This presentation reports on preliminary investigations of the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887, a mass casualty event perpetuated by White planters and property owners on striking Black laborers and community members in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Employing methodologies from historic archaeology and forensic anthropology, this investigation aims to locate and delineate a purported mass grave associated with a confrontation that began with striking sugarcane laborers and ended in racist violence. Community folk histories focus on a landscape transformed by residential and commercial construction and buried by a twentieth-century landfill. Available scholarship suggests the violence was aimed at Black community members indiscriminately and that most deaths resulted from gunshot wounds. Early aspects of the investigation detailed here include community engagement initiatives, the collection and assessment of community oral histories, and archival research intended to guide later geophysical assessments in areas with a high probability of containing human remains.

Agricultural production is a significant driver for the historical development of many of Louisiana's industries. Given the geological and physiographic diversity of the state, individual regions within the state carry different trajectories in history. Oftentimes, there is a disproportionate focus on archaeological research towards the plantation era landscapes and quarters within the southern area of the delta. Drawing from results from nearly 3,000 acres of survey coverage in northern Louisiana, this paper draws attention towards tenancy, particularly in the Holly Ridge community in Richland Parish. Here, I integrate these data on a wider scale to compare and contrast trends in agricultural community development through the use of sharecropping and tenancy systems in Louisiana. By tracing these developments from the individual and unique histories of each community it is possible to better contextualize the greater trends of material consumption and their effect on cultural resources during this period.

Much of Louisiana’s history and culture connects directly to a dependence on rich wetlands, interweaving waterways, and proximity to the coast. Archaeological survey is one tool used to study past human interactions with these fluctuating wetland environments and is regularly implemented in advance of projects subject to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (as amended), such as marsh creation and restoration projects. The Louisiana Division of Archaeology currently curates over 7,500 cultural resource management reports and employs GIS to link reports to their associated survey coverage area. This paper demonstrates the use of geospatial analysis to compare land cover of Louisiana’s wetlands and coastal zone with the survey reports curated by the Division. The analysis reveals the geographic distribution of archaeological surveys in the subject environments and explores how future surveys may impact our understanding of Louisiana’s past.

The Poverty Point Site has at least two known, but not well understood, historic mortuary areas. Between two and four historic graves are known to exist atop Mound D, a precolonial monument locally known as Sarah’s Mound. Sarah Guier, whose husband Philip owned and cultivated the site as a cotton plantation, is one of the burials. An unknown number of historic graves are believed to occupy a relatively circumscribed section of the south plaza. Though its existence was originally noted in 1913, little information is known about the area, including extent or the number of interments. This presentation details preliminary geophysical investigations and archival research into both areas and highlights new efforts to verify a possible third location of historic burials on the site. Understanding the placement and extent of the historic graves at Poverty Point will increase awareness for this aspect of the landscape and aid in stewardship initiatives.

Archaeology, especially that of plantation sites, is not confined to the past. As the legacies of slavery persist today, we as archaeologists must also look to present-day communities as testimonies for many of the very themes that we are exploring archaeologically. These themes center on relationships to the landscape via industry and labor, subsistence, community and identity, memory, and resistance.

This paper draws together oral history interviews, conducted as part of the River Road Oral History Project, with archaeological materials recovered from Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Survey in Edgard, Louisiana to show how the archaeology of plantation sites in Louisiana can necessarily transcend time.