The Subfloor-Pit Tradition in the United States: A Florida Case Study and Critical Reappraisal of Its Origins

Abstract

Subfloor pits, or root cellars, associated with African American housing and dating from the 17th through the 19th centuries, have been documented archaeologically in the Mid-Atlantic states and upland South. Excavations in 2014 and 2015 at the Bulow Plantation in Florida exposed the footprint of an early 19th-century slave cabin containing a stone-lined subfloor pit, which represents the only well-documented archaeological example of its type identified south of South Carolina. Two conflicting interpretations exist regarding the cultural origins of subfloor pits: that the subfloor-pit phenomenon, writ large, is an African tradition that was simply continued under enslavement in the United States, or, alternatively, subfloor pits are not African in origin at all, but were innovated in the British American colonies in the early years of enslavement. The combined archival and archaeological evidence gathered here entirely support the latter interpretation.