Archaeological
Approaches
to
Atlantic
Slavery

Anthropology 394/794 Place:Cabell 210
University of Virginia Monday:4:30-7:00
Spring 2008 Fraser D.Neiman

Description
This course explores how archaeological evidence can be used to enhance our understanding of the slave-based societies that evolved in the early-modern Atlantic world from the 17th through early-19th centuries. We will focus on the Cheapeake, South Carolina, and Jamaica. The course covers recent contributions to the historical and archaeological literatures on the lives of enslaved people, as well as theoretical models of human behavior and basic techniques in archaeological data analysis that jointly are required to make and evaluate inferences about the meaning of archaeological evidence.

The course is structured around a series of research projects that offer students the opportunity to use historical knowledge, theoretical grounding, and methodological skills in the analysis of real data from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org). In each project, you will have an opportunity to make and critically evaluate inferences about the historical meaning of the archaeological record left behind by enslaved Africans and their descendents. The projects focus on the following issues:
  • How can we infer reliable, fine-grained archaeological chronologies that are necessary to trace patterns of change in lifeways of enslaved people within a single sites and at multiple sites?
  • What do patterns of change across the 18th century and regional variation in slave houses and in the abundance and morphology subfloor pits tell us about social dynamics within slave communities?
  • Do changing frequencies and shapes of locally made and imported ceramic vessels document changing social identities, economic opportunties, and participation by enslaved people in the 18th-century "consumer revolution"?
The class format combines lectures, discussion, and computer workshops. Pre-requisite: prior coursework in archaeology.

Class Email List
Use the class email list to send email to other class members. You also have access to a log of previous emails.

Course Schedule and Reading List
* The schedule and readling list for the course are available here.

All required reading will be available on Toolkit

We will be reading significant chunks of the following books, which you may want to purchase:
Davis, David, Brion
2006 Inhuman Bondage, The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford, New York.
Drennan, Robert
1996 Statistics for Archaeologists, A Common-Sense Approach Plenum, New York.
Morgan, Philip D.
1998 Slave Counterpoint, Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. , UNC Press, Chapel Hill.
Ferguson, Leland
1992 Uncommon Ground, Archaeology and Early Africa America,1650-1800.Smithsonian, Washington DC.

Requirements
Written work for the course consists of the three class projects. The class projects are due at the beginning of class on the day specified in the Course Schedule. I will deduct one letter grade for each day your project is late, unless it is accompanied by a letter from your physician or association dean attesting to your physical incapacity. Plan your work accordingly.

Each student is responsible for one presentation in which he or she shares the results of one of the projects with the class. We will divide the projects up on the first day of class. Presentations should be 20-30 minutes in length.

Doing well on the class projects requires integrating archaeological data with theoretical ideas, analytical techniques, and historical information from the reading and lectures. There is no way you will be able to be able to grasp the ideas, learn the techniques, digest the history, do the analysis, and write it all up in the week before the project is due. My advice: do not miss any classes; come to class having mastered the reading for that week; if you do not understand something in class, ask immediately.

To encourage all those great outcomes, there is one final requirement. At the beginning of each class, we'll play the archaeologist's version of Wait,Wait Don't Tell Me. Here's how it works. On the first day, I will randomly assign you to one of three teams. During the week you will work together with other members of your team to come up with questions about that week's readings. You will also come up with short answers to each of the questions. Your questions should be designed to illuminate critical arguments and major themes in the reading. Each team member must contribute one question and its answer. You will NOT share your questions or the answers with the other teams. Each team will submit its questions and the answers in writing to me via email by Monday 12:00 noon. You will identify the author of each question when you submit the questions. Well designate a "team captain" each week to take this on. During class, members of your team will ask their questions to the other two teams. I'll score the answers. At the end of Wait, Wait , the team with the highest total score will win a fabulous prize -- suggestions welcome here!! Each game will figure into your grade as follows. I'll grade your written question, your written answer to it, your performance during the game, and the overall quality of your team's questions. This last component means that you have some interest in being a team player and helping your fellow team members come up with good questions. We will reshuffle team membership every three weeks.

Honor Policy
Students in this class are expected to adhere to the College's and University's honor policies. I reserve the right to determine grades, independent of the outcome of any honor investigation.

Evaluation
Three written class projects: 24% each; one project presentation: 10%; Wait,Wait: 18%.

Datasets
Handouts Projects
    Comming soon....
Software Tools
  • Excel Tutorial
    Excel skills a bit rusty? Try this tutorial.
  • Scatterplot Labels for Excel
    An Excel Add-In that allows you to label scatterplots (something that Lotus-123 could do in 1982, but Excel cannot, 20 years later). Download to a folder on your hard drive, double click the self-extracting archive label_97.exe . Checkout readme.doc for further instructions.
  • Frequency-Seriation Diagrams
    An Excel spreadsheet with VBA code by Bill Hunt that draws frequency-seriation diagrams a la Jim Ford.
  • Biplot Tool
    Excel Add-In that does --among other things-- correspondence analysis. VBA code by Ilya Lipkovich and Eric P. Smith at Virginia Tech. Create a folder on your hard drive and extract the contents of the biplot_final.zip file to this folder -- you will need a copy of WinZip for this. Then check out Readme.doc for further instructions.
  • Exact Binomial Confidence Limits in Excel

Last update... 28 January 2008