A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp

Abstract

Even such a seemingly remote place as the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia has a complex social, economic, and cultural history. In the millennia prior to 1607, the Great Dismal Swamp was a part of the local and regional indigenous American cultural landscape. With the permanent settlement of the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the Great Dismal Swamp and the regional landscape in which it was nested were no longer solely the province of indigenous Americans and their cultural and social traditions and practices. Colonial Europeans and, after 1619, Diasporicized Africans increasingly solidified their presence in the Great Dismal Swamp region up through the Civil War. The Dismal Swamp landscape increasingly came to be defined and used by people of many social, cultural, and political-economic backgrounds throughout the period between 1607 and 1860. This volume is, in part, an effort to comprehend and explain the political-economic significance of the key archaeological patterns that I have observed in excavations since 2003. Those patterns and the artifacts and features in their own right represent critical material and spatial aspects of the emergence and reproduction of a heretofore unacknowledged social world and mode of production in the Great Dismal Swamp that existed for nearly two and a half centuries.