Living Ceramics, Storied Ground

Last week I read and enjoyed Charles Orser’s slim volume: Living Ceramics, Storied Ground: A History of African American Archaeology (2023). It tells the story of the origins and development of the archaeology of enslaved African Americans prior to the Civil War. Beginning with Charles H. Fairbanks excavations at Kingsley Plantation in Florida and continuing through contemporary large scale re-analysis of “legacy data” from sites across the southeastern United States, Orser traces the development and debates around African American archaeology from the perspective of the discipline. It provides a much needed survey of issues ranging from the survival of African practices among enslave African Americans, evidence for African American spirituality and ritual life, as well as distinctive forms of economic production manifest in making pipes, hybrid forms of ceramics (e.g. “colonoware”), and the construction of storage pits in their homes.  

The book is short too. It runs to about 200 pages and while it’s not a page-turner, Orser manages to tell his story in a way that held my interest. More than that, his narrative pushed me think about African American archaeology more broadly and consider both what Orser said and what he left out of his account. A book that nudges us to think about a topic in more expansive ways is always a good thing to my mind. Rather than write a traditional review of a book that is short enough (and by a prominent enough author) to be a weekend read, I thought I’d just offer a few observations.

1. Top Down and Disciplinary. This book is very much top down and disciplinary in its understanding of African American archaeology. The stars of his narrative are (largely) academic archaeologists who engage in conversations with other academic archaeologists (and scholars) as they attempt to understand objects, contexts, and deposits that they’ve excavated. As an academic archaeologist, this warms to cockles of my heart. At the same time, Orser seems pretty quiet about how academic archaeology has traditionally excluded African Americans from the study of their own past. The appearance of a generation of influential Black American archaeologists in the late 20th century occurs with little note in his work. This is a bit disappointing as I expected changing racial attitudes to have paralleled new ways of thinking about the Black past in archaeology more broadly.  

2. African American Voices. Because white academics largely excluded African Americans from having formal role in archaeology for most of the discipline’s history, I wondered whether African Americans influenced how archaeologists understood the past in different ways. Orser hints that “folk” knowledge did play a role in interpreting artifacts from coarsely made ceramic pots to bundles of mundane objects brought together to harness supernatural power. What struck me as odd was that Orser doesn’t spend much time unpacking African American archaeological traditions that existed outside of academic archaeology. He notes, for example, that African Americans sometimes collected Native American artifacts and used them in a variety of ways, but he says very little about how this informed a larger view of the Black past both in the US and in the broader Atlantic World. He also noted that enslaved people and, later, free Blacks often worked as excavators alongside white academic archaeologists. Surely, this association led to new forms of knowledge both among the white academics and Black laborers. To be more blunt, a book on the archaeology of Native Americans would not think of excluding perspectives associated with Indigenous Archaeology. It is odd that this book did not do more to unpack African American efforts to understand their material past outside of the academic tradition.

3. The Big Picture. I was likewise a bit surprised that the book did relatively little to explore the development of Caribbean archaeology. Or, more broadly still, I started to wonder about the impact of the development of Caribbean and African nationalism on African American archaeology. It seems to me that one weakness of Orser’s book is that he saw knowledge of the Black past as something that archaeologists excavate from the ground (or at very least interpret on the basis of assemblages of excavated artifacts). This seems to sell the important advances in the African American archaeology short. In part, the importance of this work is that it’s part of a global trend toward recognizing survival, resistance, and anti-colonial practices that reinforce the significance and authority of Black culture both in the US and on a global scale.

Of course, a book that located the African American archaeology within a broader conversation in the Black community both in the US and abroad would be a very different book. At worst, it might undermine the important, detailed, and careful work undertaken by archaeologists in the US who preserved and analyzed the world of enslaved individuals in the 19th century. At best, a book like this might remind us of the important of “archaeologies” that transcend narrow disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological distinctions to contribute to a loosely defined, but compelling and important body of knowledge about the past.

Orser’s work feels like a first step toward this broader synthesis and occupies a specialized, but, in the end, significant role in producing a narrative that will, in the end, extend beyond the narrow confines of academic and discipline archaeology and the US.