2 Materializing Memory and Building Community: Contemporary Landscape Archaeology of a Nineteenth‐Century Bahamian Plantation

Abstract

The Millars Plantation on Eleuthera, Bahamas was first established in 1803 as a cotton plantation and remained in operation through the 1830s. After emancipation, the formerly enslaved community continued to live on and work the plantation acreage and surrounding areas, until 1871 when Ann Millar formally left the 2000 acre‐property to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, despite a series of legal challenges by Bahamian and foreign investors who seek to develop new tourism‐based economies in the area. In the process of documenting the historical landscape of the Millars Plantation through oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and landscape survey, the research revealed ways that residents today have materialized memory—piecing together object, story, and space—on a living landscape that has too often been framed as empty or relegated to the past. This chapter investigates the ways in which memory becomes rooted in the materiality of the South Eleuthera landscape. When read side‐by‐side, the archaeological and contemporary social stratigraphy of South Eleuthera illustrate this historical landscape's ongoing site formation and the ways in which community members use the memoryscape as a tool for community building and local advocacy.

4 Decolonizing Research for My Diné (Navajo) Community: The Old Leupp Boarding School Historic Site

“…I chose to research the OLBS, because of my family's connection to this site, and because the local Navajos and teachers of Leupp and Birdsprings indicated this was an important place in Navajo history, which they felt ought to be researched and taught about in schools and to the Diné public. As a Navajo archaeologist, my goal is to decolonize the field of archaeology by researching sites and places significant to the Diné people by using culturally appropriate research methods and with the consent and support of Navajo communities-of which the Old Leupp Boarding School is just such a place (see also Sesma [2022] this volume, Chapter 2 regarding the benefits of community-based participatory research in archaeological research).…”

1 Exploring the Contemporary in Old Places

“…Surface survey, in particular, shifts archaeologists’ focus on a site's stratigraphic depth to the social significance of surface strata. Rather than framing surfaces as static reflections of the present, authors in this volume approach surfaces as strata undergoing formation (Danis [2022] Chapter 7; Sesma [2022] Chapter 2; Taylor [2022] Chapter 9; Wilkie [2022] Chapter 10). Surfaces are sites of social action where the accumulated material traces of the past intersect with concerns for the future.…”

“…Memory, and especially collective memory, proves to be a powerful force and an incredibly useful tool in our contemporary archaeological repertoire. Sesma ([2022] this volume, Chapter 2), Oliver and Cox ([2022] this volume, Chapter 3), Two Bears ([2022] this volume, Chapter 4), and Wilkinson ([2022] this volume, Chapter 5) each demonstrate ways of engaging collective memory about meaningful places through archaeological‐ethnographic methods. In these cases, memorywork is also a deliberate way of maintaining community connections to place when development projects or conventional heritage narratives would erase or obscure local pasts.…”

“…To begin, the COVID‐19 pandemic brought global tourism economies to a standstill, with cruise ships especially affected by early case counts and legal restrictions on the operation of cruise companies. In the Bahamas (see Sesma [2022] this volume, Chapter 2) these protective measures meant that ports and resorts closed, leaving the Bahamian economy—structured around international tourism dollars—in disarray. Locally, this manifested as increased unemployment, pauses in new development projects, and increased isolation between settlements and islands.…”

Introduction

“…Of late, Indigenous, African diasporic, and community‐centric approaches in archaeology have led the charge in attempts to right the abuses archaeologically oriented heritage practices have long perpetuated (see, for example Smith, 2006). The growing number of projects taking these approaches as their central ethos (Colwell, 2016; Wylie, 2014, 2019) is causing what might be the most significant paradigm shift in the field since the postprocessual movement (e.g., Acabado and Martin, 2020; Cipolla and Quinn, 2016; Cowie, Teeman, and LeBlanc, 2019; Diserens Morgan and Leventhal, 2020; Flewellen et al., 2022; Fryer and Raczek, 2020; Gonzalez, 2016; Lyons, 2013; McAnany and Rowe, 2015; Schmidt and Pikirayi, 2016; Sesma, 2022; Surface‐Evans and Jones, 2020). There's ample overlap between those projects utilizing community collaborative methodologies and those projects whose aims center on repairing injustices and combating the epistemic violence permeating our field—a result often of our tendencies to prioritize archaeological understandings of the past while excluding other voices and perspectives (Gnecco, 2009; Schneider and Hayes, 2020).…”