Conference Agenda

This paper dives into a new project, which began by creating a database for spatial analysis and names associated with private shipyards in Amsterdam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It became clear in the notary records, that many women were listed in association with various shipyards. This sharpened the project’s angle and tailored the research questions: what was the role of these women? Were they merely names in a document, or did they have some level of agency in the affairs of the shipyard? This research could make an important contribution when combined with archaeological excavations. The material culture of women has been an understudied field in the past and the archival research into the women of Amsterdam’s shipyards can be used to help inform artifact analysis. For example, objects recovered from shipyard excavations may be dated to a period with a strong presence of women at the yard.

This presentation will journey readers through the post-emancipation era by highlighting the very belongings African American women and girls wore as they navigated the racialized landscape of the American South from the twilight of the antebellum era to the dusk of Reconstruction. What would it mean to shift the lens through which we explored the post-emancipation era to center on the lives of Black women who, formally enslaved, racialized as Black, and gendered as women, lived during the periods of momentous social transformation between the Civil War, Emancipation, and the unraveling promises of Reconstruction? Centering our attention on the understudied ways Black women during these times dressed and adorned themselves, in this presentation, I will argue that everyday objects associated with clothing, adornment, clothing maintenance, and body grooming practices were key to how Black women and girls navigated the precarity of their lives after enslavement.

The items we choose for ourselves: our jewelry, clothing, religious items, and decorations; say something about the identity we project on the world. Can archaeologists learn about a person’s identity based on these items left behind? This paper seeks to examine personal artifacts from an archaeological context to learn more about the identity of people of the Tristán de Luna expedition (1559-1561). Combined with historical document research and spatial analysis, I analyzed personal artifacts from this Spanish settlement site to determine whether evidence for women and children can be recognized archaeologically.

Multidisciplinary research increasingly highlights the important and diverse roles of Indigenous women in sustaining their communities amid North American settler colonialism. In Southeastern North America, Indigenous women have spent millennia provisioning their families, organizing familial and diplomatic relationships, leading their communities spiritually and politically, and acting as agents of social continuity and change. In this paper, we call attention to the power of women in the emergence and persistence of one Indigenous nation, the Yamasee, in 18th-century South Carolina. While previous research has focused on Yamasee's role in the regional political economy and the 1715 instigation of the Yamasee War against the Carolina colony, the social and political dynamics of Yamasee towns remain poorly understood. Combining archaeological, archival, and environmental data, we explore the strategies by which Yamasee women networked their households to craft community and shape history in the years leading up to war.

Foodways and commensal politics provide the ideal contexts for exploring the social lives of palace women in late Atlantic-era Dahomey. Behind the palace walls, women from across the region and all social strata formed a veritable model of society consisting of soldiers, priestesses, slaves, prisoners of war, laborers, artisans, craftspeople, government administrators, and members of the royal lineage. This essay argues that the quotidian domestic activities of royal palace life reflect practices common to all Dahomeans inside and outside the royal palace. Palace women represented all socioeconomic classes; thus, palace life and politically vital state-run rituals were infused with craft and culinary practices drawn from commoner communities across the kingdom and beyond. This study engages ethnoarchaeology, Atlantic-era documentary sources, and ceramic data analysis to enrich our understanding of the relationships between food, gender, class, and politics in the precolonial West African Kingdom of Dahomey.