Overview

DAACS’ influence on archaeological scholarship is evident in an accelerating stream of journal articles, monographs, and theses that feature DAACS and make use of the data that the DAACS website offers. DAACS data figure importantly in recent comparative work on change and variation in the architecture of houses and quartering areas for enslaved people (Samford 2007; Neiman 2008) and assemblage content (Heath and Breen 2009) in the Chesapeake. Scholars have used DAACS data to chart, for the first time, variation in the means and motives of enslaved people to participate in the wider consumer economy in the Chesapeake (Agbe-Davies 2017; Bloch and Agbe-Davies 2017; Galle 2006, 2010) and to discover and explain striking contrasts in patterns of consumption on domestic slaves sites in North American and Jamaica (Galle 2011, 2017).

Archaeologists have begun to use DAACS measurement protocols and data to provide a wider context necessary for understanding the uniqueness of archaeological patterns in their own data at the regional or site levels. Examples include studies of domestic sites occupied by enslaved Gullah peoples on the South Carolina Coast (Barnes and Steen 2012), enslaved agricultural laborers at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest Plantation in Virginia (Heath 2012), enslaved industrial workers at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation in Virginia (McVey 2011), middling tobacco planters in Virginia (Zevorich 2006), free townspeople in North Carolina (Gabriel 2012), and enslaved laborers on sugar plantations in Antigua (Rebovich 2011). Archaeological sites featured in DAACS have yielded insights into the social and economic dynamics behind the spatial organization of sugar plantations in Jamaica (Armstrong 2011; Bates 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) and the effects of plantation location and crops on market access for enslaved people (Reeves 2011). Furthermore, each year since 2006, a new crop of masters and doctoral students have contributed data to DAACS or engaged directly with existing DAACS data for their theses and dissertations. Links to these theses can be found here.

Some of the most innovative and compelling uses of DAACS data have come from historians, not archaeologists. Historians have used DAACS data to document surprisingly frequent access to firearms by enslaved people in North America (Morgan and O’Shaughnessy 2006). They also have mined DAACS for systematic evidence of literacy among enslaved populations in the form of writing slates and slate pencils (Bly 2008). DAACS also figures importantly in historians’ reflections on the ways in which archaeological data might advance their understanding of changing slave lifeways (Morgan 2006, 2011).

The list below provides citations for publications that discuss and analyze DAACS data. If you have published using DAACS data, we would love to know! Please contact the DAACS Project Director and we will add your publication to the growing list of research that engages with Archive data.

DAACS Citations

Agbe-Davies, Anna S.
2017     Where Tradition and Pragmatism Meet: African Diaspora Archaeology at the Crossroads. Historical Archaeology 51:9-27.

Agbe-Davies, Anna S., Jillian E. Galle, Mark W. Hauser, and Fraser D. Neiman
2013     Teaching with Digital Archaeological Data: A Research Archive in the University Classroom. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory DOI 10.1007/s10816-013-9178-3.

Armstrong, Douglas V.
2011     Rediscovering the African Jamaican Settlements at Seville Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay. Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser and Douglas V. Armstrong, pp. 77-101. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

Barnes, Jodi and Carl Steen
2012     Archaeology of the Gullah Past. South Carolina Antiquities, Volume 44: 86-95.

Bates, Lynsey A.
2007     Surveillance and Production on Stewart Castle Estate: A GIS-base Analysis of Models of Plantation Spatial Organization. B.A. Honors Thesis with Highest Distinction, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.

2014     “The Landscape Cannot Be Said to Be Really Perfect”: A Comparative Investigation of Plantation Spatial Organization on Two British Colonial Sugar Estates. In The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, Lydia W. Marshall, editor, pp. 116-142. Carbondale, Illinois: Center for Archaeological Investigations, SIU Occasional Paper #41.

2015     Surplus and Access: Provisioning and Market Participation by Enslaved Laborers on Jamaican Sugar Estates. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.

