





































In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness 
and the Archive, Georgio Agamben uses 

the framework of the Holocaust, specifical-
ly the Auschwitz death camp, to interrogate 
the very nature of testimony and the posi-
tion of the witness. According to Agamben, 
witness testimony to the Holocaust from 
survivors of the camp occupies a particular 
hinge: “On the one hand, what happened 
in the camps appears to the survivors as 
the only true thing and, as such, absolute-
ly unforgettable; on the other hand, this 
truth is to the same degree unimaginable, 
that is, irreducible to the real events that 
constitute it” (12). This hinge of the 
unimaginable and the incomprehensible, 
the unforgettable and the inarticulateable, is characteristic of “the aporia of Auschwitz,” “a reality 
that necessarily exceeds its factual elements.” However, this aporia is also indicative of a “lacuna” 
specifically imbedded in the nature of testimony itself. According to Agamben, “At a certain point, 
it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survi-
vors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” (12). This zone of indistinction 
between the knowable and unknowable, of meaning that can never be externalized but exists only 
in retreat, makes up the “lacuna” of witnessing, the inherent impossibility of bearing witness that 
characterizes the act of witnessing itself.

Agamben’s theory of the “lacuna” of witnessing, by dealing exclusively with the writing and 
speaking subject, appears to engage only literary and witness forms of testimony. However, the 
“lacuna” of testimony contains an inherent material, spatial, and forensic dimension imbedded at 
the site of its etymology. The term “lacuna” means “a missing portion in a manuscript,” as well as 
both “an unfilled space or gap” and “a cavity or depression, especially in bone.” While the “lacuna” 
of Agamben’s definition is applied explicitly to witness testimony in his work, the etymology of 
the term implicitly includes other testimonial forms. By referencing “a missing portion in a man-
uscript,” alongside “an unfilled space or gap” and “a cavity or depression, especially in bone,” the 

Speaking the Lacuna:  
The Archaeology of Plantation  
Slavery as Testimony
Esther Wolfe, Ball State University

Key Words:
Slavery, archaeology, forensics, anthropology, 
trauma studies, Shoshana Felman, Giorgio 
Agamben, Eyal Weizman

Abstract:
This paper examines plantation archaeology 
as a form of material testimony and bearing 
witness to the historical trauma of slavery. 
Exploring intersections of literary and spatial 
analysis, and using a critical framework that 
combines Agamben, Weizman, and Felman, 
the author argues that the material testimony 
of plantation archaeology embodies a “la-
cuna” of witnessing, and may even replicate 
historical dynamics of violence.  

63

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etymology of “lacuna” alludes to an unexplored and fundamental relationship between witness 
and literary testimonies and the material testimony of objects and spaces. In this way, the ety-
mology of “lacuna” also hints at the ways in which material, forensic, and archaeological forms of 
testimony may also embody the crisis and inherent impossibility of bearing witness. 

In its contemporary context, forensic archaeology has become increasingly utilized as a method 
to structure political interventions on behalf of victims of atrocity, to investigate and expose vio-
lence, to commemorate its events, to recognize the presence of historical trauma in contemporary 
life, and to pursue a project of collective healing. According to Keenan and Weizman, the advent of 
forensic aesthetics fundamentally shifted the privileging of witness testimony to that of the mate-
rial testimony of objects. As Weizman also points out, this critical shift in the aesthetics of public 
truth-construction is fundamentally rooted in the desire to resolve the instability of witness testi-
mony (Keenan and Weizman, 23). In this way, by privileging material, forensic, and archaeological 
methods of representation over witness testimony, it could be argued that this shift engages a belief 
in the ability of these methods to resolve the “lacuna” of testimony by extracting and representing a 
pure externalization, an objective reality of the memory and experience of trauma.

