Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800

by Leland Ferguson

Winner of the Southern Anthropological Society's prestigious James Mooney Award, Uncommon Ground takes a unique archaeological approach to examining early African American life. Ferguson shows how black pioneers worked within the bars of bondage to shape their distinct identity and lay a rich foundation for the multicultural adjustments that became colonial America.Through pre-Revolutionary period artifacts gathered from plantations and urban slave communities, Ferguson integrates folklore, history, and research to reveal how these enslaved people actually lived. Impeccably researched and beautifully written.

Genres: Archaeology, Anthropology, History, Nonfiction, African American, School, Academic

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Leland Ferguson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Colonial African America, 1650–1800, a recipient of the Southern Anthropological Society’s James Mooney Award.

Reviews

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Ferguson is one of the influential archaeologists studying the archaeology of enslavement, he is not the only voice in the field. He struggles to get away from his own ethnocentrism as a white man who grew up during segregation and the Jim Crow era. His research shed considerable light on how enslaved people maintained their own culture in spite of planters' attempts to suppress their culture. This is a good primer written for a more general audience, but I suspect there are books written by Black scholars more recently that would be a better place to start

[Charlotte]

this came out after I was done taking classes, and so I never read it back when it was groundbreaking....glad my son brought it home from college with him, and I had the chance to read it now.

[Whitney Warrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Already out of date, but still with good data.

[Tom Darrow · Rating 4 out of 5]

The overall themes of this book (that African slaves should be considered pioneers and that there weren't clear-cut lines between White, Native American and African cultures during the colonial period) are well done. For when the book was written (1992), I imagine that these ideas would have been somewhat revolutionary.

This book has a couple of flaws, however. Ferguson is clearly an expert on colonial era ceramics and pottery, so most of his examples of archaeology are of pottery, and that gets a bit tedious. He briefly discusses house design and a few other topics, but more variety would have been helpful.

My second critique is that the author is somewhat self praising. Yes, he discovered some important things and his personal stories are sometimes illustrative and helpful, but in other places his tone is generally arrogant.

Finally, a complaint about the editing. There are lots of photos, graphs and illustrations in this book, which are helpful in explaining his points, but the pictures are often placed several pages away from where the figure is mentioned in the text, so the reader has to flip back and forth to see what the author is talking about. Also, there are a couple of places where there are a few lines of the main text placed between two pictures, which also makes the reading somewhat confusing.

Generally speaking, though, this was an enjoyable book. He illustrates that African slaves were not simply molded by white owners and that they carried on many of their cultural traditions from Africa.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the colonial era or archaeology, although it might be a bit too specific for people who have a general interest in history.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic, must read for any archaeologist, particularly historical archaeologists, and even more specifically, for anyone working in African Diaspora contexts.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting look at historical archaeology.