The Archaeology of Slavery

Plantation sites, especially those in the southeastern United States, have long dominated the archaeological study of slavery. These antebellum estates, how­ever, are not representative of the range of geographic locations and time periods in which slaving has occurred. The Ar­chaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Ap­proach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia Wilson Marshall, investigates slavery in diverse settings and offers a broad framework for the interpretation of slaving.

Essays cover the potential material representations of slavery, slave own­ers’ strategies of coercion and enslaved people’s methods of resisting this co­ercion, and the legacies of slavery as confronted by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Among the peo­ples, sites, and periods examined are a late nineteenth-century Chinese laborer population in Carlin, Nevada; a castle slave habitation at San Domingo and a more elite trading center at nearby Juf­fure in the Gambia; two eighteenth-cen­tury plantations in Dominica; the Hueda Kingdom (Benin) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; plantations in Zan­zibar; and three fugitive slave sites on Mauritius—an underground lava tunnel, a mountain, and a karst cave.