What Is the Use of Plantation Archaeology?

This essay is a commentary on plantation archaeology inspired by a recent article by William H. Adams and Sarah Jane Boling (1989). By asking what is the use of plantation archaeology, this author does not mean to reject this increasingly popular archaeological enterprise. Rather, the purpose is to provoke serious reflection on two issues: (1) the reasons for doing plantation archaeology and (2) the audiences for such studies. The essay has three main parts: a general discussion of the status of self-reflection in plantation archaeology; a specific critique of Adam and Boling’s piece; and a set of four suggestions for improving on Adams and Boling’s work, not by changing their analysis but by paying greater attention to the contexts in which slave-owned ceramics existed in the past and the contexts in which these same objects exist today, as archaeological finds. This commentary is based on critical theory, and on the proposition that, whether it is explicitly interpreted for the public or not, any archaeological project is a public performance. Whenever archaeologists go about their archaeological work, they perform, at the very least, their own training and biases, their sources of funding and support, and the history of their research subjects, a history to which they may have only the most tenuous connections.