This belief is reflected in the methods of the archaeology of slavery. According to archaeologist 
scholar Patricia Samford, “[T]he lives of slaves, in many respects, are shadowy and inaccessible. Be-
cause most of the enslaved were kept from learning to read and write, their thoughts and emotions 
come to us only indirectly” (2). In an apparent parallel to this perceived inadequacy, Samford argues 
that the past of enslaved Africans are “visible now only to archaeologists, who carefully record and 
excavate the soil stains and brick foundations and preserve the thousands of artifacts revealed by 
digging” (3). In this way, Samford’s scholarship communicates a critical shift: a privileging of ma-
terial, forensic, and archaeological testimony over witness testimony, rooted in the belief that these 
methods allow us to excavate and represent the memory and objective reality of slavery.

However, plantation archaeology embodies a fundamental site of paradox. According to 
Samford, “Just as historians make it possible for the words written by long-dead individuals to 
come to life, so too a skilled archaeologist can coax silent objects to speak” (3). Here, Samford’s 
language reveals a site of rupture and collapse within the supposed objectivity of material, foren-
sic, and archaeological testimony. For, if plantation archaeology is meant to resolve the inherent 
“lacuna” of slave witness and literary testimony by recovering an objective reality of slavery, what 
then does it mean to make objects “speak” if the act of speech and the position of the speaking 
subject is rendered unstable and impossible via testimony? Within plantation archaeology, what 
is the relationship between witness/literary testimony and the testimony of objects and space? 
And, in what ways does the material testimony of plantation archaeology embody the “lacuna” of 
literary and witness testimony? 

This analysis enacts multiple analytic processes to examine plantation archaeology as a form of 
testimony and bearing witness to the atrocity of slavery. By applying literary analysis to material 
testimony of slavery and by exploring representation of material testimonies in the literature of 
slavery, this paper aims to open up the relationship between literary and material testimonies of 
slavery. Using a critical framework that synthesizes Agamben’s theory of the “lacuna” of testimo-
ny, Shoshanna Felman’s concept of the “irreducibility” of literature, and Eyal Weizman’s concept 
of critical forensic practice, I examine the relationship between the literary and material testimo-
ny of slavery, as well as the forensic methods and digital archives of plantation archaeology. Using 
this framework, I aim to address what I have come to view as critical gaps in dialogue and applica-
tion within intersections of mainstream trauma studies, comparative slavery studies, and the field 

64 Wolfe



of critical forensic practice. 
First, while Agamben’s theory of the “lacuna” of witnessing and testimony has been histor-

ically important to the development of mainstream trauma studies, many have also noted the 
conspicuous absence of slavery from this framing. Similarly, while Felman has famously explored 
the relationship between literature and testimony, particularly the inherent “irreducibility” of 
literature and the inability of literary analysis to go “outside itself ” in order to produce a pure 
externalization of meaning, the implications of this relationship to material forms of testimony, 
particularly the material testimony of slavery, remains obscured (Felman, Writing and Madness: 
Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis). In addition, while Weizman and other theorists within the 
field of critical forensics have analyzed the archaeology of many sites of historical atrocity and the 
relationship of these methods to knowledge production and the management of cultural trauma 
(including Holocaust concentration camps, Bosnian death camps, genocides in South America, 
and the colonial archaeology of Israel in the Palestinian territories), as of yet this critical forensic 
framework has not been used to analyze the archaeology of the transatlantic slave trade in the U.S.

In an effort to address these identified gaps, this paper makes several arguments. In the first sec-
tion, I present an analysis of a section from Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy. In this section of anal-
ysis, I identify the material and spatial dimensions of Morrison’s literary testimony and bearing 
witness to the atrocity of slavery. Here, I argue that there is a fundamental relationship between 
literary and material testimonies of slavery and that the study of witness and literary testimony of 
slavery also inevitably illuminates these material forms. Analyzing the material testimony of Mor-
rison’s literary witnessing allows us to begin identifying the ways in which the material testimony 
of slavery is implicated in the “lacuna” of literary forms of bearing witness. In this way, the insep-
arable folding of the material and literary testimony of slavery in A Mercy allows us to identify the 
relationship between literary and material testimony within the archaeology of plantation slavery 
and frame an analysis of the particular “lacuna” of plantation archaeology. 

