I love this:
Those interested in understanding the daily lives of slaves are likely to learn more by shoveling dirt than reading through the written records of America’s plantations, Joe L. Speight told an audience at the Camden County Historical Society (CCHS) yesterday.
(Well, “yesterday” being in Febuary 2002, but still – when you’re talking centuries a few years here or there don’t matter much.)
“I am always encouraging African-American students to think about getting involved in archaeology because excavated artifacts provide more accurate information about the slave experience,” said Speight, a retired DuPont chemist who has studied art and archaeology at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania.
“The records that exist about slaves were always written from the point of view of the slave master,” he said. “Those records are biased. Their authors often misunderstood what they were seeing and often misrepresented what they recorded. A large part of the daily reality of slaves was never documented and never even seen by slave owners,” Speight said.
Never even seen…
Read about the pipes, too. I’ll have more to say on that at a later date, but it’s lovely.
