The Millars Plantation on Eleuthera, Bahamas was first established in 1803 as a cotton plantation and remained in operation through the 1830s. After emancipation, the formerly enslaved community continued to live on and work the plantation acreage and surrounding areas, until 1871 when Ann Millar formally left the 2000 acre‐property to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, despite a series of legal challenges by Bahamian and foreign investors who seek to develop new tourism‐based economies in the area. In the process of documenting the historical landscape of the Millars Plantation through oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and landscape survey, the research revealed ways that residents today have materialized memory—piecing together object, story, and space—on a living landscape that has too often been framed as empty or relegated to the past. This chapter investigates the ways in which memory becomes rooted in the materiality of the South Eleuthera landscape. When read side‐by‐side, the archaeological and contemporary social stratigraphy of South Eleuthera illustrate this historical landscape's ongoing site formation and the ways in which community members use the memoryscape as a tool for community building and local advocacy.

This chapter opens an analytic space to consider the resonance of “old places” in the contemporary moment through the lens of archaeology. Borrowing the term used by some of our interlocutors, old places are places that bear memory, that have accrued emotional attachment, and that intervene in the present as reminders of things that have happened before. Through these qualities, old places sustain life and relations. We adopt an expansive view of site formation processes that extends into the present and future and argue that studying contemporary site formation can unleash insights into the multi‐temporal constitution of the world we inhabit. We do not insist on a single approach to studying these processes, but rather suggest that the methodological and theoretical diversity that archaeologists and local communities bring together is key to studying and knowing old places in the present. We draw connections between a contemporary archaeology of old places and the emergent fields of contemporary archaeology and critical heritage studies, but also argue for retaining and fully incorporating the political and activist orientations of historical, feminist, African Diaspora, and Indigenous archaeologies—fields that have long centered the knowledge and concerns of contemporary communities—into this work.

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Photography can be a useful and distinct method for community engagement and collaboration, especially when used as a tool to add depth to oral history or ethnographic interviews. In particular, 360degree panoramic photos can mimic walking interviews, thereby allowing participants to virtually re-inhabit spaces within the study site, encouraging new dialogues about the materiality of historic places and personal experiences within them. This method of photo elicitation can enable more participation from those who may not be able to physically join archaeologists on a site that is difficult to access due to time, mobility limitations of participants, or the terrain of the landscape. I use examples from a community-based archaeology project focused on the site of a nineteenth century Bahamian plantation to demonstrate how photo elicitation can reveal unique insights into the ways that local people of all ages understand, interact with and value the historical site today.

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