In the proceeding sections, I apply Felman’s literary theory to the methodology of plantation 
archaeology as a form of testimony and ,specifically, to the archaeological methods of forensic 
osteological analysis and digital object archives. Here, I argue that the forensic methodology and 
digital archives of plantation archaeology, rather than resolve the “lacuna” of slave testimony by 
excavating and representing a purely externalized memory of slavery, instead are tainted always by 
their own processes of meaning-making. By analyzing the forensic methodology of osteological 
analysis, as well as the digital archives of the Digital Archive of Comparative Slavery, I will show 
that these methods, rather than recover the traumatic memory of slavery and enact an interven-
tion against its violence, instead work to erase the historical trauma of slavery and rhetorically 
repeat the very structures of the violence of slavery itself. In this way, I argue that the “lacuna” of 
plantation archaeology ultimately further emphasizes that the traumatic memory and experience 
of slavery exists outside the possibility of excavation.  

Literature and Trauma: The Material Testimony of Florens’s 
“Telling” in A Mercy

The ending of A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s devastating novel exploring intersecting systems 
of slavery, violence, and trauma in colonial America, contains a pivotal scene. In the text, the 
character Florens, a young, enslaved black woman, is subjected to compounded structural and 
interpersonal violence and abuse. Born into slavery, rejected by her mother and sold to a new 
master (to “save” her from sexual abuse from her previous master, unbeknownst to Florens), and 

65 Wolfe



later violently rejected by the older, free black man who takes her as a lover, Florens ultimately 
returns to the farm she left, where her master has since died. Each night, in his room, on the walls 
of her master’s house, Florens carves her “telling,” her understanding of what has happened to 
her, her representation of her own trauma. “I am holding light in one hand and carving letters by 
the other. My arms ache but I have need to tell you this” (189). Here, Florens’s “telling” (“I am 
holding light in one hand and carving letters by the other”), as well as her expressed need to tell 
(“My arms ache but I have need to tell you this”), reveals her “telling” as a form of testimony, a 
method of bearing witness to the memory and violence of slavery. But what manner of testimony 
is Florens’s telling? Probing this question reveals an inherent doubling of testimony, an insepara-
ble folding between witness, literary, and material testimonial forms. Florens’s “telling” is, funda-
mentally, a witness testimony: she wishes to speak her understanding of her traumatic experience, 
to externalize the internal truth of what has happened to her. However, the act of externalization 
that transforms Florens into a speaking subject in order to bear witness also orients her “telling” 
within the realm of literary testimony. “If you never read this, no one will. These careful words…” 
(188). In the act of externalization, by becoming “letters of talk,” and “careful words,” Florens’s 
“telling” undergoes an inevitable process of translation, a passing from language into discourse 
that can now be “read” and interpreted as text. However, in this very act of externalization, in the 
passage of language into discourse, Florens’s “telling” folds again into another realm of testimony 
via the method of telling itself. “There is no more room in this room. These careful words cover 
the floor ... Round and round, side to side, bottom to top, top to bottom all across the room” 
(189). In the act of carving the “careful words” into the wall, Florens’s witness and literary testi-
mony also becomes material testimony. Carved into the wall, her “telling” becomes image and 
object, space and architecture. In this way, Florens’s “telling” also takes on a forensic and archae-
ological dimension which is left behind where she hopes her traumatic memory and meaning of 
the experience of slavery will be excavated and unearthed. 

This doubling and slippage between witness, literary, and material forms of testimony in Mor-
rison’s work points to a fundamental relationship, a simultaneous blurring, between testimonial 
forms. Florens’s “telling” reveals that witness, literary, and material testimony of slavery, rather 
than falling into separable hierarchy, continuously folds and refolds, passing into and out of one 
another, leaving behind and mingling with the residue of other forms. In this way, Morrison im-
plicitly destabilizes hierarchies of witnessing that privilege material testimony. Forens’s “telling” 
reveals that the material testimony of slavery always contains a trace of the literary, while literary 
testimony is revealed as material. 

