Conference Agenda

In May 2024, the Haciendas of Nasca Archaeological Project undertook a comprehensive registration of architectural and artistic features at the ruinous Jesuit hacienda chapel of San Francisco Xavier de la Nasca in Peru’s Ingenio Valley. Completed in 1745 in the Late Andean Baroque style, the hacienda chapel was intended to indoctrinate and serve the spiritual needs of the hacienda’s community of nearly 300 enslaved African descendants. Heavily obscured by calcification, new mural paintings were discovered on two lintels in the chapel’s sacristy. Angels, grotesque figures, and hybrid beings of classical antiquity contrast with realistic depictions of Afro-Andean hacienda laborers and are accompanied by floral decorations in vibrant polychrome. I interrogate these works of art together with my previous archaeological research at the colonial haciendas of Nasca to understand how diverse sensory experiences contributed to an ever-changing aesthetico-political regime and simultaneously resonated with a broader African diaspora.

Enslaved communities imprisoned on colonial sugar plantations engaged in and fostered a web of informal economies across Jamaica, which often manifested as street markets and were frequently accused of illegality. Because the Jamaican street markets were linked to illegal trade, and because illegality in the Caribbean was primarily linked to the merchant instead of the material, this thesis uses regression analysis to investigate the relationship between imported goods in several slave quarter sites and their distance to coastal street markets. Furthermore, the analysis conducted examines both spatial and temporal relationships, observing the behavior of a century of imported artifacts in 25-year intervals. While the results of this analysis can only begin to speak to the informal economies, new questions regarding the illegal are posed. Establishing the extent of enslaved communities engaged in illegal activity assists in understanding enslaved lifeways and the necessary shadow economies cast by the plantation model.

West Ashcom, later called Cremona, is located in tidewater Maryland, USA and has witnessed over 300 years of continual estate agriculture throughout the beginnings of the colonial period to present day. Changing hands from elite white owners, the estate was built on the labor of trafficked and enslaved Africans and African Americans, and later post-emancipation, a mixed-race farm laborer workforce. Archaeological excavations led by Dr. Liza Gijanto from St Mary’s College of Maryland have been ongoing since 2012, most recently funded by a three-year NSF-REU grant. Excavations have focused on the 17th-18th century manor house and outbuildings, and a 19th century extant cabin. This paper takes a long view of enslavement, tenancy, and farm labor focused on the years from 1650-1946. We will demonstrate the effect of changes in plantation culture and labor practice through the racialization of space through oral histories, documentary and archaeological records.

In the antebellum United States, white enslavers were initially ambivalent regarding the literacy of enslaved Africans. This ambivalence radically changed with Nat Turner’s revolt, and after 1835, when the American Anti-Slavery Society began to flood the southern states with abolitionist newspapers, handbills, and other abolitionist literature. Period slave narratives, writings by abolitionists, and the 1930s ex-slave narratives, have all aided historians in understanding these strictures, and the means by which many African Americans surmounted them. While artifacts associated with writing, such as slate tablets and pencils, have been recovered from enslaved contexts since the beginnings of plantation archaeology in the 1960s, a detailed assessment and interpretation of these data has been lacking. Using artifacts derived from Kingsley Plantation (Fort George Island, Florida) as a primary dataset, along with comparisons made to other plantation excavations, this study examines previous interpretations, and suggests new possibilities for understanding literacy through these objects.

Several seasons of excavation at Kingsley Plantation, in Duval County Florida, have yielded a large, multi-component dataset that spans both domestic and industrial components of the plantation. The enslaved Africans and African Americans at Kingsley Plantation engaged with their material worlds in a variety of different ways, as demonstrated by the variability in architectural features and artifact assemblages between the four different cabins. This paper will focus on strategies that the enslaved inhabitants of the four cabins used to manipulate their houses and material possessions to better suit their needs.

An average of 10-15 enslaved individuals worked and lived at Historic Sandusky, a 19th-century plantation in Lynchburg, Virginia. According to an 1813 insurance map, the property consisted of the main house and several exterior buildings including a 16x32-ft detached kitchen. In Spring 2021, archaeologists excavated a 20x20-ft open-area block to determine the kitchen’s location based on past excavations. They discovered a subfloor pit and proceeded to excavate it and take flotation samples in search of small artifacts and faunal remains. Historical documentation is unclear as to whether the kitchen operated as living quarters, workspace, or both. I will determine the function of the subfloor pit at Sandusky based on small artifacts and bones recovered from fine screening, artifacts from ¼-inch screening, and comparison with other subfloor pits from Central Virginia. My results will illuminate how the kitchen space was utilized.

During the mid-19th century Fort Snelling, located in what is now known as Minnesota, housed African American individuals enslaved by officers serving in the American military. Today, the site functions as a popular historic destination. Although enslaved people were crucial to the site’s history, as well as Minnesotan and Midwestern history in general, their stories have frequently been excluded from the narrative presented at the site. In this paper, I highlight a group of artifacts that could be used to alleviate this representational discrepancy.