The Tip of the Iceberg: Structural Violence in the Archaeological Record
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery are acts of violence rooted in a longer history of racism, inequality and enslavement in the United States. Physical violence against Black people is often the most visceral display of a racist society, the tip of a much larger iceberg created and maintained by structural violence.
When violence becomes embedded within the political, economic, and social foundations of a society, it is termed structural violence. Structural violence renders a specific group, often based on race, class or gender, vulnerable to politically or socially accepted forms of suffering (Martin & Herrod, 2015). The experiences of emotional, mental, economic, social, and spiritual abuse become a series of daily traumas operating unseen, like an iceberg below the surface.
While physical violence could be seen as the most direct and harmful form of structural violence, it represents just one of the multiple ways in which abuse becomes normalized. As a consequence, these lived realities are often left unquestioned or perpetuated by members of society, especially those belonging to groups which benefit from these behaviors. Thus, much like the waters surrounding an iceberg, acts of structural violence are often hidden by the systems that are responsible for creating them in the first place.
Black Lives Matter Protest, Denver CO. Logan Weaver on Unsplash.
In order to identify structural violence in the past, archaeologists begin by attempting to understand the traces that physical violence leaves behind. Biological anthropologist Dr. Carlina de la Cova has written extensively on the importance of integrating contextual information, such as historical documents, in the interpretation of physical trauma seen in human skeletal collections (de la Cova 2019, 2012, 2011). She argues that this is especially important when thinking about the ways that structural violence impacts marginalized communities. Such contextual information adds a deeper dimension in the interpretation of the lived experience surrounding, and potentially influencing, the trauma recorded in bone (de la Cova 2012).
This means that while bone fractures and breaks can represent evidence of trauma in a skeleton, not all trauma leaves a mark. Thus, it is essential to consider the different ways that structural violence can be interpreted using the archaeological record, especially in early colonial North America.
Avery’s Rest is a small plantation on Delaware’s eastern shore that was occupied from 1680-1710. Since 2015, a team of colleagues and I have tried to understand the lived experiences of the eight European and three African individuals buried there (Fleskes et al., 2019). The African individuals, two adult males and a child, are the earliest to have been discovered in Delaware, and were enslaved by the European individuals buried near them. This makes Avery’s Rest an ideal site to investigate the roots of structural violence related to slavery in the archaeological record.
1688 Map of Present-Day Delaware, as claimed by the colony of Maryland. The red start marks the location of Avery’s Rest. Image courtesy of the Darlington Memorial Library.
The lives of the European individuals buried at Avery’s Rest were relatively easy to reconstruct from documents linked to their White and land-owning status. For the African individuals, reconstructing their lived experience was a different matter. To understand how structural violence manifested itself at Avery’s Rest, we needed to use many different methods of analysis – from documents, bones, and even DNA – to glean information about their lived experiences.
This difficulty stems partly from the fact that the documentary records of the African individuals at Avery’s Rest are sparse. We only have one document that mentions them. This estate inventory record states that two “negros ware dead” and thus should removed from a property evaluation previously conducted. In and of itself, the lack of documentation for these individuals is a reflection of the structural violence of enslavement, i.e., an erasure of the histories and identities of these individuals who lived and died at Avery’s Rest. In addition, it also represents two direct ways that structural violence is manifested at Avery’s Rest: (1) these individuals are recorded as property, and not as people; and (2) we have no other forms of establishing their identity beyond their classification as “negro”. I consider these aspects to be clear acts of structural violence, as they represent the sanctioned commodification of human lives during the colonial period.
1690 Court document describing the passing of the two enslaved African individuals at Avery’s Rest. Photo by author.
The interpretation of physical trauma is more complex. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution found that the only evidence of physical trauma to the remains found at Avery’s Rest occurring near the time of death was a facial fracture on the cheekbone of one adult African male. We know this because the area surrounding the bone showed no signs of healing, meaning it occurred at the time of death, or shortly thereafter. This type of break is also termed a Boxer’s Fracture. The fracturing of the cheek bone occurs from trauma to the face, either by force extended from another individual (such as a punch) or from a fall. Due to the nature of the break, we do not know exactly whether it occurred as a result of physical trauma at the hands of another person, or by accident in a fall that occurred after the individual died.
