In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A central problem for archaeologists is the extreme dif¤culty of addressing issues of power and resistance, change and continuity, emic and etic perspectives, from archaeological data. Simply trying to determine the function of an artifact within a presumably unambiguous context is often dif¤cult; as Brown and Cooper (1990:18–19) show, meaning is the product of the social context within which an artifact is used, which is not necessarily always the context for which it was originally intended. We can only approximate how people thought about what they made, purchased, used, and discarded. How people thought about these things in the complex context of daily life on a colonial southern plantation under slavery is even more tenuous. The current trend to address individual artifacts within very speci¤c associational contexts is good. A few buttons, crystals, or bones in a particular , very well controlled context and viewed from a broader perspective of research into African cultures, power, and cultural continuity can, and have, produced insights not otherwise available. Broader patterns and contexts on the plantation can also indicate culture change and “provide new insights into the cultural evolution of Africans into African Americans” (Brown and Cooper 1990:19). Yaughan and Curriboo, two Lowcountry colonial plantations along the Santee River in St. Stephens, South Carolina, are examples of where broader patterns can be seen and interpreted. Work at these two plantations in 1979 identi¤ed what turned out to be three slave quarters of two adjacent Huguenot plantations settled in the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries (Wheaton 1999; Wheaton et al. 1983). Yaughan plantation had two workers’ quarters (Figure 3.1), and Curriboo had one (Figure 3.2), along with various other plantation dependencies . The ¤rst quarter at Yaughan (site 38BK75) dated from the 1780s to the 1820s, while the second (38BK76) was occupied from the 1740s to 3 Colonial African American Plantation Villages Thomas R. Wheaton Figure 3.1. Yaughan structures and major features (based on Wheaton et al. 1983). Figure 3.2. Curriboo structures and major features (based on Wheaton et al. 1983). the 1790s. The quarter at Curriboo (38BK245) dated from the 1740s to around 1800, although other parts of Curriboo continued to be occupied until the 1840s. This study, unlike many previous archaeological and historical studies, provided insights into the pre-Revolutionary rather than the antebellum character of life on a southern plantation. A total of twenty-six clearly de¤ned buildings or parts of buildings were exposed along with several hundred other features, and over 35,000 artifacts were recovered. All of the ¤ve structures at the later quarter at Yaughan (38BK75) and twelve at the earlier quarter (38BK76) were either dwellings or small outbuildings associated with the two slave quarters. The nine structures found at Curriboo (38BK245) were mostly domestic structures used by the enslaved population, with three other structures serving other functions: a barn, an “of¤ce” or other nondomestic building, and a naval stores warehouse. Curriboo also had a brick clamp. A summary of the data upon which much of the argument presented here rests is included in Wheaton et al. (1983) and Wheaton (2000). In 1983 (Wheaton et al. 1983) and in 1985 (Wheaton and Garrow 1985), I and my colleagues argued that the African population of the plantations was rapidly becoming African American so that by sometime in the nineteenth century it would be impossible to distinguish archaeologically an African American settlement from a Euro-American settlement. It was assumed that this change from African to African American was steady and applied evenly to the material culture and by extension to the nonmaterial culture. Because of subsequent work I conducted at the freedmen ’s town of James City, North Carolina, in 1989 (Wheaton et al. 1990) and the work of others (e.g., Brown and Cooper 1990; Westmacott 1992), I have modi¤ed this position to one that allows for differential rates of change in aspects of African American culture and for the retention to the present day of Africanisms that can be identi¤ed archaeologically. Culture Change and Continuity at Yaughan and Curriboo The historical research conducted for Yaughan and Curriboo (Friedlander 1985; Wheaton et al. 1983) concluded that the initial populations of the workers’ settlements almost certainly had a signi¤cant number of Africans, as well as African Americans from South Carolina or the Caribbean. Only one, or possibly two, of the enslaved were Native Americans. The makeup of this population remained fairly stable during the eighteenth...

Share