Changing Social Relationships Between Plantation Owners and Their Laborers in the 17th-Century Chesapeake: Evidence from Tobacco Pipe Assemblages from 44PG92, Flowerdew Hundred
Beth Bollwerk and Fraser Neiman
Department of Archaeology, Monticello
Abstract: Enslaved Africans, indentured servants, and land-owning family members lived and worked together in close proximity at 44PG92, a mid- to late 17th-century occupation at Virginia’s Flowerdew Hundred. The artifact assemblages, carefully excavated by Dr. Ann Markell and cataloged into the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), contain a wide variety of domestic refuse, including thousands of imported and locally made tobacco pipes. Using detailed contextual and artifact data, we track how these pipes were used across the site and what these patterns can tell us about who used them. We begin by developing a fine-grained, seriation-based chronology, which allows us to measure synchronic spatial patterning and change over time in multiple dimensions of variation among pipe assemblages. We discuss how the results clarify the extent to which locally made pipes were predominantly used by enslaved and indentured laborers or by landowners.
Please join us for this presentation and Q&A. Light refreshments provided! The Brown Bag is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program.