Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'African American studies|Archaeology|African history'

The Great Dismal swamp straddles the North Carolina and Virginia state lines. From the seventeenth century until the Civil War this remote landscape became home to thousands of Maroons. These Maroon communities were comprised of runaway slaves, Native Americans and disenfranchised Europeans. The swamp was not only part of the passage for the Underground Rail Road (UGRR) but it was also a destination for individuals who lived on high ground and islands throughout the swamp. These self emancipated individuals developed complex modes of communitization. This dissertation uses a variety of theoretical perspectives, including agency theory, diaspora, and marronage to aluminate and understand the conditions and cultural transformations that took place over the course of several centuries and generations. The examination of these different communal groups will show that the each possessed and left behind different archaeological assemblages. Towards the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the outside world began to view the swamp as an exploitable resource and commodity. This led to increased forays by the outside world into the swamp and increased the possibility of contact with remote communities living on mesic islands deep in the swamp’s interior. As the outside world penetrated the interior of the Great Dismal Swamp it required the communities to adapt and transform. This dissertation will examine the cultural and communal transformations of a community that resisted contact with the outside world in response to loggers and canal laborers arriving in the deep interior of the swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study excavated The Crest of the nameless site during the 2009-2013 field seasons. These excavations ran in conjunction with American University’s Archaeological Field School. The excavations revealed a new architectural feature and artifact assemblage that represent a cultural transformation and the emergence of a new mode of communitization. These features and artifacts will be examined using a lens of agentive action to shed new insights into the Maroons who occupied a mesic island deep in the Great Dismal Swamp.

Stratford Hall Plantation’s Oval Site was once a dynamic 18th-century farm quarter that was home to an enslaved community and overseer charged with growing Virginia’s cash crop: tobacco. No documentary evidence references the site, leaving archaeology as the only means to reconstruct the lives of the site’s inhabitants. This research uses the results of a macrobotanical analysis conducted on soil samples taken from an overseer’s basement and a dual purpose slave quarter/kitchen cellar at the Oval Site to understand what the site’s residents were eating and how the acquisition, production, processing, provisioning, and consumption of food impacted their daily lives. The interactive nature of the overseer, enslaved community, and their respective botanical assemblages suggests that food was not only used as sustenance, it was also a medium for social interaction and mutual dependence between the two groups.

The botanical assemblage is also utilized to discuss how the consumption of provisioned, gathered, and produced foods illustrate the ways that Stratford’s enslaved inhabitants formed communities and exerted agency through food choice. A mixture of traditional African, European, and native/wild taxa were recovered from the site, revealing the varied cultural influences that affected the resident’s cuisine. The assemblage provides evidence for ways that the site’s enslaved Africans and African Americans adapted to the local environment, asserted individual and group food preferences, and created creolized African American identities as they sought to survive and persist in the oppressive plantation landscape.

The results from the Oval Site are compared to nine other 18th- and 19th-century plantation sites in Virginia to demonstrate how food was part of the cultural creolization process undergone by enslaved Africans and African Americans across the region. The comparison further shows that diverse, creolized food preferences developed by enslaved communities can be placed into a regional framework of foodways patterns. Analyzing the results on a regional scale acknowledges the influence of individual preferences and identities of different communities on their food choices, while still demonstrating how food was consistently both a mechanism and a product of African American community formation.

The Great Dismal Swamp, located in Virginia and North Carolina, was a landscape of resistance for enslaved Africans who fled to its interior maronnage settlements. But how did the enslaved workers who were forced to participate in the slavery-based capitalist economy find avenues to perform acts of resistance within these circumstances, and were they able to interact with or facilitate maroons and refugees escaping through the swamp? This research questions the role of material culture consumption as a form of resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp by exploring the historical and archaeological records of Dismal Town, Site 44SK70, and Jericho Ditch Work Camp, Site 44SK506, where enslaved men and women lived and worked during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The Dismal Swamp Company (1763-1814), headquartered at Dismal Town plantation along the Washington Ditch, was one of the first corporations to exploit the swamp’s natural resources. Its successor was the Dismal Swamp Land Company (1810-1871), headquartered at the sawmills at Jericho Town, with work camps spread throughout the swamp including the work camp on the Jericho Ditch. Opportunities for and tactics of resistance changed as the company changed its name and transitioned from a slave-owning, plantation-style labor system of agricultural production to a more industrialized, slave-leasing, task-based system of lumbering and shingle production. Because material culture plays a role in power-laden social relationships, the consumption and use of materials culture can constitute resistance on both an individual and collective level. This resistive consumption can take many forms, self-determination and persistence in expressions of cultural identity, or the ability to legally purchase freedom for one’s self or family with saved wages, or even the ability to supply and facilitate fugitives within the GDS through redistribution in an internal economy. This research will prove that resistance can be a pervasive, persistent, and hidden range of practices and tactics used by people in their everyday lives through the seemingly mundane choices of how to cook and serve food, prescribe medical treatments, and acquire clothing and personal items.

