 Today, we have a talk about her research from Elena Cezma, whom many of you probably know is a president's postdoctoral fellow here for the year, or 11 months, as she tells me, because she's on her way to a spanking new tenure-track job in anthropology at the University of Kentucky, she reminds me. So thank you for your call. Thank you. And be her, and I'll kiss these grad students and see if it does happen. And she's from Maryland and did her BA at the University of Maryland. And then she went up to Massachusetts for her graduate work, where she has a PhD anthropology from UMass and Hearst. She is an historical archaeologist with particular interest in black feminist theory and community-engaged research. And she says she's a bit of a Caribbeanist and a bit of a mid-Atlanticist, if that's the word. But she looks to get into super interesting studying this phenomenon of loyalist subjects displaced from the colonies by the revolution, who took themselves up to maritime Canada and tried to transplant there a, I'll be a Marxist slave motor production, not very successfully, super interesting. Anyway, but today she's going to talk to us about her fieldwork, I assume related to your dissertation, right? In the Bahamas, on the island of Eleuthera, and in particular Miller's plantation, and cotton plantation, I guess, which was operative for sort of the first few decades in the 19th century, where she's carried out work which involves, I guess, landscape studies, as well as pretty intensive ethnographic work, interviewing the descendants, I guess, of the people who work the estate, and then, I guess, inherited its lands. So rather than me pretending I know what she wants, I'll just turn it over to her. And let's hear what she has to say about this interesting project. All right. Thank you. Well, I'm really happy and honored to be here today. I know this is a pretty busy week, so thanks for coming. As Ted said, I'll be talking about some of the work I did for my dissertation, which was a long-term community-based project in the Bahamas, specifically on the island of Eleuthera, based around this early 19th century cotton plantation. So over the course of five years, I worked with community organizations and individuals who descended from the early 19th century enslaved population of the Miller's estate to document sites of collective memory and sites for potential archaeological investigation. And in the background of this project, sort of throughout the entire time I was there, there was also a highly contentious legal battle around who had right to this acreage. So in this talk, I'll really be describing how a lot of these things intersected in my research, peripherally around the research, and how it led me to a new understanding of contemporary archaeology as a way of approaching traditionally historic sites. So historical archaeologists of the African diaspora in North America and the Caribbean have long taken the plantation as a site of major research interest. Others have looked more closely at specifically post-emancipation sites to expand the archaeological record of the African diaspora beyond experiences of just slavery. But today I'll be discussing a site that originated as a cotton plantation in the early 19th century, but its history of agricultural production and occupation extends through the present day. So I draw on a genealogy of African diaspora archaeology of plantation and post-emancipation sites in the Caribbean and especially in the Bahamas. So in most cases, the archaeological study of plantation sites is limited to the period of enslavement or immediately following emancipation. In this case, the former plantation estate is still very much a part of people's lives, their political advocacy and local community development. During this course of research, I was often struck by the somewhat contradictory ways that my participants framed their relationship to and their knowledge about the 19th century Miller's plantation. On one hand, the local community had mobilized around their ancestral connections to the plantation property in the face of this legal suit, often referring to themselves as descendants of the Miller estate. But on the other hand, when talking about the landscape that included the Miller's plantation, folks spoke more openly about the history of this region in just the last century, really only addressing the plantation history when prompted by my specific questioning. So it was through, and I should just give you a little introduction to where we are. The Bahamas is huge. So the island that I'm focusing on is kind of, say, dolphin-shaped. It's very long and skinny. And it's the very southern end of the island of Eleuthera. So it is really this very small region within this massive archipelago. So it was through community-based engagement and collaboration with present-day residents, many of whom trace their family roots back to the enslaved population of the early 19th century, that the project developed a distinctly contemporary approach to the study of landscape and its historical materiality. From a focus on the plantation estate's early 19th century history and the remaining plantation-era structures, the project shifted to examine both the historical formation of the site as well as the ongoing social relationships that people fostered to and around this site. It also expanded to include the surrounding environs of the southern end of the island, which you can see in the upper right corner, encompassing both existing and abandoned settlements that border the former plantation estate and the communities who have lived in those spaces in the