American slavery was done in 1967 and 1968 by Fairbanks. His research at the Zephaniah Kingsley plantation in North Florida was designed to investigate questions of African-American lifeways under slavery and the extent to which African cultural survivals could be documented in the archaeological record (Fairbanks 1984). Although Fairbanks was unable to clearly define “Africanisms” in the material record, he was able to document a sufficiency of life for the slaves that was at odds with much documentary information about plantation slave life.

Shortly after this time Jerome Handler initiated the archaeology of Caribbean plantation with his work in Barbados, looking not only at the domestic lives of slaves (Handler 1972) but also at the physical anthropology and ritual behavior through the excavation of slave cemeteries (Handler and Lange 1978). Fairbanks’s and Handler’s early efforts gave rise to a vital and very active program devoted to the archaeology of slavery and plantations in both the United States and the Caribbean, which, in the 1990s, has evolved into an emphasis on the origins of African American society in general (see Fairbanks 1984, Posnansky 1983; Singleton 1985, 1995).

An influential role in this development was played by Merrick Posnansky of the University of California, Los Angeles. Posnansky, an Africanist archaeologist, encouraged a more systematic archaeological study of the African diaspora, and a more explicit integration of African social models, in the Caribbean (1983). Posnansky’s exhortation has been implemented most vigorously in the plantation settings of the Caribbean, and information about early Afro-Caribbean architecture, diet and health, economic activities, craft production, ritual, and interethnic influence in the plantation setting has been recovered by historical archaeologists in Jamaica (Agorsah 1994; Armstrong 1990), Barbados (Handler and Lange 1978), Montserrat (Watters 1994), Antigua (Clement 1995), Curacao (Haviser and De Corse 1991), St. Eustatius (Heath 1988), and elsewhere.

Although most of the archaeological research into African American society in Florida and the Caribbean has concentrated on slave sites, there was a steady growth of interest through the period in non-slave black settlements. The original impetus for this work was provided by historians working in the Caribbean during the 1960s and 1970s, who began to pay serious attention to the roles of free black colonists in the Caribbean and particularly to African resistance to slavery and the resulting cimarrón, maroon, and marron societies (terms used in Spanish, English, and French respectively to describe free black communities formed after rebellion by former slaves). Summaries of some of the influential work on the history of African resistance to slavery and free society for the Caribbean can be found in works such as Agorsah (1993), Price (1973), and Sued Badillo (1986).

One of the first archaeological studies of a free black settlement in the United States took place in Florida at the site of Fort Gadsden, a nineteenth-century fort manned largely by African American soldiers (Poe 1963). Explicit archaeological attention to colonial-era free African life, however, first took place in the Dominican Republic, where manieles (cimarrón settlements) were located and investigated by Bernardo Vega and subsequently by Juan Arrom and Manuel Garcia Arévalo. Few cimarrón sites have been located and studied archaeologically since that time in the Caribbean or Florida, owing at least in part to their concealed and isolated locations. One exception is the site of Nannytown, Jamaica, which is occupied today by descendants of the colonial-era maroons and which is being investigated through archaeology and oral history by Kofi Agorsah (1994). Another is the site of Fort Mose in Florida. Mose was an eighteenth-century fortified community near St. Augustine that was settled in 1739 by African slaves who escaped from the British colonies to the north and were granted freedom by the Spanish government in Florida. The site of Fort Mose was located and investigated in Florida during the 1980s (Deagan and McMahon 1995).

In Florida the archaeology of Seminole Indian sites was often thematically related to that of African cimarrónes. Fairbanks suggested that the name “Seminole” was an anglicized degeneration of “Cameroon,” occasioned by the fact that the Seminoles were considered to be wild and rebellious Indians who fled from their settled