Throughout his career, Leland Ferguson pushed against a priori notions of the ways in which archaeology should be conducted, whom it should be conducted by, and how it should be interpreted. He championed a multidisciplinary methodology that diversified informative data sources as well as dissemination styles and methods, and highlighted connections between academic and quotidian observations. In this presentation, I will discuss how Leland's work, guidance, and mentorship have reframed the way I seek to identify and analyze connections in African Diaspora archaeology at sites across the Atlantic.

One of Leland Ferguson’s goals when writing Uncommon Ground was to present his archaeological findings on colonoware and of the South Carolina Lowcountry to a general audience in a similar vein as that of James Deetz’s In Small things Forgotten. Unlike Deetz, his study centered on the worldviews and actions of enslaved people. In the end, Uncommon Ground delivered so much more. His framing of the study around creolization and cultural resistance have withstood the course of time. I have been particularly drawn to his application of cultural resistance in African Diaspora Archaeology in my own work. In this paper, I recount my conservations with Leland regarding Uncommon Ground as well as the archaeological study of slavery and plantations more generally.

In his research, through his mentorship and throughout his life, Leland Ferguson emphasized the power of narrative and visual arts to enhance our connections with the past. He consistently highlighted and incorporated artworks in his presentations, publications, and personal expression. In this paper, as a reflection of this practice, I discuss how archaeologists can collaborate with artists to develop reformative efforts to challenge, erase and transform the dominant histories and symbols to offer reimagined representations of the past for the public. I highlight the particular case of Gamble Plantation in Ellenton Florida, a mid-19^th century sugar estate that has been at the center of discussions concerning historical justice, confederate monuments, heritage, and white supremacy. I present the current outcomes of collaborative work between archaeologists and artists to rectify centuries of silencing, erasing and excluding of Black voices and histories at heritage sites and in public spaces.

Strength was a key word in Leland Ferguson’s lexicon. Awed by the survival of the people forced into slavery on plantations in the Carolinas and Virginia, Leland asked, “Where did their strength come from?” He found answers in the stories they left in the ground and nailed shut the coffin of the white supremacist view of the plantation as a "school" that helped "civilize" the enslaved. He countered with a world of cultural constructs, insights from pottery shards into the food preferences of the captives, ordinary objects embedded with religious significance, ritual items rooted in Africa, fragments of toys testifying to family life. These were the lost and discarded possessions of the Black pioneer generations, an iconography of an emerging identity. Familiar yet mysterious, the unearthed relics of slave labor camps in the American South—like recently excavated Judaica buried during the Nazi era—bring dark history into the light of day.

Leland Ferguson's archaeological work remains remarkable for its empathy towards persons, be they represented by archaeological remains, stakeholders, students or colleagues. In recent considerations of how archaeology might better engage with critical disability studies, I found myself thinking about Professor Ferguson's professional life, and it occurred to me that he embodied through his practice and scholarship the idea of "communities of care". Critical Disability Studies has emerged out of conversations with queer and Black feminisms, performance theory, critical race theory, and disability activism, with a strong concern for contemporary social Justice--seeing disability as a rhetorical space where inequality is constructed. In this paper, I will discuss how we can see in Leland Ferguson's life works, inspirations for a critical disability informed archaeology, a perhaps unexpected legacy.

From 1985 to 1987, Leland Ferguson and I prepared a detailed interpretive map of 18th to 19th century rice plantations along the East Branch of Cooper River, northeast of Charleston, S.C. We drew the layout of these plantations onto an overlay of U.S.G.S topo maps. Leland's first purpose was to locate the sites of villages created and inhabited by enslaved people of African descent. We were largely successful in this project, which also revealed the past landscape that showed the achievement of these Black pioneers, who created, then operated, the technological landscape of low-country rice, under conditions of severe oppression. Beyond "Black labor, white rice," we found the true intellectual and material contribution of these early African Americans to American history. We also saw, in revealing this landscape almost two centuries after its creation, the racism that had hidden this contribution from most Americans. This map was "big," indeed.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South Carolina Lowcountry became a focus of archaeological research into the lives of enslaved African Americans toiling on plantations. Dr. Leland Ferguson was a primary leader in this field of study and used his observations from the East Branch of the Cooper River as well as excavations in the South Carolina Lowcountry and elsewhere to enhance our understanding of marginalized lives and underscore the importance of enslaved African American culture in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Intensive excavations have been a valuable tool for interpreting African American culture and lifeways. Now, our review of survey level and remote-sensing data from Francis Marion National Forest is providing an opportunity to clearly demonstrate enslaved laborers as primary authors of the South Carolina Lowcountry built landscape on a large scale.

In God’s Fields (2011) Leland Ferguson examined the interplay between religion, race, and landscape in the Moravian town of Salem, North Carolina. In doing so, he highlighted the vital role of faith in social life. By examining cultural change vis-à-vis race and landscape in a theocratic town, Ferguson joined a small but growing group of archaeologists who explicitly examined religious belief and practice. Ferguson combined archaeological and documentary evidence with a measured application of practice theory and landscape phenomenology to demonstrate how religious ideals can radically shift over time. The result was a nuanced account of the often-fraught relationship between religion and race and the complex process of racialization in one early American community. This paper examines the legacy of God’s Fields and the ways in which Ferguson’s approach informs my own analysis of Moravian ceramic production in Salem.

Leland Ferguson was a mentor, colleague, and friend who influenced my work with the African American past and colonoware in particular. In this paper I reflect on those interactions and the intersections between Leland’s colonoware research and my own. I consider this research from the perspective of social and cultural geography and discuss how sites, trends, and other’s research influenced the analysis of colonoware.

As his student and friend, Leland asked me to walk and talk with him and contemplate the world around us. He taught us how to look at things differently, with patience and attention. He made me ponder not just archaeology in the field, but life. Through Leland's subtle cues I have adopted an autoethnographic approach to my archaeological practice that continuously, reflexively, shapes who I am as a human. In my paper I share the insights I learned from Leland, how I've used his hints and cues to delve deeper into the sites I work and my life as I work those sites, and how Leland's ability to teach us about archaeology really helped us all learn more about our lives. Through this I hope to express that some of Leland's best taught lessons were not on dirt and artifacts, but on ways archaeology can "make us better people."