Community Development and Cultural Creolization Through Food: The Oval Site at Stratford Hall Plantation

ABSTRACT

The once-dynamic Oval Site at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, is a prime example of how the history of an enslaved community can be lost to time. As an eighteenth-century farm quarter that housed both an overseer and enslaved individuals, the undocumented space was a location of constant cultural interaction and negotiation that, without archaeology, would have remained unknown. An archaeobotanical analysis conducted on plant remains recovered from the site demonstrates how enslaved Africans and African Americans on the site acquired and consumed food, and interacted with the site overseer and slave owners. Identified botanical material suggests that food was both a mechanism and a product of community development, identity formation, and agency assertion. The botanical assemblage further illuminates the multitude of influences and experiences that went into forming new, creolized African American foodways.

KEYWORDS:

• Foodways
• creolization
• African American
• Chesapeake
• plantation
• archaeobotany
• paleoethnobotany
• community formation

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of Heather Trigg, Doug Sanford, Nedra Lee, and Andrew Wilkins with my master’s thesis, which was the foundation of this paper. My analysis builds on a broad body of work on cooking and foodways in enslaved communities throughout the broader Chesapeake and Mid-Atlantic region, and would not have been possible without the scholarship of Maria Franklin, Steve Mrozowski, Leslie Hunt, Barbara Heath, Justine McKnight, Leslie Raymer, Jessica Bowes, and Samantha Henderson. I would also like to thank the journal editor and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback, which greatly improved this paper.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexandra Crowder

Alexandra Crowder is a historical archaeologist and archaeobotanical specialist working in cultural resource management. Her research interests include foodways, African Diaspora archaeology, environmental reconstruction, and urban archaeology.