Published October 22, 2024
MONROE, LA – October is Archaeology Month in Louisiana, and to celebrate, the ULM Museum of Natural
History will host featured speaker Dr. Matthew Rooney on Thursday, October 24 at 6:00
p.m. The talk is entitled “African American Household Change on an Arkansas Plantation”
and will be hosted at the museum on the first floor of Hanna Hall, 708 University
Ave. on the ULM campus. The public is invited to attend.
Rooney is the Station Archaeologist at the University of Arkansas Monticello. He will
speak about his plantation project, which is a hybrid archaeology and cultural anthropology
undertaking with former sharecroppers and their descendants.
The Hollywood and Valley Plantation, located in southeast Arkansas on the banks of
Bayou Batholomew, was home to at least four waves of migrating African Americans:
two forced migrations of enslaved people of color in the 1820’s and 1840’s, and two
voluntary migrations of Black sharecroppers in the 1870’s and 1900’s.
Preliminary excavations at two different archeological sites have uncovered three
living spaces away from the surviving big house that have remnants of smaller houses
built and lived in by Black families over the course of a century.
Analysis of ceramic, glass, nail, and brick artifacts allow for a seriation of these
three living spaces that correlates with documentary research about three of the four
known migration events to this Arkansas plantation.
The material culture recovered shows the materiality of enslaved African Americans
living on an antebellum frontier and how this changed when sharecroppers replaced
their labor and arrived along with the railroad, the development of nearby small towns,
and greater access to retail shops and non-local products.
For more information about the ULM Museum of Natural History, visit www.ulm.edu/caes/museum.html.
