Comments on
"Perspectives on the Evolution of African American
Culture: The Historical Archaeology of the Tenant
Community at the Levi Jordan Plantation"
by Maria Franklin. Delivered at SHA Conference 1998,
Atlanta, GA.
I would first like to thank the chairs, Ken Brown and
Carol McDavid, for inviting me to participate in this
session. Like many of you I have followed the Levi Jordan
plantation project with great interest, and with not just
a little bit of artifact envy. This site really has it
all, great temporal depth, undisturbed floors, good
historical sources, and of course, lots of really cool
stuff!
This session represents an ambitious undertaking in
pulling together all aspects of this twelve-year
intensive study. Ken and Carol are also to be commended
for not taking the easy way out in coming up with a
session theme. The unifying theme could easily have been
the archaeology of Levi Jordan plantation, but they set
their objectives much higher, and state in their abstract
that the common thread for these papers would be the use
of a postprocessual contextual methodology that is
multidisciplinary to boot. And our critics say there's no
rigorous theorizing in African American archaeology.
Still, the difficulty arises in actually implementing
methodology, and in bringing data and theory together to
arrive at new, relevant, and hopefully interesting
insights into past cultures. In preparing my comments
then, that's what I mostly looked for.
Rebecca Barrera's goal was
to look at social relations between blacks and whites,
and how they changed over time from the period of slavery
to emancipation and tenancy. Here is what I felt was the
strength of her paper, in that she was attempting to
consider how structures of oppression operated at Levi
Jordan over time. She relied heavily on the
archaeological record to interpret building use and
disuse and changes in the landscape, and I was impressed
with the detailed field analysis and interpretation of
the site formation processes. Rebecca did a wonderful job
in delineating how spatial and architectural features
shifted over time to indicate a shift in social relations
between blacks and whites in moving from slavery to
tenancy. Rebecca also looked to see if there were any
differences in socio-economic status between
slave/tenants and planter. I for one was hardly surprised
when she found them. I would encourage her to forego the
status differentiation stuff a la John Otto, and stick
with the more intriguing and useful interpretations
regarding the shift in race relations.
Mary K. Barnes essentially
had one goal, and that was to figure out why at least
nine cabins were abandoned around 1887. I'd say she was
successful. If I were a black tenant, living as Mary put
it in an "economic atmosphere that was tenuous and
oppressive," plus had to deal with those unruly
landowners, the Martin boys, I'd have left in a hurry
too. But I'd hate to think that she did all of this
archival research for just this reason. I think Mary and
Rebecca should work on something together, and really try
to synthesize the historical and archaeological evidence
in order to better understand black/white social
relationships during the tenancy period. I have a
suggested starting point for them also, something they
both mention in their papers, but apparently disagree
upon. Did paternalism, an ideology practiced widely by
whites during slavery, play a role in how whites treated
blacks any time after emancipation? Mary suggests that
the "paternal management of the farm" made life
rough for blacks, while Rebecca suggests that paternalism
was non-existent during this same period. I think that if
you work on this question, you may be able to start to
better unravel the mindset of whites as they scrambled to
maintain some control over blacks, and in turn, how
blacks responded.
Robert Harris focused on
the evidence for the craft specialization of carving on the plantation, and
tried to determine whether one particular cabin might
have been the dwelling/work space of the carver. He
clearly thought through every argument that a pessimist
might throw at him, and I believe he stands on firm
ground with his final interpretation that the carver's
cabin has been identified. Now on to his interpretations
regarding the role that this person played within this
community. Robert begins by asking why a carver would be
needed by these people. Maybe they didn't need him; maybe
the carver just needed to carve. But I prefer Robert's
interpretation that this individual, along with others,
provided material items which served to unify this
community. I think he is right on in stating that this
activity was a cultural strategy with resistive aspects.
But I'm curious about how these crafts and their
producers influenced the internal relationships within
the black community, but not just in their
"positive" manifestations. This whole communal,
warm fuzzy feeling crops up several times in this
session, and I'm wondering about jealousy, envy and other
emotions which surely wreaked havoc from time to time
within this neighborhood. For example, was there a
hierarchy, and how were craftspeople ranked? The
archaeological evidence suggests that there was
differential access to the carver's products; what might
that mean?
Jorge Garcia-Herreros
focused on the munitions-maker's
cabin, and attempted to define his role within his
community. He is absolutely right, again, that this
community would've had to pull together for strength, and
he makes the important observation that self-sufficiency
would have been crucial in order to meet their basic
needs, and in establishing independence from whites.
Jorge argues that the munitions maker would have been the
more important specialist providing not only the means to
procure game, but also for providing the means to
protect. Here is where I would have to disagree on why
this individual was important. First, you don't need
firearms to hunt; a good hound dog and a big stick will
get you a possum, or you could fish for that protein.
Second, I would de-emphasize the importance of firepower
as a means of protection, especially from whites. By the
time a crisis would reach the point where a black would
actually raise a gun to a white, he'd have to shoot the
person, because just threatening a white would mean
certain death, so I think that would have been a
desperate, last ditch effort at protection. The hunting
activity that Jorge discusses might be the best line of
evidence to follow, however. Skilled hunters were held in
high esteem within black communities during enslavement,
and probably afterwards also. Could this munitions maker
also be a hunter who may have bartered his game to his
neighbors? If this was so, perhaps his primary role
within the community was as a hunter who also made
munitions (for himself and others).
