Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Long Term Organizational Principles in Multi-Ethnic Contexts

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This project will undertake research to investigate how colonial structures and processes related to plantation agriculture were adopted and negotiated within an indigenous context. Though there exists a wide array of historical and archaeological scholarship on plantations and chattel slavery in the American South and Caribbean, there has been relatively little research on the numerous corresponding institutions that existed within Native American nations. Such indigenous contexts encapsulate many of the racial dynamics of 19th century America and provide a unique opportunity to study the malleability of the plantation system across national and cultural boundaries. Due to the dearth of historical documentation on indigenous plantations specifically and the daily lives of the enslaved everywhere, archaeology is particularly suited to such research. Broadly, the project will contribute to popular and academic discussions of the legacies of colonialism and race relations in American society. Locally, the project will include education and outreach through community interaction and volunteer opportunities at a publicly owned site and provide historical context for contemporary debates regarding Native American Freedmens status as tribal citizens. These local interactions allow the research team to engage with traditionally disenfranchised groups and shed light on the historical development of race relations in indigenous settings. The project is guided by one overarching question: How were plantations organized in Native contexts, and how was this different than that of those in Euro-America? To answer this, the research team will evaluate the spatial organization, internal social organization, and the organization of agricultural and industrial production at the George M. Murrell Home (also known as "Hunter's Home"), in Park Hill, Oklahoma, in the heart of post-Removal Cherokee country. The dissertation student, Travis Williams, will lead a team of archaeologists, zooarchaeologists, ethnobotanists, and soil chemists to illuminate the organization of Hunter's Home during the middle of the 19th century through a combination of archaeological data and relevant historical information from extant primary sources. A comparison of these data to the plethora of those from like plantations in Euro-America will reveal differences and similarities in land use, labor organization, consumer practices, and agricultural production at plantations within and outside Cherokee country. The investigators will produce an interdisciplinary dataset germane to comparative analyses for the broader academic community currently engaging with issues of the African Diaspora, Native Americans, and colonialism. The study will also contribute to a growing body of archaeological scholarship exploring the inadequacy of traditional dichotomous categories of colonialism (e.g., colonizer/colonized, continuity/change), as the residents of Hunter's Home moved through, manipulated, and managed both sides of such dichotomies.