression within white European-descendant communities. Critical analysis acknowledges and respects the historical challenges faced by marginalized whites but demands recognition of how these groups also worked against people of color. Understanding how marginalized whites leveraged claims to white privilege is of critical importance today, when white supremacists peddle myths of Irish enslavement to undermine African American claims for reparations, and politicians cite JD Vance’s sensationalized Hillbilly Elegy to rail against the perceived decline of rural white Appalachia by the forces of multiculturalism. Empirical evidence easily disproves these claims, prompting serious consideration of what it means to be white, or white enough, in a society structured by skin color-based racism.

Hatteras island, on North Carolina Outer Banks is well known as the likely destination of the 1587 English Colonists when they abandoned their settlement on Roanoke island. Our archaeological investigations at the Cape Creek site since 2012 have located a sequence from the 16th-early18th c. which maps the integration of the English colonists into Algonquian society. We have observed shifts in diet, weaponry, material culture, architecture and dress. Using their unique status between English and Native American society, they became successful traders in deerskins, and visited by merchants from the Chesapeake. This society seems to have faded by the early 18th century, before the island was settled in c. 1720 by pioneer English colonists. The paper will explore the binary divide in the historical narrative, and argue that supremicist interprations have denied that the possibility of such a society surviving from the first English to have settled in North America.

Building on decolonizing and postcolonial frameworks that highlight white supremacist ideologies within the disciplinary formation of archaeology, this paper addresses informal collecting practices of middle-class white families in the nineteenth century. By tracing a family of civil engineers across the Eastern United States, I connect their collecting to opportunity created by the Indian Removal Act, the capitalist calculus of railroad companies, and the generational wealth of cotton trade. Through examination of documents, objects, and spaces at Woodville (38AL26), an historic house museum and National Historic Landmark in Southwestern Pennsylvania, I argue its nineteenth-century occupants mobilized economic and kin networks to access Native American sites then negotiated their own racial identities vis-à-vis anthropological constructions of indigeneity by organizing extracted objects into a mock-scientific, in-home display. Using Bennett’s concept of assemblage, this project maps flows of Indigenous archaeological materials into white settler domestic space and beyond to museums and universities today.

Most social reformers were Anglo-American middle-class whites, who found they could not impose their privileged racist and classist ideas of “proper” housekeeping, cooking and mothering etc. on poor whites, minorities and immigrants, because participation in reform programs was voluntary. Amazingly, reform women quoted negative as well as positive feedback by participants and changed or eliminated programs in response. Because the goal of reformers was creation of community, they lived in poor neighborhoods and created new institutions in urban landscapes, some of which continue to provide social services today. Reform leader Jane Addams discussed how her views and actions changed as her eyes were opened by the process of hearing feedback from participants in programs. Some reform women's social settlements made early statements valuing diversity in immigrant cultures and advocating two-way cultural exchanges, which is a method of subverting white privileges that could still be used today.

The Depression-era company town and logging community of Apex, Arizona was staffed and occupied almost exclusively by White lumberjacks of Scandinavian descent. Archival research indicates that the community’s racial and ethnic makeup was by design, given the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company’s staunch refusal to hire African Americans and tendency to hire Indigenous and Hispanic workers in non-logging positions. Furthermore, the mythic image of “the Lumberjack” is invariably situated in aesthetics that invoke an idealized White American masculinity, creating an image where race, gender, and labor narratives intersect. This paper seeks to critically examine how the Scandinavian laborers at Apex “learned” American Whiteness in an environment where race and employment were so tightly linked, and how this racial identity may have interfaced with their home countries’ ideas about masculinity and work.

In northern Australia, the buffalo hide industry was prevalent from the late 19th to mid-20th century. It involved Indigenous and non-Indigenous women and men working collectively for white male shooters to exploit feral water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) for their thick hides. Indigenous peoples dominated the workforce and often excelled in both experience and ability. Yet, in popular accounts, only the white shooters are heroicised. Their legend entangles in national imagining, obfuscates the valuable role of Indigenous peoples and influences the memory of the industry in the present. In this paper, I draw on my multi-scalar and inter-disciplinary study which 'excavates' the memory of the buffalo shooting industry across a cultural continuum. Combining historical archaeology and folkloristics, I explore how the Australian buffalo industry was imagined in popular accounts and how the ‘Wild West’ and ‘Buffalo Bill’ influenced the construction of the colonial legend of the Australian buffalo shooting industry.

Dozoa or Providence Island has long served as a meeting ground along the West African coast. Indigenous groups traded and potentially used the site for rites associated with secret societies. The site later served as a trading outpost, with European merchants eager to exchange goods, including human cargo. In this paper, we discuss recent findings associated with the Back-to-Africa Heritage & Archaeology (BAHA) project to foreground Indigenous use of the site and the complex relationships forged between West African societies and arriving settlers in 1822. African American settlers arrived on Dozoa in that year, setting the stage for the founding of the Republic of Liberia in 1847. Referred to as “Liberia’s Plymouth Rock,” this paper also examines the settler colonial founding myths that have been reanimated by recent bicentennial celebrations. We argue that these white-adjacent heritage narratives obscure more accurate renderings of the Liberian past revealed through our archaeological project.

The archaeological archive is a largely untapped resource related to the role that race and White supremacy played in the production of archaeological knowledge and methods. As I suggest in this paper, archaeological methods and thought were deeply, even if unconsciously, influenced by plantation logic. Specifically, race determined who filled roles as laborers and who generated knowledge about the past. With examples from archaeological expeditions in the American South and Egypt, I focus on field notes and correspondence to demonstrate how management techniques and ideologies of racialized bodies seamlessly transitioned from the plantation to the archaeological trench.