Interview with Uzi Baram, Ph.D.
Discipline: Archaeology
September, 2005

Q: How did you become involved in the Looking For Angola Project?
A: My training is as a historical archaeologist. As a historical archaeologist, my interest is actually pretty broad, with fieldwork both in North America and the Middle East. When I was hired here at New College back in the late 1990s, I decided I would give my students some experience with historical archaeology, which meant doing some local projects. I quickly teamed up with Sarasota County archaeologists and engaged in some small scale projects.

What was very evident after the second project was how much issues of race haunt the recent past of Sarasota and Manatee Counties. As I was talking to various local historians and local archaeologists, and just getting involved with the community, one of the things I heard about was Angola. It just really captured my imagination, I saw the article by Canter Brown, Jr., and it seemed to me that Angola was obviously very important to look for, but I knew at the time that I was not the person to do it, and particularly not at that point.

Then a year and a half ago, I get a phone call and Vickie Oldham comes into my office, and she comes in like a firestorm [laughs], with a wonderful very positive energy. She had heard from one of my colleagues here about my work as a historical archaeologist, and just came knocking. I quickly recognized that this was the person who could pull it off, and that would do the project the way I thought it needed to be done, that is, with the African American community. It wasn't about myself just walking in and finding something. That appealed to Vickie. She understood that very well, more than actually I ever could have hoped.

And so the partnership developed. I helped her write up the grant proposals and then volunteered my time to do the public education campaigns and to start doing some serious research into Angola.

Q: Why do you feel this research is important?
A: My sense is that the larger component of looking for Angola is what is referred to in historical archaeology as African American Archaeology, revealing the lives of people whose efforts, labors, struggles aren't well documented in the historical record. Angola as a settlement, as a community, reminds us of people's struggles.

People struggled mightily for freedom, and they overcame tremendous obstacles both geographic (in getting from Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama to the Manatee River in Florida) and in the struggle to try to live as free people, as others were trying to capture them as property, and trying to negotiate a new way of life in a very challenging environment.

My sense is the more we can remember about these maroon communities, the more we can demolish the racist assumption that people were willing to live as slaves. These communities show that people did not want to live as slaves. They refused to accept that tyranny, and they had to take great chances to escape it and live as free people. So Angola is part of that larger story of maroon communities, and it provides an example of one locally.

And my sense from Canter Brown's research is that Angola is an important example of a maroon community, one that should receive more attention. Archaeological evidence of Angola will facilitate such attention.

Q: What do you hope will come out of this research?
A: On one level, that of the archaeological research, hopefully we'll find material evidence of Angola. Thanks to the efforts of Canter Brown, we have documentary evidence, archival evidence, but we don't yet have clear material evidence of this community.

So the first aspect is just finding Angola as a settlement, as a place, and finding the things people used in their daily lives. The second aspect is to better understand what Angola really was. Combining the archival record with, hopefully, the material record that will come forward, will bring forth the textures of people's lives and some of the choices they made.

The third goal, and one that's concurrent with the first two, is education, to let the larger public know about this community, to know about the history of people who escaped slavery by going down into Spanish La Florida, and thanks to the work of Rosalyn Howard, to connect that story to the people of Red Bays in the Bahamas, and really shine a light on this quest for liberty and freedom.

Q: What role does archaeology play in the search itself?
A: The first level is just finding material evidence, finding the location of the community. We have a fairly good idea of where that might have been, but we don't yet have any evidence of the actual place. So the archaeology at this point really fits the popular image of archaeology, and that is excavation.

We need to survey and excavate and locate material evidence. Once we have the evidence, that's where historical archaeology will come in, and we will compare the documentary evidence with the material evidence. We're still at that first stage of just looking, around the Manatee River region, for traces of the settlement.

Q: What challenges do you, as an archaeologist, face in the search?
A: I think there are several challenges for this archaeology. The one that I think we're starting to meet is gaining community support. With the ethics of archaeology today, one does not just go in and look for things, but needs to get support, one, of local communities, people living in the place, and two, of descendant communities. In our case that includes the people of Red Bays who may indeed be the actual descendants of the people who lived at Angola, and then more generally, people who feel kinship to the people of Angola.

I think we're meeting that challenge. We haven't met it, but I think that we are gaining in meeting that challenge. Thanks to what you're doing with the webpage, thanks to the lecture series that we've done, to the video that's coming, then more lectures, more community outreach, we're going to meet that challenge of community support.

The second level of challenge is that there's a lot of development around that river. There are a lot of single family houses, and so there's the challenge of getting the permission of individual land owners to excavate on their lands, to survey and to look for the evidence. That's a big challenge, because it means talking to a lot of people to assure them that they can contribute to a larger good, without losing any of their property rights. The people I have spoken with have been tremendously supportive, excited, and willing to contribute.

