Muffled, but not Mute

Abstract

Narratives of Long Island’s past continue to efface the many Native American, African, and mixed-heritage workers from its plural past. Many of the homes and farms White families shared with their coerced, waged, and non-White workers remain rife with archaeological potential, yet archaeologists are reluctant to excavate them, presumably because of their ambiguity and lack of culturally distinct data. This article examines changing labor relations in order to repopulate these plural sites and give meaning to the many objects, practices, and spaces diverse people shared on a daily basis. An 18th- and 19th-century farmstead provides the context. Specifically, domestic architecture and activities are traced across the transition from slavery to wage labor to determine how new relations unfolded in daily practice. The results indicate that the system of wage labor preserved White authority over non-White workers and contributed to the masking of plural spaces as homogeneously White.