Mark Hauser: Digging up Plantations

What are the material remains of slavery? And what can these sites and artifacts tell us about the lives of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances of inequality? As archaeologists excavate plantations and estate houses in the American South and the Caribbean, they learn from discarded or forgotten objects how slaves shaped the world around them in meaningful ways. Northwestern University professor Mark Hauser shares the fascinating stories these objects tell us, shedding new light on the social and intellectual contributions of Africans in the New World.

Mark Hauser has been working on archaeological sites in the Caribbean since 1991. He is an assistant professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. His fields of study are the archaeology of slavery in the Americas; Afro Caribbean material and housing culture; and colonial landscapes and everyday life. He is author of An Archaeology of Black Markets: Local Ceramics and Economies in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and co-editor of Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica.