“The little spots allow’d them”: The archaeological study of African-American yards

The Archaeology of Slavery

“…Areas such as provision grounds and yards utilized by enslaved populations have increasingly been examined for traces of the social lives of enslaved populations. These were key spaces where enslaved individuals and communities were able to come together in shared cultural practices outside of the mandated parameters of the plantation owner and white society (Heath and Bennett 2000;Battle-Baptiste 2010). As a counterpoint, the spatialities of slavery have also been understood through the types of regimes designed to control the lives of enslaved populations.…”

What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?

“…7 Those patches supplemented a meager diet, even managing sometimes to yield a surplus sold at market, when slave-masters allowed, and were often bought up by the mistress for her own table (Heath and Bennett 2000;Heath 2001;Thomson 2008). In CSSJ's tiny garden are a few of the multipurpose flowering plants and medicinal herbs-including dandelions in profusion-that enslaved Africans in New England and elsewhere learned about and adapted, largely from Native Americans but also from the European colonists.…”

“…Some of these spaces were in their environments: their homes, gardens, communities and grave sites. (58) Archival research on slave life and newer archeological and other studies of plantation material culture also note that the enslaved grew flowering plants for a multitude of purposes (Egypt, Masuoka, andJohnson [1945] 1968;Heath and Bennett 2000). 9 From the testimony of the enslaved in the WPA Alabama interviews, for example, it was clear that both vegetables and flowers were often planted in the slave patches.…”

The Spatial Distribution of Tobacco Pipe Fragments at the Hudson's Bay Company Fort Vancouver Village Site: Smoking as a Shared and Social Practice

“…Activities can take on different meanings in different settings as well (Rapoport 1990). For instance, an activity carried out in a more visible, public area like a yard can potentially convey a symbolic message (Heath and Bennett 2000). Artifacts with spatial distributional patterns can point to regular behaviors predicated on sociocultural beliefs.…”