Alumni Engagement Events
[PAST EVENT] Dan Sayers: "Creating Home: African and Native American Resistance Communities of the Dismal Swamp"
Access & Features
- Open to the public
Join the W&M Anthropology Department for their Inaugural Anthropology Enlightenment Lecture this Homecoming Weekend as Dr. Daniel O. Sayers, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at American University, presents "Creating Home: African and Native American Resistance Communities of the Great Dismal Swamp."
From the earliest days of colonial settlement and conquest in the 1600s to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Indigenous and African Americans settled the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. At around 2,000 square miles, the swamp could and did accommodate a lot of people. Sayers’s archaeological research has focused for nearly two decades on the communities that people of the historical period,
including African American Maroons, established for a variety of reasons across those 250+ years. Still, it is clear that resistance and defiance of the laws, orders, and economies of the colonial and enslaving worlds outside the swamp were important factors in the peopling of the Dismal Swamp. In this Homecoming presentation, Sayers will provide the William and Mary Anthropology community with some updates on the swamp project and include some new, if tentative, ideas about how swamp residents created spaces and places of “home” and homeland within the seeming unforgiving morass.