During the period of enslavement and its immediate aftermath, the overseer class occupied an ofen ambihgous place in colonial Jamaica. Fashioning themsevles as part of the planter class, overseers were at once welcomed to the tables of wealthy planters and reviled by them for their class standing as salaried employees and for their nearness to the dirty work required by the oppresive system in which they were embedded. This presentation reviews the material world of this class of people, including the central role that the overseer's or "busha's" house played in plantation landscapes, the relations overseers had with both their employers and the enslaved workers they supervised, and considers the material culture of their administrative lives as evidenced by artifacts recovered from an overseer's context at Marshall's Pen, a coffee plantaiton located in the central highlands of Jamaics.

Overseers are often overlooked despite their essential role in plantation society. This paper examines the overseers’ social lives through a comparative analysis of ceramics between the enslaved quarters and overseer’s house at George Washington’s Union Farm. In the 1790’s Washington reorganized his five farms, placing these structures on either side of the road. The quarters were occupied by enslaved households while the overseer’s house was largely occupied by single white men. Comparing these households offers a unique opportunity to examine the access networks and social aspirations of the overseer.

Archaeologists studying plantations often overlook two powerful forces in the American South. The first are overseers and other white employees who lived on and were critical to the functioning of plantations. The second is the racial ideology of whiteness, which was foundational to American slavery. Research on race in the antebellum United States is fundamentally incomplete without addressing the ways that enslavers and their employees created, performed, and reproduced nations of whiteness the supported racial slavery. This paper presents recent research at Belle Grove Plantation (Frederick County, Virginia, USA) that explores how white plantation employees (including overseers) performatively enacted whiteness through the ways they set their tables and ate meals.

Whitehall Plantation’s Overseer’s House, built around 1750 by Maryland’s Governor Horatio Sharpe, provides a rare example of continuous long-term use as part of the plantation surveillance landscape; a negotiated space serving the quotidian lives of paid labor, enslaved labor, landowners, and tenant farmers. We will explore its role in this surveillance as a signifier in the greater plantation hierarchy as reflected in changes to its architecture, outbuildings, and consequently the archaeological record.

The Oval Site (44WM80) is a circa 1720s to 1770s complex of domestic and agricultural structures at Stratford Hall Plantation, the 18th-century home of the Lee Family in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The site includes an overseer’s house, barn, detached kitchen, and housing for enslaved African Americans, though no known historical documentation exists that directly addresses the site. Overseer occupations in archaeology are relatively few and difficult to identify within a plantation landscape without historical corroboration. While past presentations on the Oval Site have focused on complex relationships between spatial behaviors, class, and race; this paper returns to the issue of how an overseer’s house was interpreted at the Oval Site in the first place. Working back through a progression of contextual distinctions in architecture, artifact assemblages, plantation layout, and comparative analysis to show how these elusive but impactful people and histories can be included in our archaeological discourse.

Archaeological survey and excavation at the 19th century Overseer Home Site at the Montpelier Plantation in central Virginia recovered over 80,000 artifacts over the course of several seasons from 2019-2024. This paper addresses research questions posed by the descendant community, public archaeology participants, and archaeologists at Montpelier to explore the material culture recovered during excavations that represent the daily life, foodways, consumer choices, and identity negotiations of the individuals who lived at the Overseer home site.

In 2019, Archaeologists at The Montpelier Foundation began a multi-year investigation of the Home Farm, a location believed to be the site of agricultural buildings, dwellings for enslaved families, and a free white Overseer. The purpose of the survey was to understand the full context of the overseer's house in relation to the sites around it, and how the Home Farm was organized. Over the course of Phase I and II survey of this area, evidence of a more complex landscape began to emerge, opening the doors for an opportunity to examine the ways that this landscape changed through time as a site of enslaved agricultural and industrial labor that was overseen and controlled by free white overseers over the course of many decades. This paper will examine these spatial dynamics and changes through an examination of spatial, archaeological, and documentary sources.