Dispossession—the action of taking away and depriving people of their homeland, property, history, language, identity, cultural practices and/or livelihoods—underlies and connects these two publications. Dispossession is a long-standing interest in historical archaeology dating to the 1970s when its study was referred to as the ‘archaeology of the disenfranchised’. Both books contribute superb additions to this established research area, and more significantly, they introduce new themes, approaches and insights into the myriad ways that communities were dispossessed in the distant and recent past, as well as in the present.
In The archaeology of removal, Terrance Weik and his contributors examine dispossession through social processes of removal consisting of “involuntary migration, clearance, dislocation, forced resettlement, exile, uprooting, deportation, and expulsion” (p. 2). In U.S. history, removal is most often associated with the removal of Native Americans, particularly during the time of the Indian Removal Act 1830–1847 when the U.S. government forced Native Americans to leave their lands in the eastern USA and to move to lands designated as Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The authors of this volume expand this very specific meaning of removal to include, in addition to Native Americans, other racialised and discriminated groups: African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Appalachian mountain folk, exploited labourers and the incarcerated.
Indian removal is the subject of the first two case studies. Alex Flick and Julia King (Chapter 2) chronicle the forced migration and resettlement of the Piscataway—an indigenous group who inhabited the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in the state of Maryland when the English established a permanent settlement there at St Mary's City in 1634. Through a re-examination of archaeological studies along with written sources, they discuss the ways that displacement affected the Piscataway's material and spatial practices. Despite removal, memories of culturally significant landscapes remain important to present-day Piscataways. Weik (Chapter 3) examines the role that maps played in the displacement of the Chickasaw, one of the major Native American nations targeted in the Indian Removal Act. Using period maps of the U.S. General Land Office constructed for the removal process, he considers the strengths and weaknesses of these maps in locating archaeological features at removal-era settlements; possible reasons for the misrepresentations of the buildings on these settlements; how land allotments laid out in a grid system forced the Chickasaws to create new travel routes and ways to use the land.
Capitalism and its impact on dispossession frames the studies presented in Chapters 4 and 5. Stephan Woehlke and Matthew Reeves (Chapter 4) analyse successive removals of African-Americans from Orange County, Virginia, during the nineteenth century resulting from processes common in capitalist systems: unfair competition, the command of spatial relations, fracturing of class consciousness, deskilling of the workforce, and the removal of farmers from the means of production. They discovered that these processes are identifiable in the archaeological record through their surveys and excavations at Montpelier, the plantation home of U.S. President James Madison located in Orange County. Archaeological data in combination with historic maps, aerial imagery, government documents and newspapers illustrate how industrial agriculture fuelled the removal of African-Americans from the 1830s–1900, transforming a former Black-dominated landscape into a White-dominated one. Adam Fracchia (Chapter 5) examines how capital accumulation devalues people, their material culture or history when it does not lead to the maximisation of profit in the case of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century quarry town of Texas, Maryland, about twelve miles north of Baltimore. He uses the concept of accumulation: first, to evaluate the marginalisation and segregation of quarry workers by class, ethnicity and race both in the quarry industry and in the town; second, to explain the failure of preservation efforts to nominate the town as an historic district to protect the extant buildings of this working-class history.
In the remaining chapters, three case studies address twentieth-century removals. Audrey Horning (Chapter 6) examines the forced removal of predominately White communities in the southern Appalachian Mountains to establish the Shenandoah National Park in the 1930s. Conservationists, local entrepreneurs and even social scientists endorsed the removal of these communities and argued that relocating them would improve their standard of living. Archaeological evidence from abandoned mountain settlements contradicts the premise that these communities were dirt poor, ignorant of the world beyond Appalachia or lacking modern conveniences and fashionable consumer goods. Unlike other studies in the volume, April Kamp-Whittaker and Bonnie J. Clark (Chapter 7) do not focus on removal processes or the places where people were forced to leave, but on the new community ties those uprooted established in their relocation. Their case study considers the four-year internment of Japanese-Americans at Amache in Colorado, one of ten incarceration camps established during the Second World War for the unjustified claim of national security. Through the study of historical directories, recovered artefacts and internee-modified landscape features, the authors indicate the ways in which internees responded to forced relocation, reconnected with former neighbours and forged new social relationships. Maria Starzmann (Chapter 8) critiques the archaeology of prisons for conceptualising them as institutions with absolute power, normalising them as necessities and approaching them as individual bounded sites. To counter these and other shortcomings, she undertakes a landscape analysis that utilises satellite and Google Street View imagery to understand the larger landscapes of which prisons were a part and how these carceral landscapes are perceived. In the final chapter, Charles Orser (Chapter 9) comments on the themes and issues raised in the previous studies using insights from his research on the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora.