The slippage between witness, literary, and material testimony in Morrison’s novel also reveals the 
ways in which the material testimony of Florens’s “telling” embodies the “lacuna” of bearing witness. 
Florens’s “telling” literalizes an inherent blurring of subject and object imbedded within testimony; 
in the act of carving her “telling” into the wall, Florens’s enunciation as subject is literally objectified. 
Similarly, in the act of being carved into, the object of the wall becomes subjectified, as the “talking 
room” is literally made to “speak.” However, Florens’s “telling,” in the attempt to purely externalize 
and capture meaning, is soon revealed as a further deferral and alienation of representation. As she 
carves her “telling,” Florens realizes that the one she leaves it for will never understand it. “Sudden I 
am remembering. You won’t read my telling. You read the world but not the letters of talk. You don’t 
know how to” (188). Her telling is untranslatable and unrepresentable, and its meaning cannot be 
extracted, instead existing always in deferral and retreat. This inaccessibility, the unrepresentable 
nature of her testimony, the inherent impossibility of externalizing her experience, is doubled by the 

66 Wolfe



reader as audience. Although we are told of Florens’s “telling,” it is only described to us—we have 
no access to the “letters of talk” themselves. They are never revealed to us; as a result, we cannot read 
them, only about them. This perpetual deferral of meaning is further performed by the text itself, 
particularly in the lexical disjuncture of the speaking “I,” as well as the text’s use of metaphor and 
simile. In the text, Florens as speaking subject, articulated in “I,” is often out of joint with grammati-
cal structure. “Sudden I am remembering,” “I am become wilderness…” (188-189). Here, the lexical 
disjuncture of the “I” of testimony performs the impossibility of bearing witness. Florens’s speaking 
subject, always out of joint, cannot externalize and articulate itself; thus, the meaning of her testimo-
ny is always displaced and alienated by the very act of externalization undertaken. The meaning of 
her testimony, its representation, cannot be purely extracted; rather, the act of testimony becomes 
another deferral of meaning. 

This impossibility of testimony, its perpetual deferral of meaning, is also performed by the use 
of metaphor and simile within the text. “Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. 
Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow” (188). Florens, speaking 
on her own testimony, describes it in terms of simile and metaphor. Here, via the function of 
metaphor, Florens’s testimony, the meaning of her experience, is again inherently displaced by the 
very attempt to externalize it. In metaphor, what is described is framed not in terms of what it is, 
but specifically as what it is not. In this way, Florens’s use of metaphor again performs the impos-
sibility of testimony—rather than creating a pure externalization of experience, the act of “telling” 
creates a further deferral of meaning and representation. Similarly, with the use of simile, what 
is being described is framed as “like” something but is also fundamentally not that thing. In this 
way, Florens’s “telling,” her representation of experience, exists always in this in-between space of 
inarticulation. Through the use of simile and metaphor, Florens’s testimony is defined always in 
terms of absences and gaps, its meaning perpetually deferred, impossible to truly externalize. Flo-
rens’s “telling,” in the act of being self-reflexively described, in the act of being read “about” by the 
audience, performs a testimony of testimony, the readers ultimately bearing witness to the act of 
bearing witness. Like the “letters of talk” circling her master’s room, Florens’s “telling,” as witness, 
literary, and material testimony, exists always in excess of its framing.

Florens’s “telling” reveals a fundamental slippage between witness, literary, and material tes-
timony of slavery. As a result, Florens’s material testimony also embodies an endless deferral of 
meaning and externalization, performing the impossibility of bearing witness. Morrison’s framing 
allows us to identify similar slippage within the testimony of plantation archaeology, as well as 
the ways in which the material testimony of plantation archaeology, in the form of osteological 
analysis and digital object archives, also embodies a “lacuna” of bearing witness.