intervening 200 years. So as a whole, this research demonstrated how individuals and community organizations defined a unique memory scape that connects historical and contemporary cultural landscapes. And to take that one step further, I argue that contemporary and collaborative interpretations of historic landscapes reveal the ways in which a place is continuously imbued with value by local and descendant communities through ongoing material and social formation processes. So to give you a bit of geographic and historical context, Aluthera is that skinny little island that you can barely see. It is one of 700 islands and keys that make up the Bahamas. It's the fourth most populous island in the Bahamas today. It's nearly 120 miles long, but no more than two miles wide anywhere on the island. It sits at the edge of the Atlantic and the rest of the Bahamian archipelago, those crystal clear blue waters. It was first settled by the English, loyalist exiled from Bermuda in the mid 17th century, and the island was the first seat of the Bahamian colonial government. The population would drastically increase in the final years of the 18th century after the British crown awarded land grants and settled American loyalists throughout the Bahamas, as well as the rest of the Caribbean following the American Revolution. A very short lived plantation economy would follow and Aluthera would take up the mantle of the bread basket of the Bahamas well into the 19th and early 20th centuries as agriculture became and persisted as the dominant economic engine on the island. But a series of economic downturns and ecological disasters devastated rural agricultural settlements on this island in the early 20th century, leaving drastically reduced populations and economically vulnerable communities in the far south of the island. The late 20th century saw Bahamian independence and fluctuating tourism investment in Nassau and the family islands. And the family islands are basically any of the islands that are not New Providence where Nassau, the capital is and Grand Bahama. So you may be familiar with tourism commercials for Atlantis and sandals. All of those big resorts are on New Providence and Grand Bahama. So the former Miller's plantation estate sits at the southern most end of Aluthera. The Miller family settled in the Bahamas at the end of the 18th century presumably as part of that loyalist immigration wave. They were originally from Scotland, but the family likely arrived in the Bahamas by way of the American colonies in the 1780s or 90s, bringing with them a number of slaves that were already in their possession. The patriarch of the family, George Miller, established first a plantation on Long Island in the southern end of the Bahamas. This was called Strawberry Hill Estate. George died in 1798, leaving all his property to his children, Robert Archibald and James and George Miller. And then in 1803, Robert began cultivating cotton on this Long Island estate. But at about the same time, cotton began to fail across the Bahamas due to a prolific cotton bug and just pretty poor soils that would have been needed to produce a lot of cotton. Miller, however, moved a large number of slaves from his father's estate in Long Island to a new plantation property in South Eleuthera. He took charge of that property in 1806. The cotton plantation managed to resist devastation by the cotton bug and caterpillar that had decimated most of this economy elsewhere on the islands through a combination of yearly soil fertilization, the late season planting, intensive pruning and management, and slash and burn at the end of harvest to destroy any potential survival and infestation of the cotton bug. So you can see some of these practices are still happening on the island today. This picture in the lower right is a recently cleared area that has now been planted with corn, okra, peppers. So a lot of these ways of replenishing the soil of rotating fields is still practiced today throughout the island. So Miller, Robert Miller, was still growing cotton on his Eleuthera estate at the time of emancipation in 1833. So several decades after the rest of the economy had crashed. He was the second largest slaveholder on the island at this point. With the passage of the Abolition of Slavery Act, the British government and the Bahamas established a system of apprenticeship, which was theoretically to ease the transition from slavery to freedom, but in reality, it kept formerly enslaved people tied to the land and to the master who had previously owned them. Apprenticeship was abolished in 1838, but many of the newly freed black communities throughout the islands remained in place, occasionally continuing on as tenant farmers or at other times occupying unattended crown lands and creating new free communities of their own. Robert Miller died in 1845, leaving all of his property to his sister Ann, his sole heir who at the time lived in New Providence. It's really unclear if Ann ever spent any time on the estate in Millers and if so to what extent, but oral histories from elder residents of present-day Millers in Bannerman Town suggest that she did live on the estate on the Plantation Hill at some point because there's a building there that is often referred to as Ann Miller's house. Ann Miller died in 1871. In her will, she left 2,000 acres of the family's former plantation properties to descendants of her former slaves and servants. At least 16 of these individuals named in the will, also up here on the screen, were also appeared in the 1834 slave census, suggesting that many of them remained either employment of the family on their