An Archaeobotanical Approach to Well-Being: Enslaved Plant Use at Estate Cane Garden, 19th Century St. Croix

From Slavery to Servitude: Transformations and Continuities in Hacienda Labor, Well-Being, and Foodways in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Nasca

“…In this article, we conceptualize worker well-being as a holistic index of a population, one that moves beyond health and the biological necessities of life to include regimes of self-care and sourcing nutritious and culturally desirable food for the practice of culinary arts (see Reifschneider and Bardolph 2020). Among enslaved communities of the African diaspora, archaeologists have found that foodways often reveal the tensions between top-down administrative strategies for providing the bare sustenance for performing labor and the bottom-up, agentive cultural expression of self-care practices, including medicine and cuisine, that transformed raw ingredients into meals shared among families and workmates, offering a temporary respite from the relentless reality of agroindustrial labor (e.g., Brunache 2011;Franklin 2001;Wallman 2020).…”