Methodologies of Violence and Erasure: An Examination of 
Osteological Analysis 

Within archaeological practice, osteological analysis refers to the forensic examination of human 
remains. Examining bones and tissues, including skeletal structure, microbone morphology, disease 
pathology, ossification, and biophysics, is used to verify the identity of the deceased, as well as to 
reconstruct the circumstances of their deaths and recover the history and memory of former life. 
According to Weizman and Thomas Keenan, osteological analysis allows us to recover and represent 
“not just the moment of death but the entire history of a life- a sequence of illnesses, incidents, and 
accidents, along with conditions of nutrition, labor, and habit- that is fossilized into the morphology 
and texture of bones” (19). The authors goes on to say that “the bones of the skeleton are exposed to 

67 Wolfe



life in a similar way that photographic film is exposed to light. A life, understood as an extended set 
of exposures to a myriad of forces (labor, location, nutrition, violence, and so on) is projected onto a 
moving, growing, and contracting negative, which is the body in life” (20). 

As a result, osteological analysis has become particularly important to the archaeology of geno-
cide and other forms of cultural violence and atrocity. Through the forensic examination of victim 
remains, the archaeology of atrocity seeks to restore a sense of political subjectivity to victims 
who have been utterly desubjectified by genocidal violence. In this context, osteological analysis is 
particularly important within plantation archaeology. According to Samford, osteological analysis is 
often utilized within plantation archaeologies as a method of representing the trauma and violence 
of slavery. The “photographic film” of bones and tissues can indicate overt physical trauma, as well 
as sustained patterns of abuse: “Studies focusing on the dentition of skeletons…have shown, for 
example, very severe growth arrest lines (hypoplasia) indicative of extreme dietary deficiency or 
starvation; various types of malocclusion also reflect conditions of malnutrition” (20). 

The use of osteological analysis to represent the violence and trauma of slavery is also intended 
to supplement the perceived instability, ambiguity, or unreliability of witness and literary testimo-
ny in the form of documentary evidence. According to Samford, “Osteological and pathological 
conditions not addressed in the documents have been observed on skeletal material from New-
ton and elsewhere” (26). As a result, “the skeletal data, in short, provides an independent data 
source and expansion or verification of narrative or literary sources” (26). In this way, by privileg-
ing the forensic testimony of osteological analysis over the witness testimony of documentary or 
narrative evidence, plantation archaeologists engage the belief that osteological analysis allows us 
to recover an “objective” reality and representation of slavery, to externalize its traumatic memory 
and meaning. 

However, osteological analysis also inhabits a site of slippage and paradox. “Osteological,” from 
the root “osteon” meaning bone, and “logia” meaning to speak, gestures at an etymological point 
of rupture, as does another term often used to refer to osteological analysis: “osteobiography.” “To 
speak” and the term “biography” infer both witness and literary testimony. If osteological analysis 
is intended to subvert the ambiguity of the narrative and speech of the witness as subject, what 
does it mean to make bones “speak,” to “write” and “read” them as text, as biography? In this way, 
osteological analysis hints at a fundamental relationship between testimonial forms: a destabiliza-
tion of hierarchy at the site of etymology.

This inherent, etymological rupture between testimonial forms is further repeated within the 
practice of osteological analysis itself. Although osteological analysis is meant to resolve the ambi-
guity of witness and literary testimony, the process of supposedly recovering an “objective” re-cre-
ation and externalization of traumatic memory via material evidence inevitably requires a process 
of inscription, presentation, interpretation, and translation by a speaking and literary subject. In 
order to construct the testimony of material evidence, someone must translate the “speech” of the 
object and speak for it. As a result, “the predicament that characterizes the witness, for better or 
worse (faulty memory and ambiguity, for example) now appears as the state of the material object 
as well” (23). In this way, osteological analysis, by attempting to re-subjectify victim remains, also 
moves through witness testimony. As a result, something of the “residue” of ambiguity and im-
possibility that characterizes witness testimony is transferred and replicated by the material testi-
mony of bones. In addition, by constructing a “biography” of bones, in a sense “inscribing” bones 
with meaning and signification, the material testimony of osteological analysis passes into and 
out of the realm of literary testimony, with victim remains being “written” and “read” as texts. In 