various properties or that they continued to reside on the former estates after emancipation. Today, many residents of the Southern Settlements trace their ancestry back to these old servants and former slaves. And I just want to note in the rest of this talk, when I use the term descendant, this is the community I'm talking about, those who can trace their family lineage back to the enslaved population of Miller's plantation and many of them still live on this island. So to give you an idea, these are the four settlements that I'll be mentioning by name a lot. Whims's Byte, John Millers, Millers in Bannerman Town. So the main plantation complex is located just north of Millers Settlement, the existing settlement. Bannerman Town is now unoccupied. No one actually lives within the borders of that area. But all of these settlements were either on or surrounded the official borders of the Millers plantation acreage. All right, so in 2010, Franklin Wilson, a Bahamian developer attempted to gain title to a portion of the Millers acreage under a piece of legislation called the Quieting Act, which establishes that a person can petition and be awarded title to land if there are no other parties that demonstrate legal ownership. The descendant community countersued arguing that the developer had no right to the land because it was still occupied and collectively owned by descendants of a formerly enslaved population. And this is actually a pretty common phenomenon in the Bahamas. It's generally referred to as generation property. There's really no legal definition for that term, but it's commonly acknowledged as the rights to land left in common to a collective group. Most often that group is our descendants of an enslaved population. In 2014, the Supreme Court of the Bahamas denied the local community's claims. And over the next four years, the local community pursued their case through two appeals in the Bahamas and then to the Privy Council in London, which is still the final judicial oversight of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. So the final ruling came down in October 2018 and I'll address that towards the end of my talk. So I first arrived in Eleuthera just weeks after the local community association appeared in court to give testimony in defense of their claim to the land. The people that I spoke to were frustrated, saddened and angry and confused that the lawyers and court representatives would insinuate that they had no legitimate connection to the land. Over and over, I heard community members tell me of their memories growing up on and around the site of the stories that they had received from their parents and their grandparents. People were definitely interested in archeology, but more than anything, they wanted their stories to be heard and to be respected, which had not really happened in court. So this gave rise to a community-based project centered on recording local history and documenting sites of significant cultural value and of collective memory. So shifting away from the study of the Miller's estate specifically of the plantation period, I had to develop a new framework to understand how the historic Miller's plantation site had come to sit at the heart of contemporary conflicts over land rights, economic development and heritage values. Drawing on Whitney Battle Baptiste's Black Feminist Archeology and Sonya Adelaide's Community-Based Archeology with, by and for local indigenous and the Senate communities, I built an ethnographic and archeological toolkit that enabled me to trace the contours of both contemporary and historical experiences in this place. And here I also draw on the methods proposed by Hamalakis and Harrison to make a case for contemporary archeological ethnography of historical landscapes and the communities that still live on and care for them. I refocused my research on the formation of a collective memory and identity around the Miller's plantation and the deployment of memory as a political tool that could tie people to the land. I use Adelaide's concept of braiding knowledge to represent how the ethnographic and archeological data as well as the individual relationships and community partnerships that emerged out of this research all came together to create a fuller and richer account of this region's past and present. When woven together, these multiple perspectives, relationships and kinds of data created a tapestry of life in South Alucera historically and in the present. And it's in that tapestry that I see the political work of memory in this project. I used a variety of methods for data collection under this framework. Archeological methods, including pedestrian survey, windshield surveys, mapping and photo documentation of standing structures, facilitated the creation of digital maps identifying significant historical and cultural sites throughout South Alucera. Ethnographic methods, including walking interviews, oral histories, photo elicitation and of course, participant observation facilitated a contemporary reading of the landscape. The overlapping ethnographic and archeological data revealed what I call a material memory scape that connects people and ties communities to the land, bringing a contemporary perspective onto this historical landscape. So just to give you a little clearer idea of some of these methods, I partnered with three, primarily three different organizations in South Alucera. The first was the Wims's Byte Community Library, which was located in the settlement where I was living during field work. I also worked with the Bannerman Town Millers and John Millers Community Association, which was