The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Island’s Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races.
Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the North’s first plantations. The Manor was built in the mid-17th century by British settler Nathaniel Sylvester, whose family owned Shelter Island until the early 18th century and whose descendants still reside in the Manor House. There, as Hayes demonstrates, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collaboration and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester family’s economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the significance of Sylvester Manor’s plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community.
Katherine Howlett Hayes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, and an M.A. in Historical Archaeology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Table of Contents
Contents List of Figures and Table xi Acknowledgments xiii Prologue xvii 1 Tracing a Racialized History 1 2 Convergence 17 3 Building and Destroying 57 4 Objects of Interaction 86 5 Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget 121 6 Unimagining Communities 163 Epilogue 181 Notes 183 Bibliography 187 Index 215 About the Author 221
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From the Publisher
Hayes offers a skillful and captivating take on some of the big issues in contemporary historical and anthropological scholarship: race, community, material culture, memory, and heritage. This highly readable book will attract and satisfy archaeologists, historians, and general readers alike, and its thoughtful treatment of New York’s colonial and 'racial' histories will resonate with researchers of colonialism around the world."-Stephen W. Silliman,University of Massachusetts, Boston
"Under Katherine Hayes's gifted eye, Shelter Island, NY, becomes the grain of sand within which a whole colonial world may be grasped. Skillfully blending archival and archaeological evidence, she shows Sylvester Manor Plantation to be a crucible of bondage in which Algonquians, Africans, and poor whites labored to provision the Atlantic economy even while beliefs about race drove them apart. Long forgotten (or intentionally suppressed), this colonial history speaks to our present as sharply as it clarifies our past."-James F. Brooks,President, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe