Description
"Between the Creeks: The Goundings of Seventeenth-Century Middle Plantation, Virginia" is a historical and historical archaeological interdisciplinary study of the seventeenth-century community which in 1699 became Williamsburg, Virginia's second colonial capital. Between its 1630s founding and 1699, Middle Plantation was home to a number of prominent and wealthy Virginians, and was shaped by all of the changes which defined life in Virginia. Middle Plantation is the most excavated seventeenth-century landscape outside Jamestown, and thus provides the richest material archives of how English colonization took shape in the colony. "Between the Creeks" follows two connected lines of inquiry. These are how Virginia's plantation slavery system took shape during the second half of the seventeenth century, and how Virginians participated in the larger British World's trends and fashions. During this era, Virginia's planters shifted the housing of their labor forces from their own homes to outlying quarters. This shift was a crucial development in the growth of the plantation complex, the shaping of Virginia's homelots, and even the rise of racial categories. But importantly, these changes took form as Virginian used and altered metropolitan fashions and changing models of family and comfort. Middle Plantation's sites provide considerable evidence of how these changes took place and how this process created spaces in which some European and African cultural traits survived and others were blocked.
