This project examines how enslaved laborers at Mount Calvert Plantation in Maryland constructed “homeplaces” as spaces of resistance through the everyday use and arrangement of ceramics. Drawing on material culture studies, I analyze ceramic assemblages recovered from two spatially distinct areas: the enslaved domestic quarter and the manor house vicinity. Through a relational study of decorative patterns on white paste earthenwares, this research explores how enslaved individuals negotiated identity, community, and resistance within plantation life. Centering bell hooks’ (1990) concept of the homeplace, the study reframes domestic spaces not merely as sites of enslavement and trauma, but as radical sites of self-making, possibility, and survival. Further, it challenges typological approaches that flatten enslaved experience and argues that ceramic decoration reveals complex practices shaped by both constraint and creativity. This research contributes to a deeper anthropological understanding of plantation landscapes and Black women’s agency within them.

One research thread in African Diaspora archaeology is the search for material evidence of African religiosity. There are four venues where insights into these beliefs can be achieved – personal charms; dedication sacrifices; house/yard charms; and public displays (e.g., cemeteries). While aspects of all of these elements were discovered at Kingsley Plantation, this paper outlines the evidence for dedication sacrifices, house and yard charms, and house shrines, features that would be manifested by an entire family within the four walls of a domicile, or its immediate domestic spaces. Since these are not isolated and lost elements, but features that were purposely placed and buried, our ability to see behavior and intentionality, identity and performance, is arguably possible with a greater clarity. That is because the location for some objects is where they were originally deposited, some arguably placed there in circa 1814, when the slave cabins were built and dedicated.

The 1856 Project at the University of Maryland was started when UMD joined Universities Studying Slavery (USS), an effort initiated at the University of Virginia and joined by over a hundred colleges and universities around the globe. “Member schools are committed to research, acknowledgment, education, and atonement regarding institutional ties to the slave trade, to enslavement on campus or abroad, and to enduring racism in school history and practice.” One challenge for the 1856 project has been defining the institution’s connections to enslavement. Furthermore, how do we define the institution that is connected to enslavement? This paper will explore the connections of the University of Maryland and the wider state system of universities to enslavement and its legacy, as well as how the choice of definition influences the approach to research, commemoration, and most importantly, atonement.

The 1857 Slave Dwelling at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Bedford County, Virginia, was used as housing for enslaved laborers until 1864. After Emancipation, the brick structure was home to African American tenants and later was used for storage. Upcoming plans for restoration required excavations around the entire structure before stabilization can begin. This paper examines the use of storage spaces at buildings inhabited by African-American tenants through analysis of the artifact assemblage and features associated with a storage shed on the building’s east side that stood from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th century, according to photographs and excavations. A range of farm equipment and tools stored within the shed indicate farming activities at Poplar Forest during this period. Other artifacts such as ceramics, glass, and personal items reveal activities occurring within and around the shed, which may include residents of the dwelling and others who frequented this space.

This paper explores everyday life for the enslaved community at Estate Little Princess(ELP), a Danish plantation founded in 1749 on the Caribbean island of St. Croix.

Representing Black life through artifact class distribution, I ask whether archaeological assemblages at ELP conform to the spatial distributions of contemporary colonial maps and texts. Employing historian Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, I integrate historical maps and texts with data from shovel test probes(STP) and units to imagine an assemblage in conversation with socio-political processes of anti-Blackness. Drawing upon Black theorist Christina Sharpe’s measurement of how anti-Blackness shapes atmospheres and conditions through weather, I blend sources of all mediums to question the dominance of colonialism in remembrances of Caribbean enslavement.

Though colonial cartographies imagine enslaved communities as primitive and uniform, my counter-maps assert that enslaved individuals within plantation contexts applied their specialized skills and knowledge to maintain community amidst enslavement.

The McDowell-Gilbert site was discovered in an unplowed pasture in Fayette County, Kentucky. The shallow yet mostly intact foundations of the dwelling, outbuildings, and enslaved persons quarters, as well as associated features, shed light not only on the daily lives of the McDowells and Gilberts, but also the lives of the enslaved individuals who lived and worked there. Preliminary research has revealed how the farm was tied to national events and also provided personal insights, such as the names of 17 enslaved individuals. Intact sites like this and opportunities to conduct extensive excavations with scholarly research rarely come along in CRM. The data recovered from the McDowell-Gilbert site is not only relevant to current interests but will provide opportunities for interpretations of the data for future researchers.

Brown's Farm (36CB227) was a 19th-century African American farmstead located near Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The site was settled prior to 1820 by two African American men, and their descendants occupied the farmstead until 1967, when Western Pennsylvania Conservancy acquired the land to create Laurel Ridge State Park. This paper will discuss the preliminary results of the 2025 excavation at Brown’s Farm, conducted in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. The fieldwork consisted of STP survey and test unit excavation to locate the original site of the farmhouse on the property, as well as identify cultural material related to the family’s subsistence strategies and recreational activities. The identification of material culture related to children was also of special interest, as the occupation of the farmstead was multigenerational.

How have the conversations around racial uplift and respectability politics progressed in the last 150 years? How can understanding the parallels between the past and the present in these discussions help us interpret what we see in the archaeological record? This paper examines several examples of late 19th and early 20th century African American families from Annapolis, Maryland to understand how strategies for racial uplift promoted by African American scholars such as W.E.B Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Copper, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune, just to name a few, were translated into the material culture of daily life. The paper then compares this to the conversations happening in the 21st century around respectability politics and explores how the trends of today both help us understand and influence how we perceive the past.

The American Victorian Period of the 1870s to 1915 was a time of significant transitions in medicine. In Louisville, Kentucky, this period saw an influx of migrants, immigrants, and Black healthcare professionals, as well as the founding of Louisville National Medical College, the state’s first medical school open to people of color. A number of these professionals lived and/or practiced in the Beecher Terrace study area, which was excavated between 2017 and 2020. Statistical analyses of the medicine bottles recovered during the archaeological investigation and of city mortality rates were employed in order to understand diachronic changes in healthcare access and outcomes for neighborhood residents. Significant differences in consumer patterns and mortality were observed among Black, immigrant, and U.S.-born white households. The findings suggest that, while marginalization negatively impacted Black Louisvillians, health outcomes improved significantly after the establishment of Black professionals and institutions.

Since 2017, Cultural Resources staff of Summit Metro Parks have been studying a unique cultural landscape within its Cascade Valley Metro Park in Akron, Ohio. From 1948 until the mid-1970s and prior to the creation of the park, an informal, racially integrated neighborhood named Wheelock Cuyahoga Acres existed on a dirt road called Honeywell Drive. Most of the properties were Black owned and purchased by families who relocated to Akron during the Great Migration. In order to resist systems of oppression in the nearby cities, these households continued familial traditions of self-sufficiency, community buiding, and mutual aide. This presentation outlines the stories of two households, the Prathers and the Johnsons, and how descendant collaboration, archaeology, and historical research make it possible for Summit Metro Parks to preserve and celebrate an overlooked part of the Rubber City’s history.

Previous excavations in Cascade Valley Metro Park in Akron, Ohio, prompted research on what was once a rural neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. This subdivision, known as Wheelock Cuyahoga Acres (WCA), contradicted the prevalent housing segregation in the surrounding areas. Property advertisements specified that they were available for purchase regardless of race. This project contributes to previous work of revealing the stories of the rural community in WCA. By focusing on one of the Black owned houses, this research highlights an individual narrative of Black settlement during the Great Migration.