68 Wolfe



this way, while osteological analysis is intended as a means by which to externalize the traumatic 
memory and meaning of slavery, its meaning cannot be purely extracted from its own context of 
meaning-making—something of the “residue” or trace of interpretation, translation, and analysis 
taints its meaning via the very process of extraction. Osteological analysis, rather than interpret-
ing the “sign” and signification of bones, instead renders bones another sign in a further deferral 
of meaning. Here, rather than resolve the ambiguity and impossibility of witness and literary 
testimony in order to externalize memory and meaning, we see that osteological analysis folds 
and refolds into the testimonial realms of the literary and the witness, destabilizing hierarchies of 
testimony. In this way, osteological analysis also embodies a “lacuna” of bearing witness. 

This “lacuna,” the inherent rupture and impossibility of osteological analysis, has specific 
implications to its practice in the plantation archeology of slavery. Osteological analysis, through 
the forensic analysis of victim remains to verify identity and reconstruct traumatic memory and 
meaning, attempts to return victims to subjectivity, to resubjectify what was stripped away by the 
inherent objectification, commodification, and fetishization of slavery. However, the methods 
and practice of the osteological analysis of slave remains constantly undercut their own project 
and even repeat the dynamics of violence inherent to slavery. Although osteological analysis aims 
to “resubjectify” victim remains via identification, in order to enact identification, all of these 
instruments and objects become commingled with traces of the human: something must be put 
into the DNA amplifier, the blood card, the centrifuge; the plastic boxes do not remain empty. 
Yet in the process, these traces of the individual, the subject, the missing person, are effectively 
annulled, flattened out into the very same equipment or instrumental level as every other item on 
the list, the human remains losing their remaining identity to the very tools and objects meant to 
identify them. (172) 

Mapping this analysis specifically onto the osteological analysis of plantation archaeology, 
victim remains of slaves, in the process of resubjectification, mingle with the material instruments 
of osteological identification. Pressed between slides, passing into and out of centrifuge and mi-
croscope, victim remains slip into and out of material and witness testimony, subject and object, 
phasing between them, undergoing a continuous and simultaneous process of subjectification 
and desubjectification. As a result, the remains of slaves are again subjected to further abstraction, 
objectification, and commodification via the very processes intended to restore subjectivity. In 
this way, osteological analysis of plantation archaeology repeats the dynamics of violent erasure 
and desubjectification it aims to subvert. Rather than resolve the “lacuna” of witnessing via the 
material testimony of osteological analysis, plantation archaeology further illustrates the ways in 
which the testimony of slavery, its traumatic memory and meaning, cannot be purely extracted 
and externalized, instead existing always in retreat.

Traumatic Object Archives: Analysis of Material Testimony and 
Ethnohistoric Approaches in the Digital Archaeological Archive 
of Plantation Slavery

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, established by a team based within 
the Department of Archaeology of Monticello, is a complete digital archive of “artifact, context, 
spatial, image, and map data from excavated sites of plantation slavery” (1). The archive contains 
interactive, image-laden media representing archaeological sites in Chesapeake, Jamaica, Nevis, 
and St. Kitts, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Each archival representation of an individual planta-
tion slavery site contains documentary evidence, a comprehensive excavation history, an outline 

69 Wolfe



of archaeological procedures, and a methods summary of research and analysis. In addition, the 
archive also contains image-laden object galleries highlighting artifacts, documents, and maps 
from each of the individual archaeological sites. As a result, the content of the Digital Archaeologi-
cal Archive combines images of objects with the presence of accompanying texts.