the main defendant in the case against Frankie Wilson and the One Alucera Foundation, which is an island-wide organization that runs like five million different projects from education and literacy programs to recycling programs to breast cancer screenings. And most recently, they've also been really at the forefront of settling evacuees from Grand Bahama and Andros after Hurricane Dorian. Some of the ethnographic methods, there was a lot of participant observation, oral histories with community elders, ethnographic interviews with anyone who would sit down with me. A couple of attempts at youth focus groups at the community library and the local primary school to try to get a sense of how young people understood this landscape, what they knew about the history, what this place meant to them. And a couple occasions where I was able to do walking interviews with folks. Site documentation, so again, during those walking interviews and also alone doing pedestrian survey, marking, standing structures, surface scatter of artifacts on the plantation hill, the main hill, traditional and 360 degree photography of standing structures. And you can see that's the 360 panorama that's kind of spinning around in an old church. And in this frame down here is a screen grab of a walking interview I did with the president of the community association across the Miller's plantation site. And each one of those purple pins marks a spot where he decided to stop and point something out to me or tell me a story related to what we were looking at. And of course, community meetings towards the end of my field work. I did a lot of presentations to the public about the research process, about my findings, trying to open up space for dialogue about what people still had questions about, what they might like to see in the future, what they wanted to see happen on this land pretty generally speaking. So I visited sites with local residents often as much as I could and they shared stories of each of the places that we visited. These sites ranged from plantation structures, churches, graveyards, beaches, farms, and abandoned and currently occupied homes. And as I pointed out, they were documented with a combination of tools that vary depending on accessibility and participant consent, but generally included GPS tracking, traditional and 360 degree photography and audio recording. Analysis of photo data began to reveal a unique vernacular architecture across South Alutera, consisting of the following characteristics, a single story square dwelling made of wooden beams, stone and stuccoed with sand collected from nearby beaches. These often had interior wooden walls that would have divided the room evenly into either two or four separate spaces. Furthermore, most of these structures shared similar construction and use histories, which participants conveyed during interviews. Some of these structures feature prominently in participants accounts of the island's history or of their own family histories, while others are not especially significant landmarks, other than for the fact that they and the people who once lived in them have made up a fabric of life in this area for centuries. So I first encountered this idea when I asked some friends in John Miller's about what they knew about the former plantation buildings that still stood on the Miller's estate. And we were sitting in the half of the building to the left, which is the original portion of the house. They in turn began to describe their own house construction, explaining that houses like the one we were sitting in were built to last, they said, like those built by the slaves. Knocking hard on the wall with their hands, one participant described the way that the wooden posts are smoked in a slow burning fire to dry them out at the center. Later, large stones add to the thick sturdy wall construction, followed by a mixture of lime and sand from the beach used to seal the walls. This particular house was built before the current residents were born. And they point out that with some regular upkeep, it will last for much longer than those seen elsewhere on the island of modern cement block construction. My neighbor in Whims's Byte, an elderly woman by the name of Doris, lived in a very similar style house, that bright, bright pink one. She often invited me in for conversation and a cold soda, telling me many times that she had built this house with her own hands, never borrowing, begging or stealing, simply determined to have a home to call for her own and her children. The house itself was not necessarily the key accomplishment in this story, but rather her ability to fix her presence on this land and to claim a place for herself and her people that could not be taken from her or attributed to someone else. She was in a way, I think, embedding her story into this land. Throughout my field work, I also documented a large number of now abandoned homes throughout the region that match this similar style. So I'll speed through a couple of examples, but I do wanna point out that each of these comes from a different settlement and dates to a different occupation period. So the first is the Ann Miller house. It sits on the former Miller's Plantation Hill and it dates to the plantation era. Bearing the name of the last plantation owner was presumably home to Ann Miller or her brother, Robert. But despite that name that locates its use in the plantation era, this house was continuously occupied by descendants of the Miller's enslaved population well into the mid 20th century. And this woman in the pink shirt in the middle shared personal memories of her grandmother who