Preliminary Results of the 2006 University of Florida Archaeological Field School Excavations at Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida

The earliest attempt at an African-American archaeology in the United States that specifically addressed issues pertaining to slave life was conducted at Kingsley Plantation in 1968 by Dr. Charles Fairbanks, of the University of Florida (Fairbanks 1974) (click on the images below to see larger illustrations by the authors).However, after a brief 2-week summer field season excavating within Cabin W-1 (and to a minor extent, E-1), Fairbanks never returned to Kingsley and instead continued his exploration of plantation archaeology in the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, most notably on St. Simons Island (Ascher and Fairbanks 1971; Fairbanks 1984).His graduate students John Solomon Otto (1984), Theresa Singleton (1985), Sue Mullins Moore (1981, 1985), among others, went on to define plantation archaeology in the 1970s and early 1980s.What began as plantation archaeology has expanded well beyond the confines of antebellum plantation contexts, and is now more appropriately termed the Archaeology of the African Diaspora.When Charles Fairbanks began his work at the slave cabins of Kingsley Plantation in the summer of 1968, his goal was in part to aid in architectural reconstruction, but primarily he sought evidence of "Africanisms."In his own words (1984:2): "Kingsley had been a slave importer, with perhaps an unusually permissive attitude towards his charges.I had done what appeared to be an adequate amount of research to establish a number of things that I hoped to demonstrate.Among these were the search for Africanisms among the material artifacts of those newly arrived slaves, evidence of adaptation in housing, dress, behavior to the new situation, and data on lifestyle.At Kingsley we studied much of two slave houses, both probably of slave drivers or foremen, identified a well, and found that most of our assumptions were false.No evidence of Africanisms was found, even though we were digging in the structures of an unusually permissive slave owner, dealing with newly imported slaves.Belatedly realizing that the slaves came naked and in chains, I still could not understand why they did not recreate some African artifacts."Although Dr. Fairbanks' work at Kingsley Plantation in 1968 was largely unprecedented, it was not performed within a theoretical vacuum.Rather, it was grounded in the work of social anthropologists, most notably Melville J. Herskovits.Herskovits was a pioneer in Black studies who with his 1941 work, The Myth of the Negro Past (1990), almost single-handedly dismantled the long-standing belief that people of African descent did not retain any remnants of African culture or beliefs.These cultural retentions were termed by Herskovits to be "Africanisms."At the very beginning of African Diaspora 1 Davidson et al.