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DTIC ADA127617: Waverly Plantation: Ethnoarchaeology of a Tenant Farming Community,
This report presents results of an ethnoarchaeological study of Waverly Plantation in Clay County, Mississippi. The community focus makes the archaeological data more compatible with the oral history and history collected at the same time. The study of tenant farmers at Waverly Plantation used a multidisciplinary approach to obtain and synthesize data on extinct community. Archaeology, history, and oral history present both overlapping and divergent viewpoints to cross-check and supplement each other. The Waverly study makes several important contributions. This is the first systematic study of tenant farmers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries making use of material culture, oral testimony, and written documents. Much research has been done on antebellum plantations but little on their postbellum counterparts. The Waverly study continues that research past the Civil War and into the mid-20th century demonstrating the survival of the plantation as an economic system up to the present. The Upper Tombigbee River plantations are among the least studied in the South, for Waverly Plantation was the first. The Waverly study also contributes to black history by presenting a unique local history about black tenant farmers, a group conspicuously missing from many histories.
