Slavery in the Age of Reason: Archaeology at a New England Farm

“A beautifully written work of considerable ambition, intense curiosity, and admirable inter-disciplinarity. […] In producing a work of real historical significance, [Chan] rises to the challenge of Edward Thomspon, whose Making of the English Working Class represents one of the founding texts of modern social history. To Thompson, it was a duty of the discipline to help the marginalized and oppressed to have their voices heard against ‘enormous condescension of posterity.’ Chan has responded to that challenge and done so admirably.”

— Anthony Mann, Ph.D., Director of Research and Policy at the UK’s Education and Employer Taskforce in Brighton.

“Taking a new approach of reading identity through material culture, Chan writes in a narrative style that is both accessible and engaging to […] a larger, appreciative audience.”

– Turkiya L. Lowe, National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers.

Offering a rare look into the lives of enslaved peoples and slaveholders in early New England, Slavery in the Age of Reason analyzes the results of extensive archaeological excavations at the Isaac Royall House and Slave Quarters, a National Historic Landmark and museum in Medford, Massachusetts.

Isaac Royall (1677-1739) was the largest slave owner in Massachusetts in the mid-eighteenth century, and in this book the Royall family and their slaves become the central characters in a compelling cultural-historical narrative. The family’s ties to both Massachusetts and Antigua provide a comparative perspective on the transcontinental development of modern ideologies of individualism, colonialism, slavery, and race.

Alexandra A. Chan examines the critical role of material culture in the construction, mediation, and maintenance of social identities and relationships between slaves and masters at the farm. She explores landscapes and artifacts discovered at the site not just as inanimate objects or “cultural leftovers,” but rather as physical embodiments of the assumptions, attitudes, and values of  the people who built, shaped, or used them. These material things, she argues, provide a portal into the mind-set of people long gone-not just of the Royall family who controlled much of the material world at the farm, but also of the enslaved, who made up the majority of inhabitants at the site, and who left few other records of their experience.

Using traditional archaeological techniques and analysis, as well as theoretical perspectives and representational styles of post-processualist schools of thought, Slavery in the Age of Reason is an innovative volume that portrays the Royall family and the people they enslaved “from the inside out.” It should put to rest any lingering myth that the peculiar institution was any less harsh or complex when found in the North.