The third challenge is going to be one that we haven't faced yet, but one that at one point will come up. In archaeology, the identification with historical documents is always difficult. There are always going to be questions about the materials we find, and how they connect to what the documentary evidence puts forward. That's going to take a whole series of good methodological techniques to pull that together. So, we can look forward to that issue, but that's still in the future, since we don't have the material yet. It is a problem I’m looking forward to having [laughs].

Q: How will you know when you have found Angola? How would you distinguish it, say, from an early settler's home?
A: That's one of the wonderful things about being a historical archaeologist is the knowledge that scholars have already wrestled with identification of sites and come up with methodologies for addressing that issue. In going through the history of the Manatee River region, we see that Angola would have been one of the first large-scale modern settlements down there. We have enough of a sense, thanks to the work of archaeologists and historians, of the history of settlements.

There were the Native peoples and their archaeological evidence that's been documented. When the Spanish came in they just passed through, they didn't set up permanent settlements in this region, so the next settlements come with the Cuban fishermen. As far as the evidence points, it was a coastal phenomenon. They would have been on the barrier islands and at the mouth of the Manatee River, but not inland. While the Seminole people used the inland area, the people of Angola likely had a slightly different set of materials that they would have used.

Thanks to the work of people like Dr. Brent Weisman at USF, we know what the material record for the Seminoles looks like at this time period. The only time that people came from the US was considerably after Angola, a few decades later. And so if we find evidence from the early nineteenth century, if we find ceramic and glass and other materials that can be dated to that period, that's going to be a really good inference that it's Angola. It won't be any proof-positive of Angola, but it's going to be a really good hint.

Once we have that material, there is a whole series of techniques that African American Archaeology has come up with to help us link it to what Canter Brown has found in the historical record, and ultimately we're going to connect it with what Rosalyn Howard has shown about the people of the Bahamas at Red Bays. We know a bit, from her work, about their material culture, and so we're going to connect the dots from the plantations of the American South to the Bahamas and fill the gap in the geography with the research at the Manatee River.

This work is larger than just Angola itself. We're going to bring in Terrance Weik from the University of South Carolina, who did the archaeological work at Pilaklikaha. That work is invaluable in terms of connecting the pieces. There's the work that's been done on the African Burial Ground in New York City that has provided a whole series of techniques and methodologies that will be useful. The work at New Philadelphia, in Illinois, is yet again a very large project with a lot of wonderful scholars.

We're going to be reaching into experience with techniques and theories. There's the work in Brazil at Palmares, the very large seventeenth century maroon community, that's going to be helpful. So, none of us have to rely just on our own wits. There is a whole network of scholars throughout the rest of the Americas, who have been struggling with how to identify maroon communities and how to analyze them. And so we'll be asking for their help.

Q: What can archaeology tell us about Angola and the people who lived there? What can it not tell us?
A: What archaeology brings forward are several types of information. First is location. It can tell us where Angola was, and hopefully it will tell us the extent of Angola. Canter Brown has put forward in presentations the fact that there may have been as many as 700 people living in Angola. One way to know for sure of the number of people there is to have a sense of the number of houses and the extent of the settlement. So archaeology can recover the size of the place and the density of the housing. That will tell us something about the number of people at the site, it won't tell us the exact number, but it will give us a better sense of the scale of Angola.

Second, it will tell us what people were doing with their daily lives. They lived for a couple of decades as free people. Were they fishing in the Manatee River? Were they hunting game? What kind of foods were they eating? Archaeology is very good at recovering that sort of everyday life. What sort of materials were they using? Were they making their own pottery? Were they using ceramics that they got from their British allies at a trading post that may have been associated with Angola? Were they trading with the Cuban fishermen for Cuban-made goods? Did they bring anything from the north, when they came down? The archaeology will tell us about the material culture, the everyday things: how they lived their lives, what they ate, as well as the size of the community. All of this is the positive benefit of the archaeology.

What archaeology doesn't tell us are the names of these people. We're not going to get a sense of their personalities. We already have a bit of a sense about that, just because they escaped slavery, about what kind of people they were.

They were freedom-loving people. But we might not get too much further than that. We can't really recover their feelings, and the fear they might have had when they heard of raiders coming in. So that's the inference that just won't be possible, but we're going to get a better sense of what archaeologists refer to as the cultural landscape, the sort of place they built. By seeing the place they built, we'll probably get a better sense of what kind of people they possibly were.

Q: Do you expect to find evidence of families there?
A: Yes. I suspect if we are able to find their houses, huts and the rest, we'll probably be able to recover some sense of their family structure.