lived in this house and she remembers visiting her. She remembers her grandmother cooking in the nearby kitchen building, which also dates to the plantation era. This structure still stands today, the walls at least, and reveal a mix of what may be original wooden peg framing alongside modern hardware, revealing historical patterns of reuse and adaptation of a house that was originally constructed in the early 19th century. South of Miller's are the remains of Bannerman Town, a once booming port town from the late 19th century. This house pictured here was the former family home of Selethiel Thompson, the first behemian commissioner of the police force of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. Like most of Bannerman Town, this house has likely stood empty since the second quarter of the 20th century when residents immigrated to NASA and the United States in search of employment and more stable economic opportunity than was available on this island. Like the Ann Miller house, the Thompson house is roughly the same size and shape. In the lower right-hand corner, you can see some of that characteristically thick stucco line stone walls, the large stones that make up the bulk of the wall. There are still wooden framing sort of on the ceiling, but not pictured in this photo. There are still some walls that you can see would have run across the space. Some of those interior walls are actually marked by more modern nails and hardware. And interestingly, I think, there are still nails and hooks in some of those walls. I like to think as if they were waiting a return of the homeowner who might leave a jacket hanging by the door. Another example is another house in Wimps's Byte. This one dates to the last occupation was in the 1990s. After the woman who lived in this house died in the 90s, her house sat abandoned until it was overtaken by the dense vegetation that really settles in very quickly whenever humans vacate spaces here. This house has many of the same characteristics as the previous two, same size, shape, and stucco line stone walls. But you can see that the stones beneath the stucco are smaller. The walls are significantly thinner and the wooden window and door framing are also constructed with thinner boards. A neighbor in Wimps's Byte took me to see this house in 2016 explaining that it had belonged to an older woman that he remembers as a child. He used to call this place the Garden of Eve and he remembers playing around it when it was occupied and even after the last resident passed away and it began to fall into disrepair. He showed me inside the deteriorating building pointing out what would have been inside when it was still occupied. And you can see that some materials still remain including that bed frame. As we walked around the building, he told me that quote, this place used to be a city which is a pretty common refrain when I talk to people in these settlements. He explained that if I had been here years ago he could have really shown off this place and others like it. They weren't so overgrown then and people, kids especially, were still running around between the houses around the woods but this doesn't really happen anymore. Local residents materialize memory through repeating patterns of construction, occupation, settlement, abandonment, deterioration and remembrance of these stone and stucco houses. The vernacular style of architecture is significant in that it materially unites the communities that are pretty geographically dispersed throughout the region. Furthermore, it demonstrates a continuous construction style that makes use of local resources that is adaptable to the surrounding environment and at the end of occupation is often reclaimed by this natural landscape. The fact that the style of architecture appears throughout the region and in settlements with pretty varied occupation dates also demonstrates cultural continuity in an area that many politicians and developers prefer to treat as vacant, unused and unoccupied land. On the contrary, these structures are physical remains of human occupation of the land and thus help to materialize memory and re-inhabit the historical and contemporary landscape. Each of these buildings described was introduced to me in person by someone who had clear memories of that site and the people who once occupied it. In visiting these buildings and speaking aloud about their histories, my participants were bringing their contemporary experiences to bear on objects and a bigger landscape that would otherwise seem firmly rooted in the past. Together, the material landscape coupled with oral histories reveal a complex fabric of life in the past and in the present, one that is ever present in the daily lives of people who still live here. The relationship between past and present, material and non-material, comprises a cultural foundation and a living landscape of memory for South Eleutherans that in most cases, need not be spoken or openly acknowledged except in the case of prompting by an outsider, like myself, who cannot automatically recognize the composition of that fabric. And I wanna point to another example of how present-day community materializes memory and inhabits a historical landscape. And this is through the feature called the slave wall. According to oral history, the slave population of the early 19th century was forced to build a series of boundary lines across the landscape to delineate property lines and other spatial zones within the plantation. The remains of these stacked stone slave walls still stand in many places across South Eleuthera. I first heard this term used in an interview by