The Ethnoarcheology of a Slave Community: The Couper Plantation Site

The eyewitness accounts and later interpretations by historians of the institution of plantation slavery must of necessity reflect the cultural viewpoint of the master class, for the slaves themselves left no records. In an attempt to add a new dimension to the understanding of slave culture, that of the slave himself as reflected in the material remains he left behind, excavations of a small slave community were undertaken. The archeological field techniques and materialist theories used to study aboriginal cultures were applied to the excavations and interpretations in an attempt to derive ethnological data. The settlement studied consisted of four cabins and a well, one of several such mini-communities on the large seaisland cotton plantation of John Couper at Cannon's Point, St. Simons Island, Georgia, during the first half of the nineteenth century. Culturally oriented interpretations of the archeological remains highlighted several areas at variance with many of the documents and descriptions by historians. In other areas, however, the literature was substantiated. Among the former were the extent to which the Couper slaves were able to participate in the material culture of the day through a system which allowed them to earn money, and the extent to which wild food resources procured for themselves were utilized to a degree far greater than usually documented. One of the, conclusions reached is that the slaves on the Couper plantation may have been enjoying a material standard of living not substantially different from that of free, white, rural laborers elsewhere in the South. Descriptions of many of the nineteenth-century artifacts, classified by functional categories, may prove helpful to others seeking to work in this area.