Ken and Kris's paper focused
on the now very well-known conjurer/midwife residence,
and what is the newly interpreted
Praise House, which is sure to also stir up some
debate and dialogue. They begin by advocating a
contextual approach to the interpretation of ritual
artifacts. In doing so, they critique other studies of
ritual artifacts as uncritical interpretations where
context is given no consideration. Here I believe they
are a bit harsh on their colleagues. Context is of course
important, but if one finds a raccoon penis bone that is
grooved on one end, facilitating its stringing and
wearing, I think we can forgive the fact that it was
found in the backfill of a root cellar. To use another
one of their examples, pierced coins. Dozens of oral
accounts speak of their use as luck charms, and recent
excavations of a black cemetery in Texas revealed a dozen
bodies with pierced silver coins on the breast plate or
by the ankle. Again, even if these artifacts were
discovered in a trash midden on a site associated with
blacks, I'd still say that they likely served some ritual
purpose. Re-use and reinterpretation of everyday objects,
often indicated on individual artifacts by piercing,
notching, shaping, and incising, can be as important a
sign of ritual use as context. Though I do agree that the
blue bead thing has gotten a bit out of hand.
I've always been very intrigued with the findings
within the conjurer's cabin, and it's clear that Kris and
Ken put a lot of thought into their interpretations and
aren't just seeing these things because they want to.
Unlike most of us. For the first
time that I'm aware, they see practices associated not
only with the BaKongo, but with the Yoruba also, and yes,
I too see the connection between the iron kettle and its
contents and the orisha Ogun, the god of war in the
Yoruba pantheon. I'm just wondering when Christianity
is going to figure into this. I would have thought that
with the discovery of a crucifix within a praise
house/church, that a discussion of Christianity would
follow, but the "C" word isn't even
mentioned.[although it is on this web site; see Ken Brown Interview].Especially
seeing as how the conjurer may have also been a founding
member of Grace Methodist Church.
I see great potential here for discovering how black
American religiosity transformed over time, especially
after slavery, but they will have to move beyond merely
looking for the roots of black spirituality and towards
theorizing about cultural process.
I really liked David Bruner's
idea of how blacks may have used, as he puts it,
"cemetery landscapes as arenas for resistance."
I largely agreed with his final interpretation, that
slaves and tenants used cemetery features and artifacts
as "symbols of community solidarity", and yes,
this probably was oppositional to white American beliefs
and practices. I did, however, have a hard time with the
way in which he arrived at his conclusions by employing a
trait-seeking technique where there was a list for white
burial traditions and one for black burial traditions,
but clearly the Jordan plantation community's culture had
transformed because they borrowed some of each. This is
highly reminiscent of the acculturation models we all
like to critique that basically reduces culture to
traits, and where the end result is a static view of
culture where people merely gained some new behaviors,
and lost some old ones. Also, although this is supposed
to be a post-processual session, there are some
un-post-processual moments in this paper. Part of one
sentence reads, "inductively generated model that
requires further testing." I'm sure Lew Binford
would be proud, though I doubt that was the intent. In
the end, I think that there are some solid ideas here
based on sound analogies, and a thorough understanding of
how objects can be imbued with multiple layers of
meaning. I do want to point though, that the railroad
equipment and pipes did not seem to me to be an attempt
by blacks to use items that whites would not have
associated with black identity. Consider the context:
these items were driven into burial plots. I don't think
blacks were trying to mask anything here. It may seem
like I'm picking on David's paper the most, but in fact I
thoroughly enjoyed his paper and learned a lot. I think
he took the most difficult road by trying to concentrate
on deriving meaning from these artifacts, and by really
going for some interesting interpretations. I look
forward to seeing more on this.
Carol McDavid's web project
I think is truly ground-breaking, because it's not simply
an archaeology web site, but one which employs a critical
approach where archaeological knowledge claims are
decentered, and where interaction is greatly encouraged.
It goes without saying that this is a very challenging
project when we just consider the work involved in laying
out a web site that covers 12 years of archaeological
research where hundreds of thousands of artifacts were
recovered spanning some 150 years. But on top of this,
Carol wants the web site to be reflexive, multivocal,
contextual and interactive. I'm glad she's going for it.
Read: I'm glad it's not me!
This web site, although it's in preliminary stages, is
great, and I highly encourage you all to visit it. I only
have one piece of advice with regard to some of your
possible additions. You mention "hypertext may be
able to replicate the archaeologist's own thought
process" enabling a site visitor to follow it. I
don't think the public's ready for that! Anyone who knows
Carol and how she is about her work knows that she's very
detail-oriented, which can be great with something like
this, but it can also be a curse if you try to please
everyone and attempt to cover every angle, no matter how
reflexive you want to be. The bottom line is, this web
site will be a trend-setting, great success.
Concluding Remarks
To conclude, I thought the session as a whole really
came together along the lines of a contextual
methodology, and a multidisciplinary approach. There was
a lot of new material, and as usual, there's now a lot
more provocative questions to address. There is clearly a
strong commitment to this project, after all they were
digging up until New Year's eve, and I know that just as
important as the archaeology, that this group is very
much committed to doing the right thing when it comes to
public outreach and involvement. As Ken stated in his
introductory comments, one of the goals of this project
was not to attempt a telling of the only story possible,
but to begin an important dialog with all of our help
that might sharpen the analysis. I for one hope to
participate in that dialog.
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