Yet, the circumstances regarding this individual’s death are suspect. While lacking any records of the incident, we do know that he died around the same time as the other adult African male. In addition, this break is the only evidence of trauma, at or near the time of death, in the burials at Avery’s Rest. Whatever the circumstances, we know that social interactions at Avery’s Rest occurred under the institution of enslavement. This means that power was unequally distributed and likely influenced the circumstances leading to the death of this individual – this is structural violence.
Other forms of evidence can be used to inform ways that structural violence may have been recorded in the archaeological record. With permission from the descendent communities, DNA testing was conducted to investigate whether individuals were related to each other in the burial ground. For our initial testing, we sequenced a portion of the mitochondrial DNA – this is a small segment of DNA that is inherited directly from the mother, meaning that it represents an individual’s maternal lineage.
For the European individuals, we found that half of them shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequence. This finding suggested that these individuals were maternally related and buried in a family group. By contrast, none of the African individuals shared the same mitochondrial DNA sequence. In fact, they were all very different, and likely originally came from different areas in Africa. This means that the African individuals were not buried with their maternal biological family.
It is possible that the two adult males and the child of African descent were related on the paternal (father’s) side of the family. Current analysis of their entire genome sequences will help us check on this possibility. In addition, it is possible that all of the European individuals possessed the same mitochondrial DNA sequence simply by chance. However, the probability of this happening is quite low, as their sequence is relatively rare in current European populations.
The fact remains that the European individuals were buried alongside individuals with whom they shared a maternal biological relationship, while the African individuals were not. This speaks to the privileging of being buried with biological kin in death and burial contexts during the colonial period. In addition, the presence or absence of biological family for the European and African individuals illuminates the violence inherent in separating family members that routinely occurred in processes of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. I also consider these facts another clear indication of structural violence enacted at Avery’s Rest.
In the time of Black Lives Matter, it is important to illuminate the history of structural violence in the archaeological record because, much like an iceberg, structural violence is hidden by the colonialist systems that created them. At Avery’s Rest, the lack of direct documentation of African individuals is a direct product of the structural violence embedded in the slave economy of colonial America. The visible form of direct violence as evidenced by the trauma in an adult African male is also observed, even though we don’t know the exact circumstances that resulted in this individual’s death. The interpretation of this observation in the context of the DNA evidence shows us that, in death, African individuals were not buried with maternal biological kin. These are likely only a fraction of the abuses resulting from structural violence - the tip of the iceberg – not recorded in the archaeological record. Thus, the interpretation of lived experience requires inferring evidence from as many different sources as possible to deepen our understanding of this country’s colonial past.
Bibliography:
de la Cova, C. (2011). Cultural patterns of trauma among 19th-century-born males in cadaver collections. American Anthropologist, 112(4), 589–606. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01278.x
de la Cova, C. (2012). Patterns of trauma and violence in 19th-century-born African American and Euro-American females. International Journal of Paleopathology, 2(2–3), 61–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpp.2012.09.009
de la Cova, C. (2019). Marginalized bodies and the construction of the Robert J. Terry anatomical skeletal collection: A promised land lost. In M. L. Mant & A. J. Holland (Eds.) (pp. 133–155). London: Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815224-9.00007-5
Fleskes, R. E., Bruwelheide, K. S., West, F. L., Owsley, D. W., Griffith, D. R., Barca, K. G., … Schurr, T. G. (2019). Ancient DNA and bioarchaeological perspectives on European and African diversity and relationships on the colonial Delaware frontier. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 170(2), 232–245. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23887
Martin, D. L., & Harrod, R. P. (2015). Bioarchaeological contributions to the study of violence. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 156(S59), 116–145. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22662
Raquel Fleskes is a Ph.D. Candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research intercepts with the study of colonial America by using genetic methods to identify ancestry and relationships at archaeological sites and within contemporary descendent communities.
(c) 2020 Raquel Fleskes