Overview
DAACS’ influence on archaeological scholarship is evident in an accelerating stream of journal articles, monographs, and theses that feature DAACS and make use of the data that the DAACS website offers. DAACS data figure importantly in recent comparative work on change and variation in the architecture of houses and quartering areas for enslaved people (Samford 2007; Neiman 2008) and assemblage content (Heath and Breen 2009) in the Chesapeake. Scholars have used DAACS data to chart, for the first time, variation in the means and motives of enslaved people to participate in the wider consumer economy in the Chesapeake (Agbe-Davies 2017; Bloch and Agbe-Davies 2017; Galle 2006, 2010) and to discover and explain striking contrasts in patterns of consumption on domestic slaves sites in North American and Jamaica (Galle 2011, 2017).
Archaeologists have begun to use DAACS measurement protocols and data to provide a wider context necessary for understanding the uniqueness of archaeological patterns in their own data at the regional or site levels. Examples include studies of domestic sites occupied by enslaved Gullah peoples on the South Carolina Coast (Barnes and Steen 2012), enslaved agricultural laborers at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest Plantation in Virginia (Heath 2012), enslaved industrial workers at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation in Virginia (McVey 2011), middling tobacco planters in Virginia (Zevorich 2006), free townspeople in North Carolina (Gabriel 2012), and enslaved laborers on sugar plantations in Antigua (Rebovich 2011). Archaeological sites featured in DAACS have yielded insights into the social and economic dynamics behind the spatial organization of sugar plantations in Jamaica (Armstrong 2011; Bates 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017) and the effects of plantation location and crops on market access for enslaved people (Reeves 2011). Furthermore, each year since 2006, a new crop of masters and doctoral students have contributed data to DAACS or engaged directly with existing DAACS data for their theses and dissertations. Links to these theses can be found here.
Some of the most innovative and compelling uses of DAACS data have come from historians, not archaeologists. Historians have used DAACS data to document surprisingly frequent access to firearms by enslaved people in North America (Morgan and O’Shaughnessy 2006). They also have mined DAACS for systematic evidence of literacy among enslaved populations in the form of writing slates and slate pencils (Bly 2008). DAACS also figures importantly in historians’ reflections on the ways in which archaeological data might advance their understanding of changing slave lifeways (Morgan 2006, 2011).
The list below provides citations for publications that discuss and analyze DAACS data. If you have published using DAACS data, we would love to know! Please contact the DAACS Project Director and we will add your publication to the growing list of research that engages with Archive data.
DAACS Citations
Agbe-Davies, Anna S.
2017 Where Tradition and Pragmatism Meet: African Diaspora Archaeology at the Crossroads. Historical Archaeology 51:9-27.
Agbe-Davies, Anna S., Jillian E. Galle, Mark W. Hauser, and Fraser D. Neiman
2013 Teaching with Digital Archaeological Data: A Research Archive in the University Classroom. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
Armstrong, Douglas V.
2011 Rediscovering the African Jamaican Settlements at Seville Plantation, St. Ann’s Bay. In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser and Douglas V. Armstrong, pp. 77-101. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Barnes, Jodi and Carl Steen
2012 Archaeology of the Gullah Past. South Carolina Antiquities, Volume 44: 86-95.
Bates, Lynsey
2014 “The Landscape Cannot Be Said to Be Really Perfect”: A Comparative Investigation of Plantation Spatial Organization on Two British Colonial Sugar Estates. In The Archaeology of Slavery: A Comparative Approach to Captivity and Coercion, edited by Lydia W. Marshall, pp. 116-142. Carbondale, Illinois: Center for Archaeological Investigations, SIU Occasional Paper #41.
2016 Provisioning and Marketing: Surplus and Access on Jamaican Sugar Estates. In Archaeologies of Slavery and Freedom in the Caribbean: Exploring the Spaces in Between, edited by Lynsey A. Bates, John M. Chenoweth, and James A. Delle, pp. 79-110. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
2017 Exploring Enslaved Laborers’ Ceramic Investment and Market Access in Jamaica. In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, edited by Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee, pp. 192-213. Routledge, London.
Bates, Lynsey A., Jillian E. Galle, And Fraser D. Neiman
2020 Building an Archaeological Chronology for Morne Patate. In Archaeology in Dominica: Everyday Ecologies and Economies at Morne Patate, edited by Mark W. Hauser and Diane Wallman. University Press of Florida.
Bell, Alison, Donald Gaylord, and Kristin Sharman
2019 “All My Little Might of Money’: Signaling, Structure, and Mobility among the Middling in Nineteenth-Century Virginia and Kentucky. Historical Archaeology 53(2): 372–92.
Bloch, Lindsay
2016 An Elemental Approach to the Distribution of Lead-Glazed Coarse Earthenware in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake.” American Antiquity 81(2): 231–52.
Bloch, Lindsay and Anna S. Agbe-Davies
2017 “With sundry other sorts of small ware too tedious to mention”: Petty consumerism on U.S. plantations. In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, edited by Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee, pp. 119-140. Routledge, London.