The Mount Gilead AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, perched on a mountain in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, has been a focal point of African American heritage in the area for over a hundred and seventy-five years. Though the second church building, dated to 1852, is still standing with its cemetery beside it, very little about its history has been thoroughly explored. Oral histories link the church with the Underground Railroad, a highly clandestine operation—yet the church itself was built of stone and advertized its location during the height of the movement of self-emancipated people out of the South. While it is said that this rural church community was made up of a hundred families who settled across the hillside, the cemetery itself only has 243 currently marked graves. The antebellum church hosted hundreds of people, black and white, at events held within walking distance of the rumored hideouts of those on the run from slavery. In order to determine the extent of this seemingly paradoxical relationship between secrecy and prominence, and to achieve a fuller understanding of the community during the 19 ^th century, the church's history is approached from several angles simultaneously. The cemetery itself is identified as a critical location where much can be learned about the composition, achievements, and struggles of the community. Combining archival research (primarily in the US Census, newspapers, and farm account books) with geographic information systems (GIS) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR), a sense of the size, occupations, and personal histories of the community are achieved, yielding a composite view of the general church population and its history between the 1820s and 1900.

The end of the Revolutionary War proved to be a significant moment in United States history. Not only did it signal the birth of a new nation, but it also affected the institution of slavery. Wartime rhetoric such as "All men are created equal," left the future of American slavery in doubt. Northern and mid-Atlantic states began to implement emancipation plans, and the question of what to do with free blacks became a pressing one. It soon became apparent that free blacks would not be given the same rights as white Americans, and the desire to have blacks removed from society began to increase. One proposed solution to this problem was the idea of sending free and manumitted slaves to Africa. A man by the name of John Brown Russwurm (1799–1851) would play a prominent role in the colonization movement, and his life and legacy reflect the controversy surrounding the idea of colonization.

This dissertation focuses on the artwork of J.B. Murray, an African American artist from Mitchell, Georgia. The goal of this dissertation is to explore J.B. Murray’s production of protective scripts and spirit figures. Murray created art works that served as the conduit for spiritual healing or protection between his God, his ancestral energies and the recipients or viewers of his work.

Protection through writing is both an Islamic and indigenous African tradition. Art Historians, after seeing Murray’s work, called it masterful art. It is my contention that Murray possessed knowledge that, unbeknownst to him or his ancestors, was passed along to him by his African ancestors. This knowledge is also seen in the work of other African and African American artists in this dissertation, which shows continuity across a wider group as opposed to just one artist.

Finally, a parallel is draw with African protector and healer, Serigne Bousso, from Touba, Senegal. Murray’s experience of visions and protective and healing work parallels the experience of Serigne Bousso within the last 30 years. This parallel is significant in making the connection between Murray, in Georgia, and the possible West African source for his knowledge of visions and protective signs.

This dissertation examines how poor black South African women in rural areas organize themselves to address their poverty situations and meet their practical needs – those that pertain to their responsibilities as grandmothers, mothers, and community members – and assesses their organizations' effectiveness for meeting women's goals. My research is based on two groups that are members of the South African Rural Women's Movement. They are the Sisonke Women's Club Group (SSWCG) and the Siyabonga Women's Club Group (SBWCG). A majority of these women are illiterate and were de jure or de facto heads of households. Based on interviews and participant observation, I describe and analyze the strategies that these women employ in an attempt to alleviate poverty, better their lives, and assist in the survival of their families, each other, and the most vulnerable members of their community. Their strategies involve organizing in groups to support each other's income-generating activities and to help each other in times of emergency. Their activities include making floor mats, beading, sewing, baking, and providing caregiving for members who are sick and for orphans. I conclude that, although their organizing helps meet practical needs based on their traditional roles as women, it has not contributed to meeting strategic needs – to their empowerment as citizens or as heads of households.