Browse

Archaeology of Domestic Landscapes of the Enslaved in the Caribbean examines the diversity of living environments that the enslaved inhabitants of the colonial Caribbean by analyzing archaeological evidence collected from a wide variety of sites across the region. Archaeological investigations of domestic architecture and artifacts illuminate the nature of household organization; fundamental changes in settlement patterns; and the manner in which power was invariably linked with the material arrangements of space among the enslaved living and working in a variety of contexts throughout the region, including plantations, fortifications, and urban centers. While research in the region has provided a considerable amount of data at the household-level, much of this work is biased towards artifact analysis, resulting in unfamiliarity with the considerations that went into constructing and inhabiting households. The chapters in this book provide detailed reconstructions of the built environments associated with slavery and account for the cultural behaviors and social arrangements that shaped these spaces. It brings together case studies of Caribbean slave settlements through historical archaeology as a means of exposing the diversity of people and practices in these various landscapes, across the British, French, Dutch, and Danish colonies in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles as well as the Bahamian archipelago.

Using archaeology as a tool for understanding long-term ecological and climatic change, this volume synthesizes current knowledge about the ways Native Americans interacted with their environments along the Atlantic coast over the past 10,000 years. Leading scholars discuss how the region’s indigenous peoples grappled with significant changes to shorelines and estuaries, from sea level rise to shifting plant and animal distributions to European settlement and urbanization. Together, they provide a valuable perspective spanning millennia on the diverse marine and nearshore ecosystems of the entire eastern seaboard—the icy waters of Newfoundland and the Gulf of Maine, the Middle Atlantic regions of the New York Bight and the Chesapeake Bay, and the warm shallows of the St. Johns River and the Florida Keys. This broad comparative outlook brings together populations and areas previously studied in isolation. Today, the Atlantic coast is home to tens of millions of people who inhabit ecosystems that are in dramatic decline. The research in this volume not only illuminates the past but also provides important tools for managing coastal environments into an uncertain future.

This book synthesizes the landscape histories of Native Americans in southeastern North America from the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Relying on archaeological data and historical sources, the work outlines the ways in which Native populations accommodated and contested the growing encroachments of colonialism and colonial powers. Traditional landscape practices were greatly transformed by epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and a widespread slave trade in Indian populations. Research demonstrates that populations adapted to these challenges in two major ways. First, they built on traditional histories of mobility to develop new modes of migration and travel to escape regions of conflict and to gain access to important colonial towns and resources. Second, seeking safety in numbers, Native Americans increasingly formed coalescent communities composed of two or more cultural groups. These coalescent communities evolved into the groups known today as Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Catawbas, and Seminoles. The study further explores how the evolution of these groups was connected to events and processes of the broader political economy in the Atlantic World, including the rise of plantation slavery, the growth of the deerskin trade, the birth of the consumer revolution, and the emergence of capitalism.

Bioarchaeology of Frontiers and Borderlands presents a series of cases addressing how living on or interacting with the frontier can affect health and socioeconomic status. The goal is to explore how people in the past might have maintained, created, or manipulated their identity, while living in a place of liminality, stuck in between worlds. The zone of “in-betweenness,” of demarcation between two or more spheres of influence, is a very dynamic and potentially violent place. This book aims to explore how different groups stuck in these zones were affected, how they interacted with the different worlds, and how they lived their lives on the “edge.” The cases presented address questions of how living on the frontier might have affected the health and disease of these groups, how conflict and violence might have been expressed, and how social inequalities might have been manifested. This volume also aims to emphasize the ways that frontiers and borderlands are liminal zones that demand a reconceptualization of many of our most deeply held assumptions about the relationships between people, place, identity, and culture.

Migrations in Late Mesoamerica gathers scholars from different disciplines to address the role of migration during the most tumultuous centuries of Mesoamerican prehistory (A.D. 500–1500). Ethnohistoric, linguistic, biological, and archaeological data coupled with visual imagery and hieroglyphic texts associate the final millennium of Mesoamerican prehistory with the political, economic, and social changes that often unmoored populations from ancestral lands. Independent investigations into these topics have repeatedly discerned the movement of social groups at their core, but migration itself has rarely been the central focus of theoretical analysis. The ongoing rehabilitation of migration as a subject for study now allows prehistorians to re-examine its relationship to other areas of social life. An introductory chapter isolates characteristics of migration that distinguish it from other forms of human mobility, and it argues that migration must be analyzed in conjunction with the other social processes in which it is embedded. Select representatives from archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, ethnohistory, epigraphy, and art history present contributions on migration dynamics, causes and impacts, indigenous perceptions of migration, and the methods and assumptions we use when identifying or analyzing our specific cases.