From Coercion to Compensation: Labor Systems and Spatial Practice on a Plural Farmstead, Long Island

This dissertation examines the transition from enslaved to free labor and how new relations between those imposing labor and those implementing it unfolded in daily practice. The context is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plural farmstead in Setauket on Long Island, New York. Known locally as the Thompson House, the site was home to five generations of the Thompson family and their many enslaved and waged laborers. Overtime, however, the people of color who lived with and labored for the Thompson family have been forgotten and their contributions to the making of this historical site are obscured in the reproduction of local narratives and histories. Consequently, nonwhite laborers have been symbolically annihilated from the Thompson landscape, but also across Setauket and Long Island. Normally, historical archaeology is well equipped methodologically and analytically to recover history's forgotten people. The power of traditional tools and analyses archaeologists typically rely on to "give a voice the the voiceless" wanes on sites of acute plurality where spaces, practices, and objects were shared by diverse people on a daily basis.;This project takes a multiscalar approach to the Thompson House by tacking back and forth between household-level idiosyncrasies and broader patterns of historical and social development. This approach is accomplished by applying theories of practice. For the purposes of this dissertation, "practice" is the interface of overarching structures and individual or collective agency. This study conceptualizes work as practice; the material expression of the social relations of labor and the constraints they bring to bear on the agents (those imposing and those implementing) who are entangled within their systems. Applying this perspective to the Thompson House sidesteps the pitfalls of traditional approaches that ultimately render the subaltern "invisible" in archaeological interpretation. As I demonstrate with this study, a labor-as-practice approach brings to light the activities and practices of all people, thus providing a more comprehensive and accurate rendering of historical development that considers the full range of people who contributed to its making.;Three overarching and interrelated objectives drive this research. The first objective is to develop a precise list of those people who previously occupied the Thompson House and homelot using the documentary archive. Determining particularities of household and agricultural production and who performed what types of labor is a derivative of this initial goal. The second objective is to create a biography of the Thompson's house; that is, I determine using historical, archaeological, and architectural data how the house was built and how the family changed the architectural fabric over time. The third and final objective is to gather the macro, micro, and soil chemical data needed to analyze how the use of yard space changed over time. Organizing data collected for all three objectives chronologically (i.e., before, during, and after emancipation) allows us to track how relations between the Thompson family and their nonwhite workers unfolded in daily practice as they transitioned to a system of wage labor on Long Island. More importantly, it allows us to "see" the very people who have ultimately been elided from historical memory.;My findings indicate the Thompson family altered their domestic landscape as New York slowly dismantled the system of slavery that supported the colonial and young state's economy. First, alterations to the house added spaces dedicated to household and agricultural labor. Consequently, free workers were increasingly removed from public areas of the home and concealed in rooms or behind walls as they carried out their labor. Second, archaeological and soil chemical analysis reveals the Thompson's yard transitioned from a utilitarian workspace for domestic and agricultural labor under slavery to a more symbolic, manicured lawn under wage labor. Again, workers who once occupied the yard as they conducted daily and seasonal labor were removed to spaces beyond the homelot.;On the one hand, each of these findings---the architectural changes and use of space---fit into existing narratives and historical patterns that center developing standards of privacy and progressive expansion in agricultural production, respectively. On the other hand, interpreting the changes alongside the new relations of production---or from a labor-as-practice perspective, as I do here---provides a more nuanced understanding of the patterns uncovered at the Thompson House. I argue the architectural changes and changing use of yard space are the result of daily practices that brought about and (re)produced social relations of production that organized those imposing and those implementing labor. I also consider these findings as the material origins of the historical amnesia that erased nonwhite people from historical sites like the Thompsons. Distancing nonwhite workers by relocating their spaces of work to areas beyond the homelot or by concealing their movement and labor within the home, families like the Thompsons masked plural space as homogenously white, which continues to impact interpretations and representations of local histories.