Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic ed. by Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit (review)

Four decades ago, Ira Berlin stressed the importance of understanding the diverse development of African American life and culture during the colonial era that also shaped many aspects of black society in subsequent centuries. Toward this effort, he identified three distinct slave systems in mainland British North America: a northern nonplantation system and two southern plantation systems, one around the Chesapeake Bay and the other in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry.¹ Berlin included both New England and the Middle colonies in the northern nonplantation system. The authors of this collection of essays focus on a subregion of the nonplantation North that they designate as the Upper Mid-Atlantic, "the area between New York City and Philadelphia, extending south to Delaware and northeast to Long Island, with particular attention to the Delaware Valley" (3). They further define the Upper Mid-Atlantic as a cultural "borderland" (4) between New England to the north—a stronghold of abolitionism—and the Chesapeake to the south that relied heavily on enslaved laborers.

This publication brings together eleven case studies and two reflective essays on the archaeological study of African American life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic that emphasize the countryside rather than urban centers. Varied circumstances motivated these studies, including collaborations with present-day African American communities and historical organizations interested in these places; development projects that could endanger the archaeological resources; restudy of previous research; and accidental rediscoveries of black sites. The time span for the investigated sites range from early eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The book is subdivided into four parts: "Slavery and Material Culture"; "Housing, Community, and Labor"; "Death and Memorialization"; and "Reflections."

In part 1, two of the three chapters examine archaeological remains associated with enslaved occupants, one on a site in southern Delaware (chap. 1) and the other on Long Island, New York (chap. 3). William Liebeknecht infers that a site known today as Cedar Creek Road Site was a slave quarter complex based on circumstantial evidence. In the eighteenth century, a succession of families owned the 250-acre tract of land, but the documentary records do not indicate that any of these landowners were slaveholders. The archaeological findings, however, suggest that the tract included a slave quarter complex based on the concentration of several post-in-hole, light-framed structures and subfloor pits similar to those associated with eighteenth-century slave housing in the Chesapeake. Additionally, the structure of an iron-working furnace appears to have incorporated some aspects of African technology.

Ross Rava and Christopher Matthews investigated the other slave-occupied site located in Nassau County, New York, at the Rock Hall Museum—a manor estate where one of the largest groups of enslaved Africans lived in the county. The owners of Rock Hill were sugar planters in Antigua and occupied the property until 1818. Archaeological research undertaken to find a detached kitchen building yielded two tantalizing bits of material culture associated with Afro-Caribbean roots of the slave occupants. First, they found a fireplace base made from burnt ash and seashell mixed with crush shell and brick fragments that resembles the remains of colonial-era tabby fireplace bases found in Antigua. Second, a religious bundle consisting of pins, bent nails, and lead shot was found at the top of a cellar staircase and was possibly put there for spiritual protection. Similar intentional deposits found near doorways, chimneys, windows, or corners include—in addition to nails and pins—beads, quartz crystals, pierced coins, buttons, animal bones, shells, and smoothed stones found at numerous sites particularly in Chesapeake region.

In the third study (chap. 2), Keri Sansevere analyzes colonoware—a low-fired, hand-constructed, earthenware pottery often made by and, most certainly, used by enslaved and free African Americans in the United States. Similar earthenwares were also made in the Caribbean, but Caribbeanists rarely use...