The Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina is today a National Wildlife Refuge, located in at the edges of the Norfolk metro region. Before the Civil War, the swamp was much larger than it is today and was a landscape that had many meanings for people. It was an important place for a wide range of reasons—economic, social, symbolic, ideological, and political. Since 2001, archaeologists have excavated and continue analysis of sites located in the current swamp that are associated with African American and Indigenous American resistance communities that formed deep in the swamp between ca. 1607 and 1863. The long-buried material culture and architectural residues have given us a look into daily lives that were spent forging and maintaining a new society in the swamp across many generations. Of course, changes happened across those centuries within the swamp and archaeologists have tracked some of those as well. The evidence so far gives us insights into the profound importance of place, geography, and landscape for the hidden historical people and social world that thrived in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Dan Sayers is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at American University. A native of Michigan, Dan is a historical archaeologist who is known for his work in the Great Dismal Swamp and in several other areas of American history. His book (A Desolate Place for a Defiant People, University Press of Florida, 2014) provides his most detailed discussion of the swamp’s people and his forthcoming book (The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed, University Press of Florida, 2023) will continue that discussion but take it in new directions. As a public-facing researcher, Dan has discussed the people of the Great Dismal Swamp with an international audience (through television, filmic, radio and printed media) and helped nurture global appreciation of its radical people and history across the past two decades.