As an archaeological study of the African diaspora, Delle's Northern slavery and freedom inextricably concerns dispossession. His study emphasises the resettlement of African descendant peoples and the communities that they formed in the north-eastern USA rather than their removal. References to specific removals and voluntary migrations are addressed throughout the book, and African-Americans in the North experienced numerous if not more removals than their counterparts in the South. As slaves, northern African-Americans were forcibly uprooted from Africa, the Caribbean and Virginia; while enslaved people from the southern USA emancipated themselves and sought refuge in the northern slave-free zones. Beginning in the 1850s, small waves of southern Free African-Americans began migrating to the North in search of new opportunities. In this well-researched book, Delle presents an overview of the archaeology of African-American life in the North as well as case studies derived from his own diverse research projects (Chapters 4, 6, 8). He unmasks several myths embedded in the U.S. popular imagination: 1) slavery either did not exist, or existed for a very short time, in the north-east; 2) northern abolitionism was ubiquitous and went unchallenged; and 3) numerous White abolitionists participated in the Underground Railroad—loose networks of people who provided assistance to enslaved individuals seeking refuge in northern free states.
Slavery played vital roles in both urban and rural settings of the north-east from the mid 1600s to the mid 1800s. In cities, enslaved people laboured in shipyards, warehouses and mills, and worked as cooks, valets and gardeners. In the countryside, they produced food crops on farms and plantations and performed dangerous jobs in the iron and other extractive industries. Although northern plantations were not engaged in mono-crop agriculture like most in the Americas, these plantations supplied food exports for Caribbean plantations that linked them to the Atlantic Trade in slaves, cash crops and manufactured goods in which Europe, Africa and the Americas participated. Fewer enslaved people lived and worked in the North than in the South, but archaeological studies conducted on agricultural estates in New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts indicate that slave life in the North was similar to that in the South and Caribbean in terms of slave housing, household goods and religious artefacts.
Opposition to slavery gained momentum in the Northern USA in the early 1800s as part of larger religious and social reform movements. Anti-slavery sentiment, however, did not thrive everywhere in the North, and abolitionists were violently attacked in Boston, New York and Philadelphia by anti-abolitionists who feared that the demise of slavery and the bestowal of equal rights to African-Americans would undermine the White-dominated social hierarchy of the USA. These attacks, however, did not deter abolitionists who continued their fight against slavery, some of whom assisted slave runaways through the Underground Railroad.
Archaeologists have encountered difficulty identifying Underground Railroad sites, despite numerous claims that secret passageways, hidden rooms, cellars and cisterns are evidence of this covert activity in the residences of White abolitionists. Experts have shown that these features were usually part of the original architecture of the buildings, not modifications made to them to shelter slave refugees. Moreover, historic evidence indicates that slave runaways most often received help from other African-Americans, and those seeking to escape slavery often did so by becoming members of existing free Black communities. Of the potential sites that Delle considers, the strongest possibility of an Underground Railroad site was found on the property of a free African-American woman and abolitionist in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The two books complement each other and offer numerous avenues for future research. In his commentary in the Weik book, Charles Orser notes that removal (and by extension, dispossession generally) is a grim topic, but one that offers archaeologists opportunities “to illuminate histories denied to other scholars” (p. 224). These books are testaments to the many ways that archaeology can uniquely contribute to the study of dispossession.
