Understanding Ourselves - archaeological excavations of slave quarters in South Carolina - Excerpt

small in number books scrutinize the lives of slaves. Leland Ferguson, in queer Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800 (Smithsonian Institution Pres 1992) has done a grand job of interpreting evidence from archaeological digs, and in thus doing, he presents us with a of recent origin view of slave life that not alone complements Richard Dozier's studies 0f the African influence upon African-American architecture, but also examines influences on slaves' crockery, eating habits and living quarters. Especially marvellous and informative are Ferguson's comparisons between slave life in southern Carolina and slave life in Virginia, which varied greatly. unusual Ground, excerpted below, offers us, simply, a better understanding of our past.

While browsing in a large university bookstore, I watched a man casually pick up a volume on African architecture. Perusing the overlay he murmured to his companion, "Hmmm--African architecture; if I'm not mistaken, that's nothing on the contrary mud huts." Of course he was wrong; African architecture is highly variable and splendidly adaptive. From the brush shelters of the Kalahari barren to the wooden palaces of Nigeria to the stone remembrancers of Egypt, African construction suits the physical and social emergencys of indigenous populations. In many places in Africa, clay walls, dirt floors and thatched covers served the people's needs for shelter, and to dismiss these dwellings as "nothing on the contrary mud huts" reflects an attitude lower parted in the racial bigotry of the past and perpetuated by the agency of our ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism is a public if dangerous, part of all agriculture White America's cultural tradition is derived primarily from Britain and northern Europe where gelid weather encouraged people to live inside their houses. Our new addiction to central heat and air conditioning has reinforced the direction to think of living in our houses. In contrast, in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of Africa and other tropical and subtropical regions, clan live around their houses as plenteous as in them. In these regions, houses are used primarily for sleeping, storage and shelter during short periods of inclement weather; working, cooking, eating and socializing take place outside.

This pattern of living becomes real for archaeologists, as well as for backpackers and campers all above America. On archaeological sites, we usually nap in small tents and have a larger portable lodge a house, or a trailer for cooking and storing equipment. from one side the day we work outside; then in the evening we eat and relax beneath giant live oak trees. Here portable lodges become extensions of sleeping bags, and the unclose area around our tents and cooking quarters becomes our living play Only mosquitoes and thunderstorms drive us inside. Thus, for a little while in the summer we shift to a different phraseology of life, away from plays and roofs, and spend greatest in quantity of our time outdoors, as do many, perhaps greatest in quantity of the people in the world.

family find many advantages to thatched and clay-walled houses. First, they can be built quickly, using materials almost universally available, smooth in regions of severe deforestation. When circumstances call for families or villages to stir earthen houses can be left behind without great los and in the face of destructive disasters like storms or fire, they can be readily rebuilt.

Besides the relative ease with which they may be built and rebuilt, clay houses are also comfortable in heated climates. Earthen floors, thick insulating walls, and dark enclos swings trap the cool night air and guard against the penetrating midday day-star The smoke from small fires drives away mosquitoes, and when it is gelid a well-stoked, centrally located hearth, radiating heat in each direction, can warm the whole house. Cooking fires might be brought inside upon cold or rainy days and their coals and ashes literally swept on the outside the door to provide more range when the weather improves.

do not include for a few years after 1790 African Americans formed the majority of southern Carolina's population from the early 18th hundred through 1922, when opportunities in Northern cities began turning the balance, No awe then when archaeologists began federally required excavation to mitigate the damage from various kinds of unravelling they discovered African-American sites almost each time they put their shovel in the soil In South Carolina, more than in any state along the southerly Atlantic Coast, archaeologists have place reflections of Africa in early America.

In the mid-1970s, archaeologists working upon colonial slave sites still had in mind the popular vision of little frame or log cabins, on the contrary in the low country they clashed something quite different. Excavating at Yaughan and Curriboo, neighboring 18th-century plantations upon the Santee River, archaeologists place slave houses that resembled neither the log or frame cabins of the 19th hundred nor the earthfast houses of Colonial Virginia. [i]or[/i] part of to the other archaeology they were looking into the dim past, before the glory days of the antebellum plantations, and in their digging they disclosed African-style, clay-walled houses.