a participant and its bluntness really kind of took me back. I followed up hoping to find someone to take me to see these walls in person, but I was met with astonishment that I hadn't quite literally stumbled across any yet because they're just so prevalent. For many Black South Eleutherans, most of whom can trace their family lineage to the enslaved population of the Miller's plantation, these walls are objects of great admiration and respect. They are symbols of both the horrors of slavery as well as symbols of hope and strength of ancestors who survived slavery and built a community that still resides here today. Furthermore, many descendancy the slave walls as proof of the community's continued occupation of this land, thus strengthening their claim to it. But at the same time, these walls are not static objects. Indeed, many participants are quite upfront about the fact that many of these features, the slave walls, buildings, sometimes even headstones, have been altered, destroyed, or removed in the process of daily routines over the years. And on the left here, you can see a slave wall that runs across the Miller's Hill that has been recently disassembled and some of the larger stones harvested for newer construction in the settlement. Even as these stones are dismantled and put to other uses, their place and meaning on the landscape remains a significant connection to the past and to the legacy of enslaved and free ancestors who left them there in the first place. So now, heeding the call from Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos for a transdisciplinary engagement in archeological ethnography, I'm going to demonstrate how I've combined some theories of materiality, memory, and space from across the fields of memory studies, anthropology, historical archeology, Caribbean cultural theory, and literary studies. So, a lot. I argue that these slave walls and abandoned houses are what memory scholar Marianne Hirsch refers to as points of memory, and that they pinpoint both temporal and spatial elements of memory. To South the Lutherans, they represent a variety of memories as well as a collective point of origin for the contemporary community. And marking these sites geographically on the landscape, local residents root themselves physically to this land. By repeating and preserving the stories associated with these sites, the community reaffirms the connections between individuals and the land they have been fighting to retain. And these points of memory, when placed on a physical landscape, helped to register what historical archeologist, Shannon Dowdy calls the social stratigraphy of a place wherein human and non-human elements are co-formed, layered, and deep, pointing out that that quote, the present, is constructed out of inherited materials, end quote. The fact that historical memory and contemporary experience occupy the same space in South the Lutheran is no surprise to residents. Rather, the interplay between past and present, material and abstract memory is commonplace and perhaps a time taken for granted. Drawing on Keith Basso's conceptualization of language, space, and cultural knowledge amongst the Western Apache, we might also say that memory sits and lives in these places. Those who live and work around these spaces and even those who temporarily visit them encounter the material residues of the past and present on a daily basis. Sometimes they are physically fragmented, like the disassembled slave wall. And at other times these material residues are viewed in isolation from the larger assemblage of like objects, like a single abandoned home in the vernacular style, left to decay under the weight of vegetation. Viewed in isolation and without local knowledge to interpret these objects and spaces, it might be easy to classify this object as one belonging to the past, which many developers try to do, and dismiss contemporary values and relationships between residents and the land. However, understanding that these material objects and features are part of a collective assemblage on this landscape necessitates a more inclusive interpretation of the materiality of the space and the historical and contemporary social relationships to that space. By entering a space such as the South Luthoran landscape and putting equal weight upon the social and the archeological stratigraphy, we begin to understand these contemporary landscapes as sites of ongoing formation and adaptation by and for the people who call this place home. This approach is in line with Dottie's examination of the buildup of a cultural and emotional patina on objects and landscapes that connect living communities to objects and physical spaces. It also tracks with Caribbean theorist and poet Derek Walcott, who wrote about reassembling fragments of Antillian memory in his Nobel winning essay, quote, break a vase and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love, which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and the pain of the Antilles. It is the restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago, becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent. A contemporary landscape archeology can begin to reassemble these fragments that might seem disparate to the unacquainted or it might be simply taken for granted because of their prevalence. Materializing memory, the act of piecing together object, story, and space requires thoughtful and deep engagement with the physicality of the space in the same way that it demands deep respect for and attention to emotional and personal interactions with that space and the objects contained therein. And importantly, I