Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T14:50:47.042Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Hidden in view: African spiritual spaces in North American landscapes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Timothy Ruppel ,
Jessica Neuwirth ,
Mark P. Leone  and
Gladys-Marie Fry
Timothy Ruppel
Affiliation:
Department of English, Howard University, (Email: TRu3923848@aol.com)
Jessica Neuwirth
Affiliation:
Archaeology in Annapolis Project/Historic Deerfield
Mark P. Leone
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, (*Email: mleone@anth.umd.edu)
Gladys-Marie Fry
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Maryland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How did enslaved African people in North America use material culture to create and signal their own identity? In a paper that has much significance for many other periods and places, the authors draw on archaeological and documentary evidence to show how African spiritual spaces were created in houses and gardens in the form of coded landscapes that were often hidden – though in view.

Keywords

North Americahistorical archaeologylandscapesslaveryreligion
Type
Research
Information
Antiquity , Volume 77 , Issue 296 , June 2003 , pp. 321 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BROWN, KENNETH, L. & DOREEN, C. COOPER, .1990. Structural Continuity in an African American Slave and Tenant Community. Historical Archaeology 24: 7—19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK, .1986.Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
FERGUSON, LELAND, .1992.Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650—1800.Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
FERGUSON, LELAND, .—1999. ‘The Cross Is A Magic Sign.’ Marks on Eighteenth-Century Bowls in South Carolina. In Singleton:. 116—31.Google Scholar
FRY, GLADYS-MARIE, .2002.Stitched form the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: university of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
GOMEZ, MICHAEL, A. 1998.Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: university of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
GUNDAKER, GREY, . 1988a. Signs of Diaspora/Diaspora of Signs: Literacies, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America. New York: Oxford university Press.Google Scholar
GUNDAKER, GREY, .—1993. ‘Tradition and Innovation in African American Yards’. African Arts XXVI: 58—71, 94—96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HARMON, JAMES, .2000.Archaeologival Investigations at the James Brice House (18AP38), A National Historic Landmark Site: 42 East Street, City of Annapolis, Ann Arundel County, Maryland. Annappolis: Historic Annapolis Foundation.Google Scholar
HERRON, LEONARA, & ALICE, BACON, M..1895.Conjuring and Conjure-Doctors. Southern Workman. 24: 117—18; 193—94; 209—11.Google Scholar
HOLLOWAY, JOSEPH, E., ed.1991.Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
HOWSON, JEAN, E. 1990. Social Relations and Material Culture: A Critique of the Archaeology of Plantation Slavery. Historical Archaeology 24 (3): 78—91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HUDSON, LARRY, E., JR. 1997.To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE, .1931. Hoodoo in America. Journal of American Folk-Lore. 44: 317—417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
JACKSON, BRUCE, , ed.1967.The Negro and His Folklore in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
LEONE, M.P & GLADYS-MARIE FRY, .1999. Conjuring in the Big House Kitchen: An Interpretation of African American Belief Systems based on the Uses of Archaeology and Folklore Sources. Journal of American Folklore 112 (445) 372—03.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LEONE, MP & GLADYS-MARIE FRY, , with assistance from TIM RUPPEL, .2001. Spirit Management among Americans of African Descent. In Race and the Archaeology of Identity. Charles E Orser, Jr, ed: 143—157. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.Google Scholar
LEVINE, LAWRENCE, W. 1978.Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
LITTLE, BARBARA, , ed.1992.Text-Aided Archaeology. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar
MCDONALD, RODERICK, A. 1993.The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
MORGAN, PHILIP, D. 1982. Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700—1880. William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Series, XXXIX: 563—599.Google Scholar
MORGAN, PHILIP, D.—1998. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
MULLEN, MICHAEL, M. 1994.Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736—1831. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
ORSER, CHARLES, .1988.‘The Archaeological Analysis of Plantation Society: Replacing Status and Class with Economics and Power.’ American Antiquity 53: 735—751.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OTTO, JOHN, S. 1980.‘Race and Status at Canons Point plantation.’ Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America: Afro-American and Asian American Cultural History Robert L. Schuyler (ed.) New York: Baywood Publishing Company.Google Scholar
PATTERSON, ORLANDO, .1982.Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
PERDUE, CHARLES, L., JR., THOMAS, , BARDEN, E. & ROBERT, PHILLIPS, K..1976.Weevils in the Wheat. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
PRICE, RICHARD, .1990.Alabi’s World. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
PRICE, RICHARD, , & SALLY PRICE, .1999.Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
PUCKETT, NEWBELL NILES, .1969.The Magic and Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. New York: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
RABOTEAU, ALBERT, J. 1978.Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
RAWICK, GEORGE, , ed.1972.The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Volumes 1—19. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
RAWICK, GEORGE, , ed.—1977. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement, Series 1.Volumes 1—12. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
RAWICK, GEORGE, , ed.—1979. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement, Series 2.Volumes 1—10. Westport: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
ROBERTS, JOHN, W. 1990.From Trickster to Bad Man: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
SCHUYLER, , ROBERT, L..1980.Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America, New York: Baywood Publishing Company, Inc.Google Scholar
SCHWENINGER, LOREN, .1992.Slave Independence and Enterprise in South Carolina, 1780—1865. South Carolina Historical Magazine 93: 101—125.Google Scholar
SCOTT, JAMES, C. 1990.Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
STAPLES, & BRENT, .2001.To be a slave in Brooklyn. New York Times magazine. 24 June 2001.Google Scholar
SINGLETON, TERESA, A., ed.1999.I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life. Charlottesvile: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
SMITH, THEOPHUS, H. 1994.Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STAMPP, KENNETH, M. 1956.Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
STEINER, ROLAND, .1901. Observations on the Practice of Conjuring in Georgia. Journal of American Folk- Lore. 14: 173—180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
STUCKEY, STERLING, .1987.Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
THOMPSON, ROBERT FARRIS, .1983.Flash of the Spririt: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
THOMPSON, ROBERT FARRIS, .—1991. Kongo Influence on African American Artistic Culture. Holloway: 148—184. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
TOBIN, JACQUELIN, L., & RAYMOND, G DOBARD. 2000. Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. New York: Anchor.Google Scholar
WOOD, BETTY, .1995.Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar