Reordering the Landscape: Science, Nature, and Spirituality at Wye House

Abstract

This dissertation draws on literature and theoretical frameworks of gardening and social ordering that examine early Euro-American and African-American material culture as they came together on the plantation landscape at Wye House. Located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the plantation was home to the Welsh Lloyd family and hundreds of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. Using archaeological and archeobotanical remains of garden related buildings and slave dwellings, this project acknowledges the different possible interactions and understandings of nature at Wye House and how this gave shape to a dynamic, culturally-based, and entangled landscape of imposed and hidden meanings, colonization and resistance.