| A combination of historical research and three seasons of archaeological excavation at the Isaac Royall House Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts is revealing that, far from being a collection of simple oppositions, the differences between Caribbean and New England slave systems were more complex and less clearly defined than perhaps imagined. Artifacts and social differentiation in the use of space around the estate do not support the idea of Northern bondage being either systemically gentler or more incorporative in nature than Caribbean forms of slavery. Indeed, research suggests that while Northern slavery was certainly different from Caribbean slavery, it cannot be thought to have been better, for any gains made in the material conditions of life were not without other concessions.; The concepts of habitus, praxis, performative social discourse, multi-locality, and implication are used to integrate meaning and agency into the analytical approaches and methods at the Royall House. The study brings an ethnographic approach and analysis to documents, architecture, landscape, and archaeology to focus on the diverse experiences of the many individuals from that site—white and black—and offers possible interpretations of how those different experiences were negotiated through material symbols. In documents, artifacts, landscape, and architecture, the author presents evidence of the contestations between master and slave as they struggled to define themselves and each other in a world that was violent and shifting and anything but fixed. |