2016     Provisioning and Marketing: Surplus and Access on Jamaican Sugar Estates. In Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in Between, Lynsey A. Bates, John M. Chenoweth, and James A. Delle, editors, pp. 79-110. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.

2017     Exploring Enslaved Laborers’ Ceramic Investment and Market Access in Jamaica. In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity. Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee, editors, pp. 192-213. Routledge, London.

Bloch, Lindsay and Anna S. Agbe-Davies
2017     “With sundry other sorts of small ware too tedious to mention”: Petty consumerism on U.S. plantations. In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity. Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee, editors, pp. 119-140. Routledge, London.

Bly, Antonio T.
2008     “Pretends he can read”: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730 – 1776. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(2), 261-294.

Gabriel, Jennifer L.
2012     New Data, Old Methods: A Functional Analysis of Colonial Era Structures on the “Wooten Marnan Lot” at Brunswick Town, North Carolina. Master’s Thesis, Department of Anthropology, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.

Galle, Jillian E.
2006     Strategic consumption: Archaeological Evidence for Costly Signaling Among Enslaved Men and Women in the 18th-century Chesapeake. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.

2010     Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the 18th-Century Chesapeake. American Antiquity 75(1):19-43.

2011     Assessing the Impacts of Time, Agricultural Cycles and Demography on the Consumer Activities of Enslaved Men and Women in 18th-Century Jamaica and Virginia. In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong, editors, pp. 211-242. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.

2017     The Abundance Index: Measuring Variation in Consumer Behavior in the Early Modern Atlantic World. In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee, editors, pp. 162-191. Routledge, London.

Gonzalez-Tennant, Edward
2011     Archaeological research and public knowledge: New media methods for public archaeology in Rosewood, Florida. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.

Heath, Barbara J.
2012     Slave Housing, Household Formation and Community Dynamics at Poplar Forest, 1760s-1810s. In Jefferson’s Poplar Forest: Unearthing a Virginia Plantation, Barbara J. Heath and Jack Gary, editors, pp. 105–128. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

Heath, Barbara J. and Eleanor Breen
2009     “Assessing Variability among Quartering Sites in Virginia,” Northeast Historical Archaeology Vol. 38, Article 1. Available at http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/neha/vol38/iss1/1

Little, Barbara. J.
2007     What are we learning? Who are we serving? Publicly funded historical archaeology and public scholarship. Historical Archaeology 41(2):72-79.

McVey, Shannon L.
2011     A House But Not A Home? Measuring “Householdness” in the Daily Lives of Monticello’s “Nail Boys.” Master’s Thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

Morgan, Philip D.
2006     Archaeology and History in the Study of African-Americans. In African Re-Genesis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora, Jay B. Haviser and Kevin C. MacDonald, editors, pp. 53-61. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

2011     The Future of Chesapeake Studies. In Early Modern Virginia, Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, editors, pp. 300-333. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA.

Morgan, Philip. D. and Andrew. J. O’Shaughnessy
2006     Arming Slaves in the American Revolution. In Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, editors, pp. 180-208. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

Neiman, Fraser D.
2008     The Lost World of Monticello in Evolutionary Perspective. Journal of Anthropological Research 64:161–193.

Rebovich, Samantha A.
2011     Landscape, Labor, and Practice: Slavery and Freedom at Green Castle Estate, Antigua. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, NY. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.

Reeves, Matthew
2011     Household Market Activities among Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Slaves: An Archaeological Cast Study from Two Slave Settlements. In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong, editors, pp. 183-210. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL.

Richards, Julian D.
2008     Internet, Archaeology on. In The Encyclopedia of Archaeology , pp. 1526-1529. Academic Press, New York, NY.

Samford, Patricia
2007     Subfloor Pits, and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL.

Singleton, Theresa A.
2010     African Diaspora in Archaeology. In The African Diaspora and the Disciplines, Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet, editors, pp. 119-141. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.

Zevorich, Lisa M.
2006     Ceramic Analysis of a Middling European American Planter Site in Virginia Using the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology 22: 91-102.