Against All Odds: The Creation of Families and Households at a 17th and 18th Century Virginia Slave Quarter

Lecture by Dr. Garret Fesler, James River Institute of Archaeology.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tens of thousands of Africans were stolen into slavery and forcibly transported to the New World. Once landed, enslaved men and women from diverse African heritages gradually formed families and lived within close-knit households as one means of survival against the brutalities of enslavement. While the forces of slavery constantly threatened the stability of family life, enslaved families endured despite the obstacles. This process of family and household formation has been investigated at a remarkable archaeological site near Williamsburg, Virginia known as the Utopia Quarter. Enslaved Africans and their African American descendants occupied this site between the 1670s and 1770s. Various types of archaeological data recovered from Utopia – houses, storage pits, and groups of artifacts – provide evidence of the growth and maturation of families and households.

Dr. Garrett Fesler has worked for 19 years as an archaeologist in the Chesapeake region. He received his Master’s degree in American history at the College of William and Mary and earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is a co-owner of the James River Institute for Archaeology, Inc., a private business located in Williamsburg, Virginia. His work has appeared in various publications, and he co-edited a book on ethnicity and historical archaeology published by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

In 1607, Jamestown’s colonists entered a world of Native American communities bound together within the Powhatan chiefdom. From his residence on the York River at Werewocomoco, Chief Powhatan dominated early seventeenth-century Tidewater Virginia. Historical accounts document events at Werowocomoco involving well-known figures from this period, including, Powhatan, Pocahontas, John Smith, and Christopher Newport. Recent archaeological investigations at the Werowocomoco site in Gloucester County have added an understanding of daily life in the village in the centuries leading up to and including colonial contact. The archaeological evidence indicates that the village differed in striking ways from other Native American communities. The Werowocomoco Research Group’s investigations are built around close collaboration with contemporary descendants of Powhatan.

Dr. Martin Gallivan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. His research centers on the archaeology and ethnohistory of Native American societies in North America with focus on Native communities in the Chesapeake region during the late precontact and early colonial eras. His earlier efforts resulted in the monograph, James River Chiefdoms: The Rise of Social Inequality in the Chesapeake. Currently, he is involved in two research projects, excavation of the Powhatan village Werowocomoco and analysis of a series of sites in the Chickahominy River excavated by a colleague in the 1960s and 1970s. He has written extensively in scholarly publications.

Captain John Smith’s seventeenth century map of Virginia is one of America’s most famous colonial maps. For over a century historians, cartographers, ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have used the map for a variety of purposes as diverse as estimating the size of the native population to locating the sites of Indian villages. In this illustrated presentation, Dr. Stephen Potter, Regional Archaeologist of the National Capital Region of the National Park Service, will take a different approach. By considering a variety of factors—the circumstances under which and the season of the year during which Smith made his observations, the multiple purposes of his explorations, the meanings attached to certain words or place names, and native politics and intergroup relations—Smith’s map will be transformed from a static representation of Indian settlements to a dynamic cultural landscape upon which to interpret a rapidly changing Aboriginal world.

Dr. Potter is the Regional Archaeologist for the National Park Service’s National Capital Region, which includes over 87,000 acres of parkland in portions of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. A native of Northern Virginia, his ancestral roots in the Old Dominion go back to at least the eighteenth century. Dr. Potter received his AB degree in anthropology from the University of Missouri at Columbia where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and his MA and PhD degrees in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been involved in archaeological fieldwork in Alabama, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. His research interests include both the prehistoric and the historic archaeology of the eastern United States, the southern Algonquian Indians, the formation and expansion of the seventeenth and eighteenth century frontiers, and the archaeology and history of the American Civil War. His 1993 book, Commoners, Tributes, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley, is the first modern, scholarly account of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Potomac River, from c. A.D. 200 until the 1650s. The author of numerous articles and papers on a variety of topics, Dr. Potter was co-editor of Archaeological Perspectives on the American Civil War. His most recent work is a chapter in the second edition of Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, to be published in late 2006.