1 Inter‐Quarter Community Relations at James Madison’s Montpelier Matthew C. Greer Paper Presented at the Mid‐ Atlantic Archaeology Conference, Virginia Beach, VA March 25, 2012 During the retirement years (c. 1817 – 1836) James Madison’s Montpelier was home to over one hundred enslaved African‐Americans, living in various quarters located across the property 2700 acre property. These bondsmen and women would have formed their own community, independent of the Madison influence that would have involved not only the enslaved members within the discrete quarters, but throughout the plantation, and the surrounding region. This paper will attempt to look these community relations between two of the many enslaved households; the Stable Quarter in the Stable Quarter Complex, and the Southeast Duplex located in the South Yard Quarter. These sites have been recently been extensively excavated and analyzed as part of a three year project to form a comparative analysis of slave life on the plantation. This research will be conducted by using an analysis of the potential flow of commodities and ideas between these quarters. Since its inception in the late 1960's, the archaeology of the African Diaspora has gone through many primary themes; from an early emphasis on an understanding the material culture of enslaved African Americans to later focuses on such topics as the effect of racialization amongst enslaved populations, the material aspects of resistance to Euro‐American domination and the physical remains of various cultural Africanisms (Ferguson 1992, Wilkie 2004). Within the various research avenues available to scholars, the study of the community relations between African American individuals residing on plantations across the antebellum South is just starting to be studied in its own right (e.g. Young et al. 2001, Battle 2004, Young 2004, Kowal 2007, Battle‐Baptiste 2010, Reeves 2010, Brock 2011), along with the study of African Americans communities residing outside this system of bondage (e.g. Bower and Rushing 1980, Green et al. 1994, Brock 2011), and the study of these communities across the Caribbean (Wilke and Farnsworth 2005, Reeves 2011b). This line of research provides archaeologists with an incredible potential for teasing out the invisible threads that tied together the individual men and women held in the racially oppressive system of bondage that existed across the Americas. Despite the potential amount of informational that can be gained from these community studies within the historical archaeology of the African Diaspora, these concerns have historically been the realm of historians and folklorists since the rise of the New Social History movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s (e.g. Blassingame 1972, Genovese 1976, Vlach 1991, Mattoso 1996, Morgan 1998, Chambers 2005). Most of the archaeological studies that have looked at community aspects within enslaved populations have been conducted outside of Virginia, particularly outside of the Piedmont region of the state (e.g. Young 2001, Battle 2004, Young 2004, Battle‐Baptiste 2010, Galle 2010, Brock 2011). Given the sparse understanding of this regional context, recent excavations undertaken at James’s Madison's Montpelier have a unique ability to aide in filling in this gap in our knowledge of the African American past (Reeves 2010). Through a three year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Montpelier Archaeology Department is in the process of excavating numerous households from three of the main quarters occupied by enslaved African Americans during the Madison's Retirement years, c. 1817 – 1836. Since all three of the quarters have contemporary occupation dates and an excellent preservation of their archaeological record, they provide an ideal data set for a comparison of 19 th century enslaved life ways from this region (Reeves 2010). Based off this ongoing work, two of these three quarters have been selected for an analysis of the potential community relations between their inhabitants. This study will be conducted through the analyzing the flow of material