Old ways in new places? Experimenting with plants in the early plantation setting

ABSTRACT

Plants and foodways have long been recognized for their importance to the construction of identity and culture in plantation settings. Yet despite this focus on plants and foodways in plantation archaeology, there is a need for more archaeological documentation of the types of plants and fields being cultivated in newly formed plantations in the New World. We combine historical documentation with an assemblage of recovered plant remains from the Lord Ashley site (38DR83a) to examine plant use during the formative years of a plantation economy. A renewed focus on experimental cropping in the New World plantation system at this site, along with one of the most well documented enslaved African populations before the 1690s in South Carolina, point to the influence of cross-cultural entanglements in building New World agricultural systems. The recovery of watermelon, an African cultivar, found alongside an assemblage of artifacts and other archaeobotanical remains associated with the enslaved Africans at the site, also point to the role of first-generation Africans in establishing New World foodway traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Paleoethnobotany
• historical archaeology
• plantation archaeology
• enslaved African foodways
• plantation food systems
• South Carolina archaeology

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Historic Charleston Foundation, the Charleston Museum, WestRock (formerly MeadWestVaco), and the Branton family for making the Lord Ashley Project possible. We thank the College of Charleston and Salve Regina field schools and students. Additional analyses that greatly contributed to this project were conducted by Kandace Hollenbach of the University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology and John Jones of ACS, Ltd.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessie L. Johanson

Jessie L. Johanson is an adjunct professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution Studies at Nova Southeastern University. She specializes in southeastern archaeology and paleoethnobotany.

Andrew Agha

Andrew Agha is an archaeologist with New South Associates Inc. He specializes in archaeology and historical anthropology.