What has been the role of historical archaeology in the study of African Diaspora history and culture in North America? This is the core question that this volume by Charles E. Orser, Jr., currently Research Professor at Arizona State University, seeks to address. One of the primary foci of historical archaeology has been the documentation of the everyday life experiences of those not well-served by traditional documentary sources. Orser approaches the question by exploring the archaeological study of enslavement and emancipation, discussing not only significant findings but also the attitudes and approaches of various researchers as this sub-field of study developed over the course of the twentieth century.
In an unusual step for the University Press of Florida, this book has been released in hardback and paper editions simultaneously, signalling expected use as a collegiate textbook. This is supported by the author's chatty tone and less-than-formal presentation style in comparison to previous works. That is not to suggest that the volume lacks scholarly rigour; on the contrary, the text is carefully documented with a list of references extending to 37 pages.
Orser opens the volume by noting that the material world of the enslaved, while once overlooked by scholars, is now found to be enlightening and significant. Historians of the Plantation South initially focused more on the enslavers than the enslaved and when they did turn their attention to those who worked and lived in bondage, they found the relevant documentation scant and its meaning often opaque. It fell on archaeologists to shed light on what was hidden. Charles Fairbanks of the University of Florida began archaeological inquiry into the lives of the enslaved in the late 1960s. Slowly, his students, and others inspired by his efforts, spread the study of enslavement and the enslaved and succeeded to such an extent that the archaeology of the African Diaspora has helped move the entire profession toward an overtly antiracist, anticolonialist practice that seeks substantive partnerships with descendent communities.
The following chapters proceed roughly chronologically but also thematically. Orser focuses on Fairbanks and his investigation of Kingsley Plantation. He outlines Fairbanks’ biography, training and early professional career before turning to a discussion of plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley, his attitudes toward slavery and the establishment of his plantation near Jacksonville, Florida. What started as an investigation seeking to document construction details supporting the planned restoration of an enslaved family's house, produced evidence that seemed to document the handing down of ceramics from plantation owner to enslaved workers as fashions changed. Fairbanks, however, had sought artefacts documenting African culture and, while his results opened new lines of archaeological inquiry, he was disappointed.
From Fairbanks’ investigations, the book turns to earlier efforts to document African culture in America and the rise of social scientists’ explicit efforts over the first half of the twentieth century to document ‘Africanisms’, cultural traits surviving from Africa, in part as a counter to the notion that African-American culture was an imperfect imitation of Euro-American culture. As with the discussion of Fairbanks, the personalities and backgrounds of the key players in these areas are reviewed as well as their scholarly contributions.
In the following chapter, Orser focuses on the fraught relationship of American archaeology to issues of race prior to the late 1960s. He shows how White, socially privileged scholars made racist assumptions in their work focusing on cultural histories while perpetuating a colonialist archaeological practice. This gradually changed by the late 1960s as archaeologists began to focus more on the nature of culture and cultural processes.
By the mid-1970s, the study of low-fired earthenware ceramics—termed colonoware—led to the realisation that African ceramic-making traditions could be seen in ceramics found at plantation sites in materials previously assumed to have been made by Native Americans. These wares came to be recognised as complex multicultural artefacts.
The next chapter discusses the recognition that ‘cross in circle’ inscriptions on the base of some colonoware vessels seemingly represented BaKongo cosmograms—symbolically depicting the circular process of the continuity of human life via the interaction between the realms of the living and the realms of the dead. This recognition provided new insight into the spiritual world of the enslaved and an intellectual connection to the religious traditions of the Congo region of Africa. Orser next turns to ceramic tobacco-smoking pipes. He recounts the history of archaeological study of pipes and recognition that while white/buff clay pipes were largely imported from Europe, terracotta pipes were locally produced by enslaved as well as Native American craftspeople, following the same general trajectory as the study of colonoware.
In the two chapters that follow, Orser discusses sub-floor storage pits found at many of the houses of enslaved plantation workers; he considers if their value was more than functional. He not only regards these archaeological features as representing a means of defiance and resistance to plantation-owner social control, but he also suggests that they may have had possible religious uses as well. The possibility that the seemingly mundane could have deep spiritual meanings began to affect the interpretations of archaeological data with various phenomena coming to be recognised as having spiritual significance, such as protection charms, folk medical and spiritual practitioners’ bundles, etc. That the behaviours associated with such archaeological evidence were apparently largely carried out in secret provided further insight into the adaptive/resistance strategies of the enslaved.
The biography of an enslaved man, Henry Bibb, published in the mid-nineteenth century, is considered in the next chapter from an archaeological perspective focusing on secrecy and subterfuge. Orser's contextualised reading reveals the importance of clandestine activity in the everyday experience of the enslaved. This secrecy means that the evidence of these activities is, generally, for the archaeologist only, to discover and interpret.
The final chapter returns to the importance of Fairbanks’ work and his willingness to consider the complexities of the lives of the enslaved, despite relatively little knowledge of the African Diaspora. The subsequent study of colonoware pottery, clay tobacco pipes, sub-floor pits and ritual deposits of artefacts documented subtle and secret expressions of African culture. In so doing, historical archaeologists were among the first scholars to came to understand the vast complexity of Black culture in America with continuing inquiry now delving into nearly every aspect of life. Orser closes by noting that many of the ideas discussed in the book were, and remain, controversial and that the archaeological inquiry of the African Diaspora is an incomplete and ongoing process that will continue to document the ingenuity and creativity of the millions of the enslaved and their descendants.
This is a masterful, yet concise, telling of a complex archaeology to which many researchers have contributed during the late twentieth century and into the present. It is, however, somewhat disingenuous to present this as the history of African American archaeology, in that the focus is really only on the archaeology of the African Diaspora in the Plantation South. Chattel slavery, in fact, extended in some form across all the British colonies that became the United States. There is only brief mention of finds at a colonial Dutch site and at the African Burial Ground in New York. In addition to the archaeology that Orser discusses, equally important work was conducted in various northern African-American communities over the period considered, such as at Black Lucy's Garden (Baker Reference Baker1978), the Parting Ways community (Deetz Reference Deetz1977) and the Sandy Ground community (Schuyler Reference Schuyler1980) to cite just three examples. This quibble notwithstanding, the examples that Orser presents provide a useful, well-contextualised summary of the development of those aspects of historical archaeology. It is a social history that resonates with this reviewer particularly, having worked alongside or drunk beer alongside nearly all the archaeologists mentioned. This volume will surely enjoy extensive classroom use and one can hope for a follow-up volume addressing the aspects of the development of African Diaspora archaeology not covered here.
