A Protected Place

Abstract

How did enslaved individuals use material culture to create a feeling of protection where they were coerced to live and labor? As a part of their home-making—their attempts to transform spaces of bondage into homeplaces—enslaved residents of Stagville plantation in North Carolina concealed objects like a walking stick, cowrie shell, and forked sticks within plantation dwellings in the hopes that such actions and artifacts would safeguard them. Analyzing these objects within their depositional and temporal contexts reveals not only enslaved peoples’ desires for a protected place in their precarious world but their concerted actions to realize it.