Task and Gang Labor: Work Patterns at a Kentucky Plantation

Abstract

Labor was a central part of the African-American slave experience. This article examines labor organization on Southern antebellum plantations and explores models typically used by scholars for reconstructing and interpreting work patterns. The purpose is to reconstruct the labor organization system at Locust Grove, a plantation near Louisville, Kentucky, utilizing archaeologically derived data. Ceramics and faunal analyses were completed because both have been suggested as possible indicators of plantation labor systems.

Indigenous traces in colonial spaces

“…Anthropologists and historians have spent considerable effort investigating the role of labor in colonialism, some addressing macroscale issues of world systems and economies within global labor structures (Crowell, 1997;Wallerstein, 1974;Wolf, 1982) and others emphasizing the microscale concerns of those implementing and experiencing labor (Cassell, 2003;Knack and Littlefield, 1995;Paterson, 2008;Silliman, 2006;Voss, 2008b). Historical and anthropological studies of plantation slavery have also paid attention to labor (Berlin and Morgan, 1993;Delle, 1998;Orser, 1990;Young, 1997), as have historical archaeologists studying industrial settings (Beaudry et al, 1991;Beaudry and Mrozowski, 2001;Casella, 2005;McGuire and Reckner, 2002;Mrozowski et al, 1996;Saitta, 2004;Shackel, 2000Shackel, , 2004. In general, though, archaeologists have lagged behind in this broad project by not developing ways of handling the material side of these labor relations beyond the laborers themselves.…”