~_o THE DIGGING STICK - The South African Archaeological Society

Communities of escaped
slaves in Jamaica and elsewhere
in the Caribbean,
known as Maroons, actively
resisted European domination
through the eighteenth century.
Resultant conflict,
Goucher argues, encouraged
the persistence of African metallurgical
skills for the production
of weapons and
implements of subsistence:
'the political basis of power
and resistance often depended
upon the support of armies of
blacksmiths on both sides of
the Atlantic'.
Agorsah's excavations at the
early eighteenth century Maroon
stronghold of Accompong
in Jamaica yielded th ree
cowrie shells. While ultimately
of Indian Ocean origin, such
shells, traded across the
continent, served as currency
in West Africa. They must in
tu rn have been carried across
the Atlantic, perhaps as parts
of ornaments, in the hands
either of slaves or their
masters. A dozen or so
cowries had been found
previously in excavations
at Seville, the first Spanish
settlement on the island.
In view of their prominence in
plantation hierarchies, it is
suggested that African blacksmiths
were instrumental also
in perpetuating elements in
the slave communities' ritual
and spiritual lives. The Yoruba
deity, Ogun, associated with
iron, in particular, has been
documented in Haiti, Cuba,
Brazil and Trinidad. In the
Caribbean today, African
roots are acknowledged in
many cultural manifestations:
religious beliefs and festivals,
dance, music, folk stories, language,
kinship and family,
and even resistance history.
Whereas in sites in the southern
United States reported
by Garrow, many of the more
conspicuously African elements
appeared to have been
vi rtually replaced th rough
stricter Euro-American control
The Digging Stick 11 (2)
from the end of the eighteenth
century, Goucher points to 'a
diverse range of dynamic
interactions' in the Caribbean,
'rather than [an] inevitable
decline of African-derived systems'.
While most published African
American archaeology in the
U.S. has been focused on
slavery and the pre-Civil War
period, two articles in the
Federal Archeology Report
describe research at sites of
much more recent date. In
Missouri many small hamlets
were established from the
1840s by escaped slaves and
free blacks and were occupied
for several generations
until they began to be aban-
"The popular vision of archaeology,
as an arcane and
esoteric pursuit, is still reinforced
in the U.S. by the fact
that it is not taught systematically
in schools"
doned in the early decades of
this century. A church, a
cemetery and sometimes a
school were pri"ncipal elements
in these communities
which varied from five to fifty
households in size. In a few
cases living links exist today
in the maintenance of
churches, and where some
people regularly drive long
distances to attend services.
These hamlets kept a low
profile in often hostile surroundings,
and some were
destroyed in racial conflict in
the late nineteenth century.
The project led by Craig M.
Sturdevant is as yet in its
infancy, but is addressing a
range of questions over the
rise and decline of these small
hamlets and generally about
this little known chapter in
Missouri history. Bastian and
Rutter, in another of the articles,
describe the study of a
1920s settlement of African
Americans in Iron County,
Michigan, where the archaeologists
found their dig
was contradicting other
sources of information, par-
10
ticularly contemporary newspaper
reports. These various
new perspectives on African
American history are forging
links between archaeology,
archival research and oral history
- and, especially for the
earlier periods, with many researchers
calling for the closer
archaeological investigation
of trans-Atlantic ties.
These projects have been instrumental
in increasing the
awareness and interest of
African Americans in archaeology.
Indeed the lack of
such interest in an historically
black college situation was
Sturdevant's raison d'etre for
getting his students out of the
classroom and into the field.
Warren Barbour, the first
African American archaeologist
in the United States,
explains how his family was
aghast at his becoming an archaeologist:
it was not one of
the traditional middle class
black professions that he was
expected to enter. The popular
vision of archaeology,
Barbour argues, as an arcane
and esoteric pursuit, is still
reinforced in the U.S. by the
fact that it is not taught systematically
in schools.
This very dearth of appreciation
by the public contributed
to the complex and at times
stormy confrontation that
arose in 1991-2 in Manhattan,
between government
agencies, archaeologists,
New York's African American
community - and ultimately
concerned citizens across the
States. The context was the
discovery of an eighteenth
century African burial ground
on a plot of land being prepared
for an office block.
Plans to proceed with its
excavation enraged the city's
African American community,
and it led to Congressional
hearings on the project. Many
in the community were
'adamant about not having
"research" performed on the
skeletal remains'. But the
ISSN 1013-7521