Q: Are there specific research questions or problems that you will be investigating?
A: The first set of issues that I think we're going to address is the cultural landscape of the settlement. Charles Orser has done some impressive work in Brazil, on the cultural landscape of Palmares, on what that maroon community looked like and how its inhabitants built a landscape of resistance.

I think we can actually build an image, once we start finding some material evidence, of what the place was like, how they used the river as the boundary, what some of the other boundaries of the place were, and how they used the natural environment as part of their home. That's the first level of research question, what was the cultural landscape like?

The second question, we know from Rosalyn Howard's work, that they ultimately become Black Seminoles, and we know that by the 1840s, it is common to refer to Black Seminoles in Florida. The research question is: What was their identity? How did they materially identify themselves? Were they closely connected to the Seminole people? Were they more closely associated with the life they knew in the United States? Were they still maintaining African-ness? I suspect it's not going to be only one of those. It will be a combination of all of those. So how they identified themselves and how they created new identities for themselves on the Manatee River is going to be the question.

Q: Once you recover artifacts, what will become of them? How will they be used, and where will they be kept?
A: By state law, when we excavate on private property, any materials found actually belong to the land owner. So we'll need permission from the landowner to use the artifacts for education. I suspect that won't be a huge problem, I think everyone is pretty excited about the educational aspect of this project. We expect to find everyday materials that aren't necessarily valuable on their own merit, but precious in context. I think most people are really excited to help.

Once we have the material, we're going to need a permanent location for it. I hope that it's going to be near the Manatee River, that one of the local institutions will allow us to display the materials in their facility, or maybe, and this is, of course, more like a dream, we could actually create a facility, an interpretive center. I suspect we'll follow the example of Kathy Deagan and Jane Landers with Fort Mosé, and have some kind of display in the place, a research area for the materials, and a traveling exhibit.

I think that's a very sound approach: a place for analyzing the materials, a place the public can visit to view and learn about the materials, and there's no reason we should be selfish and keep it here [laughs]. Having a traveling exhibit would work really well. I think there would be interest in it, a national interest, and possibly even international interest.

Q: What's next for your portion of the research?
A: We have a wonderful team of scholars involved in this project. What I can contribute is to explore a portion of the river and do some more research. At De Soto National Park, which is at the mouth of the Manatee River, there's a nineteenth century structure, which was tested by a National Park Service archaeologist several years ago. The ceramics dated to the early nineteenth century, the period of Angola. And that's really intriguing.

We know from the historical record that the British supported these maroon communities and set up trading posts. Where the tabby house ruin sits is a wonderful place for such a facility, just by a protected cove, not visible from the Gulf of Mexico, but a very useful location for sending things up the river. So I am going to work on getting some grants with one of my former students, and in partnership with the National Park Service, excavate at the tabby house ruins, and see if we can connect that structure definitively to the nineteenth century, and maybe to the British filibusters who supported Angola. So maybe we will have a chance to begin telling that portion of the story of Angola.

Q: What does Angola have to teach us in the present?
A: The most important lesson from Angola was that freedom was a goal for the enslaved. People undertook incredible challenges to live as free people. Some of those amazing challenges, those amazing struggles, took place here, in our neighborhood.

When we think of the land that we are walking on or driving past, we should remember what happened here. We need to remember the Native peoples who were here before the Spanish, we need to remember the Spanish conquest, we need to know about the Seminoles and their ways of life.

And, we should know about this group of people who moved down here and created what Canter Brown refers to as a "beacon of freedom." We need to know about those who struggled, who were ultimately defeated when the settlement was destroyed, but somehow went across the state, across the Florida Straits, and got to the Bahamas, and their descendants in the present live as free people.

In the mid-nineteenth century Joshua Giddings wrote about escaped slaves as Exiles, with a religious connotation. Angola is part of an Exodus story: to escape slavery and go all the way from Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, through the panhandle, down the coast, and then ultimately to the Bahamas is an amazing story.

We need to remember those who were killed, the hundreds who were captured, and we can't forget those who died trying to live as free people, but we can really celebrate those who succeeded. Their descendants in Red Bays were able to live in freedom. That's a tremendously important lesson for the present.

Living in liberty and freedom did not come easily. People struggled mightily in the past; the story of the strength of these people is an amazing story to know.

Q: What else would you like for our readers to know?
A: I think that in this region, where so much development sprang up that doesn't seem connected to the landscape: nice straight roads, and developments that just grow in every direction, it's easy to not recognize that there is a rich history under our feet.

There are what anthropologists refer to as "hidden histories," parts of the past that just don't make it into the mainstream histories, histories that we can discover, that we can learn about, to enrich our sense of this place, and I think enrich our sense of the human condition. We can learn a little more about what people are capable of, and the story of Angola says that people are capable of just amazing things. I think it helps us to see the present slightly differently, and maybe helps us to imagine a different future.