Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: An Archaeological Perspective

Abstract

<jats:p>Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.</jats:p>

Pilgrimage as costly signal: Religiously motivated cooperation in Chaco and Nasca

“…As is the case in much of human behavioral ecology, the necessary assumption is that evolutionary processes have shaped human decisionmaking to act as a proxy for natural selection, and that therefore a significant amount of human behavior operates as if it were the direct product of natural selection, and, on the whole, is designed to promote somatic and reproductive success (e.g., Bering, 2004;Bulbulia, 2004;Galle, 2010). Insofar, however, as decision-making operates in ''real time,'' it is impacted by information quality, imperfect behavior, and cultural learning within the context of complex social settings (Boyd et al, 2011;Henrich et al, 2005;Kantner, 2010a;Kümmerli et al, 2010).…”

“…This suggestion is consistent with the extensive literature on costly signaling that is a common explanatory framework used in behavioral ecology (Bliege Bird and Smith, 2005;Boone, 1998;Bulbulia, 2004;Gintis et al, 2001;Zahavi and Zahavi, 1997). Developed originally by Zahavi (1975Zahavi ( , 1977 as the ''handicap principle'' to explain features of the animal world such as the peacock's tail and the stotting of gazelles, the costly signaling model more recently has been extended to explain human behaviors ranging from hunting and sharing (Hawkes and Bliege Bird, 2002;McGuire and Hildebrandt, 2005;Smith and Bliege Bird, 2000) to monumental architecture (Atran and Henrich, 2010;Boone, 1998;Neiman, 1997), prestige good consumption (Galle, 2010), and feasting and warfare (Fitzhugh, 2003;Roscoe, 2009).…”

An Archaeology of Struggle: Material Remnants of a Double Consciousness in the American South and Danish Caribbean Communities

“…The implications of this research reach far beyond the field of archaeology, into the disciplines of cultural anthropology, history, human ecology, economics, and political anthropological studies that continue to explore how differing levels of power, or the capacity to transform a given circumstance, impact social interactions among groups (Odewale, Foster, and Torres ) as well as how access to important natural and cultural resources are connected to expressions of heritage in the community (Hauser ; Holt ; Jackson ; Shackel ), material culture (Agbe‐Davies ; Galle ; Hauser ), and shared cultural landscapes (Dunnavant et al. ; Wood ).…”

Routes and Roots of Empire: Pots, Power, and Slavery in the 18th-Century British Caribbean

“…Domestic assemblages recovered from these houses were not just a function of getting by. Some have argued that clothing and adornment enabled the enslaved to signal status (Galle 2010), while others look to older traditions remembered and borrowed from antecedent practices in West Africa (Armstrong 1998; Fennel 2007, 2009; Franklin and Fesler 1999). Of these materials, ceramics are expedient objects with which to analyze economic networks and idioms of social solidarity.…”