Ethnographic analogy, archaeology, and the African diaspora: Perspectives from a tenant community

From its inception, archaeologists have been forced to rely on ethnographic analogies when attempting to make behavioral interpretations for past humans. In the study of the institution of slavery, archaeologists have drawn a vast majority of these analogies from modem cultures of West Africa-those cultures thought to have provided the largest number of enslaved peoples to North America. This paper will attempt to demonstrate that the Gullah and Geechee cultures of the Carolina Low-country may very well represent a far more important source for such analogies. These cultures have been overlooked as a result of the view among social scientists and historians that the Gullah/Geechee represent the "end result" of a unique set of evolutionary factors not found elsewhere within the South. Primary among these factors is their isolation from European Americans and other African Americans. However, the historic roots of the Gullah/Geechee are embedded within enslavement, Reconstruction, tenancy, sharecropping, and land holding-many of the same forces that helped to shape African American cultures throughout North America, unlike the cultures of West Africa. An example derived from the historical archaeological research conducted at the Levi Jordan Plantation, Brazoria County, Texas, will be employed to demonstrate the importance of the Gullah and Geechee analogies in understanding the lives of enslaved and freed African Americans.