Sampling Many Pots

Autorentext

Laurie A. Wilkie is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Creating Freedom. Paul Farnsworth is associate professor of anthropology at Louisiana State University and the editor of Island Lives.

Klappentext
The enslaved population of Cliftion Plantation was an early 19th century cultural mC)lange including native Africans, island-born Creoles, and African-American slaves brought by the owners from the American South as part of the Loyalist resettlement. This study of the multi-ethnic African community expolores the diverse ways that memebers of this single plantation community navigated the circumstances of enslavement and negotiated the construction of New World identities within their families and with their neighbors. Focusing on the household and community levels of social integration at Cliftion Plantation, New Providence, Bahamas, from 1812 to 1833, this study employs a variety of evidence to reconstruct not only the structures and artifacts of the plantation but the identities and lives of the individuals who used them. Drawing upon archaeological evidence from a tightly controlled excavation of the site, historical data on the plantation, its owner, and the enslaved and free Africans and African Americans residing there, and ethnographic data from West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America, this volume provides a remarkably detailed picture of the lives of the plantation's enslaved and indentured residents. Utilizing the detailed contextual data, the authors are able to trace changes in the culture and identities of the individual residents over the two decades of their community's existence. In so doing, Wilkie and Farnsworth demonstrate jsut how much more can be understood about the lives of enslaved peoples in the New World through this kind of community study.

Zusammenfassung
The enslaved population of Clifton Plantation was an early 19th-century cultural mix including native Africans, island-born Creoles, and African-American slaves. This study of explores the diverse ways that members of this single plantation community navigated the circumstances of enslavement and negotiated the construction of New World identities.