Gullah-Geechee Archaeology: The Living Space of Enslaved Geechee on Sapelo Island

African American archaeology has, for 40 years now, contributed an impressive amount of new information about undocumented conditions and the day-to-day lives of chattel slaves. That same archaeological record provides a better understanding of the processes involved in the creation and maintenance of creole cultures spawned by the African diaspora.This report is concerned with archaeological information about the creation and use of space at 19th century slave settlements on Sapelo Island, Georgia (Figure 1), with an emphasis on settlement layout and domestic architecture. From an anthropological perspective, it is more basically about an enslaved community who developed a creole culture known as Geechee. As a prelude to the following discussion, it is important to reiterate a fundamental point made in 1976 by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1992:14). "[T]he Africans in any New World colony in fact became a community and began to share a culture only insofar as, and as fast as, they themselves created them."