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.