A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp

Sayers did a very thorough job in detailing what they found at the sites. It may seem like overkill, but Sayer had to crush the opinions that the communities did not exist and I believe that he accomplished that goal.The jargon gets a bit deep. I found it helpful to have a notepad nearby so I could build a glossary as I went along.Sayers is a Marxist and goes a bit deep into the theory about the communities in the swamp. This is mainly confined to two chapters in the book. I made it a few pages into the first of the two chapters and skipped the rest of that chapter and the following chapter. I later had to skim through those chapters to find definitions for a few of the words in my glossary.Overall, a great read and I recommend it

Giving the book 4 stars because of its critical importance. Im black american and a history buff. I grew up 30 minutes from the Great Dismal Swamp next to Hampton University and had never heard of the place until a couple years ago when my social network started sharing the Smithsonian article about the swamp and Daniel Sayers work. I was incredibly intrigued! At the time this may have been the 1st book entirely devoted to the subject. Thats why Im giving the book 4 stars....because it is nearly 100% primary research. It is a challenging read. Very archeological in its language and very repetitively structuralist-communist-materialist in its analysis. I imagine the author expanded a dissertation-like paper to create this book and that its meant to function as a reader text for his students when he teaches. (I skipped over a many pages throughout the book). It also reads like an opportunity to apply communist materialist principles to his work...i felt too heavily. Still im giving the book 4 stars for its historical significance as an archeological report too long overdue. Im now reading "Slavery's Exiles" by Sylviane A. Diouf. Her book is absolutely amazingly well-reasearched and entertaining to read. Includes a strong Chapter on the Great Dismal swamp and an infinite amount of details of how maroons lived around the U.S. Reading her book alongside Sayers book helps to fill in a lots of blanks on how the maroons of the Great Dismal swamp may have survived. These authors are pioneering experts on a new subject and they are citing each other as well as Terrence Weik whose book "The Archeology of Slave Resistance" is my next read.

Fascinating little known history about the renegade communities evading antebellum caste structure.

Too opinionated....like to read facts and not have. Overall a good read.

I have been looking for this book for a couple years. Did not disappoint