"I, Too, Am America": Archaeological Studies of African-American Life.

"I, Too, Am America": Archaeological Studies of African-American Life. Edited by Theresa A. Singleton. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, c. 1999. Pp. xiv, 368. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-1843-X; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-8139-1842-1.)

The fifteen essays in this volume represent the latest theoretical and methodological approaches to the historical archaeology of African Americans. The opening premise of the book is that one "cannot fully understand the European colonial experience in the Americas without understanding that of the African" (p. 1). Major themes of the collection include the relationship between material culture and cultural identity; the role of African heritage in African-American culture; the nature of and power struggles over cultural transformation; and the role of racism, not only in the creation of the material record, but also in the study and practice of African American archaeology. Together, the essays emphasize the complexity of colonial race, class, and gender relations and the fluidity of the cultural and political alliances that defined colonial identities. This volume will be stimulating and valuable for both archaeologists and historians of the African American experience.

The collection begins in the right place--Africa. Merrick Posnansky's and Christopher DeCorse's essays demonstrate the importance of understanding the archaeology from West and Central Africa, where the millions of Africans brought to the Americas originated. Their essays reflect a new and necessary priority in the field, that "African-American archaeology should be rooted in the study of African archaeology and ethnology" (p. 21). Historians and archaeologists have long sought examples of Africanisms in American slave societies. Posnansky and DeCorse effectively argue that American scholars cannot know what they seek without knowing more about the temporal and geographic specifics of African culture.

As most African American archaeology has done, the majority of the subsequent essays focus on plantation archaeology. These essays describe cultural transformation as an "active rather than a passive response to the social, historical, and environmental conditions that gave rise to African American communities" (p. 13). James Deetz, Matthew Emerson, Daniel Mouer, and Leland Ferguson engage one another in an older debate over the manufacture, decoration, meaning, and use of colonoware and early Chesapeake clay pipes. Together these scholars attempt to understand the ways in which ethnicity and African heritage are reflected in the archaeological record. They also demonstrate how difficult it can be to assign "ownership" to any one ethnic group in a creole society like seventeenth-century Virginia.

Terrence Epperson, Douglas Armstrong, Larry McKee, and Barbara Heath analyze relations of power, domination, and resistance in their essays. Epperson investigates the social construction of racial difference in the plantation landscape and finds that both whites and blacks attempted to manipulate plantation space. Armstrong bolsters Epperson's conclusion by finding that African Americans created house-yards on Caribbean plantations as a form of resistance to European spatial patterns. McKee finds the same tension in his analysis of the system of plantation food supply. Heath investigates the difference between the archaeological record of whites and blacks of the same socioeconomic class. White artisans, tenants, and overseers were also plantation residents. Heath finds that the degree of autonomy and agency of free and slave artisans is reflected in the material conditions of their lives.

The work of Kathleen Deagan, Jane Landers, and Beverly Bastian broadens the collection to include the African American experience in nonplantation contexts. Archaeologists have not often studied non-plantation African-American communities, and these essays help to restore African Americans to the local histories of Florida and Michigan. These essays are especially interesting for what they reveal about historical memory and the politics of museum representation. At both sites, the local white community responded with disbelief and even hostility when archaeologists made interpretations about the African American community that conflicted with whites' historical memory. Edward Chappell also investigates the public interpretation of archaeology at museums and historical sites and criticizes both for not creating more critical presentations of American slavery.

This volume underscores the importance of using an interdisciplinary approach in the study of African Americans. At a time when African American archaeology has been recently in the news, editor Singleton has given us a stimulating collection that defines the current state of the field and offers promising areas for future study. The issues of agency, racism, and multivalency that Warren Perry and Robert Paynter raise in their concluding essay are being hotly debated in other forums as well. For example, Perry and Paynter's assertion that as long as "Anglo-Americans ... defin[e] American nationalism as that of a modified English person ... [there will be] no room for modified Africans as anything other than `Other'" (p. 307), is reflected in Terrence Epperson's recent article, "Beyond Biological Reductionism, Ethnicity, and Vulgar Anti-Essentialism: Critical Perspectives on Race and the Practice of African-American Archaeology" (African-American Archaeology: Newsletter of the African-American Archaeology Network, 24 [Spring 1999]). The analysis of power relations in historical context and of the sociopolitics of race today make this book vital to all scholars interested in better understanding the African American experience.

LAURA CROGHAN KAMOIE
The Citadel