I was such a dumb-ass,” he says. “I was looking for hills, hummocks, high ground because that’s what I’d read in the documents: ‘Runaway slaves living on hills....’ I had never set foot in a swamp before. I wasted so much time. Finally, someone asked me if I’d been to the islands in North Carolina. Islands! That was the word I’d been missing.”


The Great Dismal Swamp, now reduced by draining and development, is managed as a federal wildlife refuge. The once-notorious panthers are gone, but bears, birds, deer and amphibians are still abundant. So are venomous snakes and biting insects. In the awful heat and humidity of summer, Sayers assures me, the swamp teems with water moccasins and rattlesnakes. The mosquitoes get so thick that they can blur the outlines of a person standing 12 feet away.

In early 2004, one of the refuge biologists strapped on his waders and brought Sayers to the place we’re going, a 20-acre island occasionally visited by hunters, but completely unknown to historians and archaeologists. Before Sayers, no archaeology had been done in the swamp’s interior, mainly because conditions were so challenging. One research party got lost so many times that it gave up.

When you’ve been toiling through the sucking ooze, with submerged roots and branches grabbing at your ankles, dry solid ground feels almost miraculous. We step onto the shore of a large, flat, sun-dappled island carpeted with fallen leaves. Walking toward its center, the underbrush disappears, and we enter a parklike clearing shaded by a few hardwoods and pines.

“I’ll never forget seeing this place for the first time,” recalls Sayers. “It was one of the greatest moments of my life. I never dreamed of finding a 20-acre island, and I knew instantly it was livable. Sure enough, you can’t put a shovel in the ground anywhere on this island without finding something.”

He has named his excavation areas—the Grotto, the Crest, North Plateau and so on—but he won’t name the island itself. In his academic papers and his 2014 book, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People, Sayers refers to it as the “nameless site.” “I don’t want to put a false name on it,” he explains. “I’m hoping to find out what the people who lived here called this place.” As he sifts the earth they trod, finding the soil footprints of their cabins and tiny fragments of their tools, weapons and white clay pipes, he feels a profound admiration for them, and this stems in part from his Marxism.

“These people performed a critique of a brutal capitalistic enslavement system, and they rejected it completely. They risked everything to live in a more just and equitable way, and they were successful for ten generations. One of them, a man named Charlie, was interviewed later in Canada. He said that all labor was communal here. That’s how it would have been in an African village.”

image: http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/f2/e1/f2e1f359-2932-4f41-aa5f-aa9a7f221eb0/sep2016_b06_greatdismalswamp.jpg

Dan Sayers
During more than ten years of field excavations, archaeologist Dan Sayers has recovered 3,604 artifacts at an island located deep inside the swamp. (Allison Shelley)
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Wherever Africans were enslaved in the world, there were runaways who escaped permanently and lived in free independent settlements. These people and their descendants are known as “maroons.” The term probably comes from the Spanish cimarrón, meaning feral livestock, fugitive slave or something wild and defiant.

Marronage, the process of extricating oneself from slavery, took place all over Latin America and the Caribbean, in the slave islands of the Indian Ocean, in Angola and other parts of Africa. But until recently, the idea that maroons also existed in North America has been rejected by most historians.

“In 2004, when I started talking about large, permanent maroon settlements in the Great Dismal Swamp, most scholars thought I was nuts,” says Sayers. “They thought in terms of runaways, who might hide in the woods or swamps for a while until they got caught, or who might make it to freedom on the Underground Railroad, with the help of Quakers and abolitionists.”

By downplaying American marronage, and valorizing white involvement in the Underground Railroad, historians have shown a racial bias, in Sayers’ opinion, a reluctance to acknowledge the strength of black resistance and initiative. They’ve also revealed the shortcomings of their methods: “Historians are limited to source documents. When it comes to maroons, there isn’t that much on paper. But that doesn’t mean their story should be ignored or overlooked. As archaeologists, we can read it in the ground.”

image: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//embedly/SEP16_COVER.super.mini.jpg.300x0_q85_upscale.jpg

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This article is a selection from the September issue of Smithsonian magazine

BUY
Sayers first heard about the Dismal Swamp maroons from one of his professors at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. They were smoking cigarettes after class in late 2001. Sayers proposed to do his dissertation on the archaeology of 19th-century agriculture. Stifling a yawn, Prof. Marley Brown III asked him what he knew about the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp and suggested this would make a more interesting dissertation project. “It sounded great,” says Sayers. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”

He started doing archival research on the Great Dismal Swamp. He found scattered references to maroons dating back to the early 1700s. The first accounts described runaway slaves and Native Americans raiding farms and plantations, and then disappearing back into the swamp with stolen livestock. In 1714, Alexander Spotswood, the colonial lieutenant governor of Virginia, described the Dismal Swamp as a “No-man’s-land,” to which “Loose and disorderly people daily flock.” Since Africans and African-Americans were not referred to as “people” in the records of 18th-century Virginia, this suggests that poor whites were also joining the swamp communities.

In 1728, William Byrd II led the first survey into the Great Dismal Swamp, to determine the Virginia/North Carolina boundary. He encountered a family of maroons, describing them as “mulattoes,” and was well aware that others were watching and hiding: “It is certain many Slaves Shelter themselves in this Obscure Part of the World....” Byrd, an aristocratic Virginian, loathed his time in the swamp. “Never was rum, that cordial of life, found more necessary than it was in this dirty place.”

From the 1760s until the Civil War, runaway slave ads in the Virginia and North Carolina newspapers often mentioned the Dismal Swamp as the likely destination, and there was persistent talk of permanent maroon settlements in the morass. British traveler J.F.D. Smyth, writing in 1784, gleaned this description: “Runaway negroes have resided in these places for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls.... they have erected habitations, and cleared small fields around them.”

image: http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/12/0c/120ce736-6922-4113-82e2-8c145931babf/sep2016_b10_greatdismalswamp.jpg

Great Dismal Swamp Historical Map
(Martin Sanders)
The most comprehensive work that Sayers found was a 1979 dissertation by an oddball historian named Hugo Prosper Leaming. He was a white Unitarian minister and civil rights activist who managed to get accepted into a Black Muslim temple in Chicago and wore a fez with his Unitarian robes. Leaming surveyed local and state records related to the Dismal Swamp, and scoured unpublished local histories, memoirs and novels for references to maroons. In his dissertation, later published as a book, he presents a detailed account of maroon history in the swamp, with a list of prominent chiefs and vivid descriptions of Africanized religious practices.

“His interpretations are stretchy, but I like the book, and it was useful on the history,” says Sayers. “When it came to the archaeology, I had nothing. I didn’t know where to look, or what to look for. So I decided to survey the swamp, find the high ground and dig there.”




Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/deep-swamps-archaeologists-fugitive-slaves-kept-freedom-180960122/#mjff8z4LAK4rMV8y.99
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