I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life

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Theresa A. Singleton
University of Virginia Press, 1999 - 368 pages

The moral mission archaeology set in motion by black activists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to tell the story of Americans, particularly African Americans, forgotten by the written record. Today, the archaeological study of African-American life is no longer simply an effort to capture unrecorded aspects of black history or to exhume the heritage of a neglected community. Archaeologists now recognize that one cannot fully comprehend the European colonial experience in the Americas without understanding its African counterpart.

This collection of essays reflects and extends the broad spectrum of scholarship arising from this expanded definition of African-American archaeology, treating such issues as the analysis and representation of cultural identity, race, gender, and class; cultural interaction and change; relations of power and domination; and the sociopolitics of archaeological practice. "I, Too, Am America" expands African-American archaeology into an inclusive historical vision and identifies promising areas for future study.

 

Contents

West Africanist Reflections on AfricanAmerican Archaeology
21
Archaeology at Flowerdew Hundred
39
African Inspirations in a New World Art
47
Colonoware Pottery Chesapeake Pipes and Uncritical Assumptions
83
Marks
116
Africanist Perspectives on Diaspora Archaeology
132
The Social and Spatial Order
159
Free Artisans in the Monticello Community
193
Museums and American Slavery
240
Earliest Free AfricanAmerican Town in the United States
261
The Archaeology of TwentiethCentury
283
Artifacts Ethnicity and the Archaeology of African Americans
299
References
311
Contributors
351
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Page 311 - Advocate suing for their Admission into the Church : For a persuasive to the instructing and baptizing of the Negroes and Indians in our Plantations, To which is added a brief account of religion in Virginia.

About the author (1999)

Theresa A. Singleton is Curator in Historical Archaeology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University. She is the editor of The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, and has written numerous articles on African American archaeology.

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