Bloch, Lindsay, and Elizabeth Bollwerk
2020 Sourcing Coarse Earthenware at Morne Patate: The Impacts of French Colonialism and Local Exchange. In Archaeology in Dominica: Everyday Ecologies and Economies at Morne Patate, edited by Mark W. Hauser and Diane Wallman. University Press of Florida
Bly, Antonio T.
2008 “Pretends he can read”: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730 – 1776. Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6(2), 261-294.
Flewellen, Ayana Omilade, Alicia Odewale, Justin Dunnavant, Alexandra Jones, and William White
2022 Creating Community and Engaging Community: The Foundations of the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 26(1): 147–76.
Galle, Jillian E.
2010 Costly Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies among Slaves in the 18th-Century Chesapeake. American Antiquity 75(1):19-43.
2011 Assessing the Impacts of Time, Agricultural Cycles and Demography on the Consumer Activities of Enslaved Men and Women in 18th-Century Jamaica and Virginia. In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong, pp. 211-242. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
2017 The Abundance Index: Measuring Variation in Consumer Behavior in the Early Modern Atlantic World. In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, edited by Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee, pp. 162-191. Routledge, London.
Galle, Jillian E., Elizabeth Bollwerk, and Fraser D. Neiman
2019 The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery: A Case Study in Open Data and Collaboration in the Field of Archaeology. In New Life for Archaeological Collections, edited by Rebecca Allen and Ben Ford. University of Nebraska Press.
Heath, Barbara J.
2012 Slave Housing, Household Formation and Community Dynamics at Poplar Forest, 1760s-1810s. In Jefferson’s Poplar Forest: Unearthing a Virginia Plantation, edited by Barbara J. Heath and Jack Gary, pp. 105–128. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Heath, Barbara J. and Eleanor Breen
2009 Assessing Variability among Quartering Sites in Virginia. Northeast Historical Archaeology Vol. 38, Article 1.
Hughes, Daniel
2012 A Case of Multiple Identities in La Florida: A Statistical Approach to Nascent Cosmopolitanism. Historical Archaeology 46(1): 8–27.
Little, Barbara. J.
2007 What Are We Learning? Who Are We Serving? Publicly Funded Historical Archaeology and Public Scholarship. Historical Archaeology 41(2):72-79.
MacLeod, Caroline Arbuckle
2020 Tools for Digital Pedagogy and the Ancient World. In An Educator’s Handbook for Teaching about the Ancient World, edited by Pınar Durgun. Archaeopress.
Morgan, Philip D.
2006 Archaeology and History in the Study of African-Americans. In African Re-Genesis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora, edited by Jay B. Haviser and Kevin C. MacDonald, pp. 53-61. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
2011 The Future of Chesapeake Studies. In Early Modern Virginia, edited by Douglas Bradburn and John C. Coombs, pp. 300-333. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA.
Morgan, Philip. D. and Andrew. J. O’Shaughnessy
2006 Arming Slaves in the American Revolution. In Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, edited by Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, pp. 180-208. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Neiman, Fraser D.
2008 The Lost World of Monticello in Evolutionary Perspective. Journal of Anthropological Research 64:161–193.
Rebovich, Samantha A.
2011 Landscape, Labor, and Practice: Slavery and Freedom at Green Castle Estate, Antigua. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Syracuse University, NY. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
Reeves, Matthew
2011 Household Market Activities among Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Slaves: An Archaeological Cast Study from Two Slave Settlements. In Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica, edited by James A. Delle, Mark W. Hauser, and Douglas V. Armstrong, pp. 183-210. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL.
2015 Assemblages: Focus on Communities of the African Atlantic. In Beyond the Walls: New Perspectives on the Archaeology of Historical Households, edited by Kevin R. Fogle, James A. Nyman, and Mary C. Beaudry. University Press of Florida.
Richards, Julian D.
2008 Internet, Archaeology on. In The Encyclopedia of Archaeology, pp. 1526-1529. Academic Press, New York, NY.
Samford, Patricia
2007 Subfloor Pits, and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL.
Sattes, Corey A. H.
2024 Colonoware Variation, Exchange, and Use from Drayton Hall’s South Flanker Well. In Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay: Colonoware in the African and Indigenous Diasporas of the Southeast, edited by Jon Bernard Marcoux and Corey A. H. Sattes. University of Alabama Press, 2024.
Singleton, Theresa A.
2010 African Diaspora in Archaeology. In The African Diaspora and the Disciplines, edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet, pp. 119-141. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Zevorich, Lisa M.
2006 Ceramic Analysis of a Middling European American Planter Site in Virginia Using the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology 22: 91-102.
Zierden, Martha A., Ronald W. Anthony, and Sarah E. Platt
2024 Colonoware in the City: Archaeological Assemblages from Charleston, South Carolina. In Materializing Colonial Identities in Clay: Colonoware in the African and Indigenous Diasporas of the Southeast, edited by Jon Bernard Marcoux And Corey A. H. Sattes. University of Alabama Press.