think this idea of materializing memory is a productive way of bringing together these similar threads that are happening in diverse fields. Again, going back to memory studies, historical archeology literature. Using memory to link themselves to the landscape, community members have developed their own notion of what Bell Hooks calls home place. Here, a place where descendants of the Miller's plantation had established a life on their own terms, resisting firstly oppression of slavery and carving out a space to safely create and foster their own sense of family and community on land that they called their own. With this sense of collective attachment, they could more easily resist for their exploitation under industrial agriculture and tourism. Today, the standing structures and remains of old buildings continue to tether the local descendant community to place and to history. The South Alluther in a landscape is a place where past, present, and future collide, where memories like roots wrap around and emerge from a fertile soil built up by deposited materials, tangible objects, emotions, lived experiences of generations long gone, and the hopes and promises of generations to come. This land and the social community around it calls it home precisely because generations before them have built it to be so. The land, the walls, and the people are a collective body. Every day, people encounter the spaces and objects and navigate the social relationships that comprise what it means to be both of and from this place. Building and sharing such a memory scape amongst generations becomes a way of both honoring the past and fostering community for the future. So I know I'm running out of time, so I just wanna hint at some of the more collaborative, explicitly collaborative work that I did. In 2017, I drafted a community history report to share with participants and local partner organizations so that there are copies of this history on the island. They're in the libraries with the One Alluther Foundation with the Community Association. This again is a screen grab of one of those 360 degree panoramas viewed in virtual reality mode. Which you can put on an iPad or your phone. And it's a really cool way of bringing spaces that aren't necessarily easy to access to people who would still like to see them, who would still like to be involved in this project. And I found that bringing those sort of VR images was a really profound and often very emotional way of allowing elders to participate and to re-inhabit this landscape that really means so much to them. So going back to the court case that was kind of in the background this whole time. After two appeals in Bahamian courts, the case finally went before the Privy Council in London. Their final ruling came out on October 15th of 2018. And it stated that neither the developer nor the community could effectively prove their right to the land. But this ruling was actually seen as a major victory for local residents. And then on October 19th, just four days later, the Bahamian government approved a proposal from Disney Cruise Lines to develop a new port in Bannerman Town immediately south of the former Miller's property that was saved by the Privy Council. The social stratigraphy of South Eleuthera continues its formation processes today. Processes of settlement, construction and abandonment and deterioration have already shaped the memory scape of South Eleuthera and undoubtedly these patterns will take hold again in the coming years, if not already. The goal of contemporary landscape archeology in this case is not to freeze time and prevent any further changes to the landscape, but to understand and appreciate that this place is a living landscape of memory, a material memory scape. Here, people constantly interact with the residues of the past, a history marked by plantation slavery, absentee land ownership, British colonialism and the ongoing global tourism model that is still playing out. But residents are also still negotiating a collective memory and identity rooted in this place in the landscape's historical and present day materiality and they are ultimately deciding what the future might hold. Thank you. So one quick question, it wasn't clear to me whether where this disputed land is, are there people actually living on that still? Cause you showed a number of abandoned places and you also showed some people living in some structures where they, are they actually on the land and how do they have the right to, do they have the right to live there? Yeah, so I'll point out the millers, the sort of heart of the plantation was right here. The part of the land that was in dispute with the legal case ran up through about here to the sea. There are people living in this area, there are people living on this area, but what people are really concerned about is that if the developer could come in, really swoop in and claim this land, that he would do the same elsewhere. So the folks that I talked about who lived in John Millers on that hill right about here have like the most beautiful view of the sea. And their biggest concern was that once Wilson came in and got this property, it was a matter of time before he came there. Cause he's, it's not just him, there are many developers who do this in the Bahamas, but he has had a habit of taking land from communities who have this kind of generational claim to property in Nassau and in other family islands. So people are very suspicious and worry that it's really just a domino effect. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is people still use, like even if, even though people don't necessarily live right here, they use that land for hunting, for crabbing. They collect palms for making baskets, which then they sell at the cruise ports. So it's still a matter of livelihood. Yeah. Gotcha. Thank you. So I was doing this research while the case with Frankie Wilson was unfolding. So at the time, none of my research was necessarily available. And I was also as a graduate student, like waiting into this absolutely terrified that I was going to uncover something that could backfire on the community's claims or that could be used against them. And so I was very tight lipped because I didn't want to mess that up. And then in one of the final community meetings in 2017, this came up with one of my local partners and he was just outright like, we know what we told you, like we welcomed you into this community. We wanted you to do this. Like don't be afraid to share it. So my work was not necessarily feeding into that legal case, but since I made that community report public, it has been accessed a very like shockingly large amount of times, including by Disney. And I can see that through like the tracking on the scholarly report of like who's downloaded an IP address from Disney. So I know that this is available, but that was really my goal. Like I wanted to make sure that my community members who really welcomed me in, who encouraged me to do this work, that they had the resources and I consider this report and my data as a resource that they can use to defend their claims. I wanted to make sure that that was available, knowing full well that it could be used by. I guess one of my biggest fears is that Disney reads it and then disnifies the history of South Alutera, but it's tricky. And it's tricky as a graduate student carrying the weight of this project, but it really was through collaboration with my local partners who said, please make sure it is available. Get it out there. Yeah. So one of the most useful methods that I found was the walking interview. And that was something that I really wish I had been able to do earlier and do more often, but it is really a hard ask of people to spend three hours rambling through dense vegetation up rocky hills so that they can do that with me. The people who did really enjoyed it and some of them were the ones that pushed hardest for me to share what I had found. But that's something I would love to do more of and I think it was most useful because it actually brought together the material analysis with the oral history with local perspectives on what this land means. But it's, again, a harder ask. Another thing I mentioned early on, I tried to do a lot of youth focus groups and those were a lot of fun, but really difficult because it's hard to get 13 year olds to get their parents to sign off on parent consent form. And when you're working with kids under the IRB, there's an additional level of consent needed. So a lot of those focus groups I didn't really use as a source of data, but as a way of engaging with young people just to talk to young people. I think that would be a really cool thing to expand upon because one of the things I found, basically from the beginning, is that elders were really concerned that young people didn't care. That young people only wanted to play video games or they just wanted to leave the island that they didn't have these really profound attachments to this place. And in those few examples where I was able to talk to young people, that was not the case at all. A lot of them said like I'm going to leave so that I can go to school, so I can maybe get a job for a little bit, but I wanna come back here because this place is home, this place has given me the things that I need in order to go back, but I wanna make sure I come back and bring that back to my home community, which was not what I was hearing from older people. So I think it would be really a profound way to bring that intergenerational dialogue to see how multiple generations understand and appreciate this place as home. I see that in your argument as an extremely important piece of elementary history to the light of this meeting, I wonder if you saw a construction of architecture or how people were able to source those resources in order to keep the long time in the structures? Currently, like in present day, yeah, during your research time. Yeah, not a lot. A lot of the construction that's happening right now is kind of being done as quickly as possible so people have a home to live in. And so that again is the folks from John Miller said like this older style of construction lasts longer than the cement block construction that you see popping up when people, when second home owners buy property and they just want a beachfront house now. And so that's the most common construction happening on the island today is that cement block. But people have an understanding that like if you want a place to last, you build those thick walls, you use the local resources. And a lot of the stones that are used in that construction, the soil, the ground in Elutera is just, it's really just rock. So you can sort of see here, there's just stone everywhere. And so it's harvested from land that's then used to farm in a lot of cases. I think actually in this photo of the farm here, so pothole farming is a place where soil kind of like gathers in these natural indentations and loose stones are pulled out. And a lot of those stones were used to make those slave walls, but a lot of them were also kind of shaped and then turned into building blocks for houses. So that's where a lot of that limestone construction is coming from. Thank you, appreciate your time.