The Digital Archaeological Archive incorporates several methods characteristic of plantation 
archaeology. Within plantation archaeology, and demonstrated within the Digital Archaeological 
Archive, the presence of material culture is used to establish and verify “slave status,” an archaeo-
logical term indicating the presence of slaves at a site. In addition, material culture is used to re-
construct the experience of slave life, to excavate and externalize the memory of slavery. Accord-
ing to Frederick W. Lange and Jerome S.  Handler, patterns in the presence of material culture can 
establish and verify slave status of a site and represent the experience of slave life at a site where 
documentary evidence is seen as ambiguous or inadequate. “Documentary sources have generally 
been vague on slave material culture … Material culture is very unevenly reported in most docu-
ments” (28). As a result, material evidence supplements this perceived inadequacy. “For example, 
artifact remains within the identified areas have shown what the domestic kits of plantation sites 
consisted of … Remains of cooking and eating dishes, food processing equipment, and faunal 
and floral remains have provided some hard data on what slaves ate … a point that was ambigu-
ous in the documentation” (27). In this way, plantation archaeology presents material evidence as 
a means by which to fill the “gaps” in documentary evidence in order to produce a pure external-
ization of the memory of slavery.

The use of material culture as evidence to supplement the instability and inadequacy of docu-
mentary evidence is further reflected within ethnohistorical archaeology approaches, which are 
favored within plantation archaeology and replicated within the textual and material interplay 
of the Digital Archaeological Archive. Within ethnohistorical approaches, an interplay of docu-
mentary and material evidence is favored in order to verify slave status and reconstruct slave life. 
However, the interplay of documentary and material evidence within ethnohistorical approaches 
also implicitly privileges material evidence within this archaeological framing. Descriptions of 
ethnohistorical models within the scholarship of plantation archaeology emphasize the ways in 
which the interplay of material and documentary evidence is utilized specifically to supplement 
textual inadequacy. “Historic sites of archaeology- using an ethnohistoric methodology empha-
sizing an interplay between the documentary and archaeological data bases- offers the potential 
to develop quantifiable patterns … The delineation of patterns with a high probability of indicat-
ing plantation slavery conditions will allow us to search for these patterns in undocumented sites 
or, by extension, to search for evidence in preliterate sites as well” (28, emphasis mine). As a result, 
“There is a much higher probability than there was 10 years ago that slavery can be defined from 
purely archaeological data” (28). Here, the interplay between material and documentary evidence 
within ethnohistorical methods in plantation archaeology is revealed as a means by which to 
supplement the ambiguity of the textual via the introduction of the material in order to establish 
slave status and reconstruct the experience of slave life. In this way, both the use of material cul-
ture and ethnohistorical approaches within plantation archaeology can be understood as forms of 
material testimony intended to resolve the “lacuna” of literary and witness testimonies in order to 
externalize the traumatic memory of slavery.

However, the use of material culture and ethnohistorical methodology also embodies a site 
of profound rupture and slippage, as illustrated in the Digital Archaeological Archive. Within the 
Digital Archaeological Archive, images of excavated objects are presented alongside accompanying 

70 Wolfe



textual descriptions and documentation intended to contextualize the material culture of slavery, 
to capture and externalize its memory and meaning. However, this interplay of the material and 
textual automatically problematizes its own project and points to a constant dehierarchization 
and slippage between testimonial forms. Texts that accompany images of objects in the archive 
describe the object itself, as well as speculate on how the object would have been used in the ma-
terial culture of slave life. By describing excavated objects and speculating on their use, the Digital 
Archaeological Archive enacts an inevitable and simultaneous process of subjectification and nar-
rativization in which objects are translated, interpreted, and implicitly fictionalized. In order for 
the traumatic memory of slavery to be excavated and externialized via material testimony, objects 
must be made to “speak” as subjects, as well as “written” and “read” as “texts.” This interplay of 
documentary and material evidence within the Digital Archaeological Archive reveals a fundamen-
tal slippage between testimonies; in order to extract material testimony from excavated objects, 
the objects of the Digital Archaeological Archive must pass into and out of witness and literary di-
mensions of testimony. In addition, rather than extracting a pure externalization of meaning and 
memory, material testimony becomes always implicated in the process of its own extraction—it 
can never get outside itself. Instead of extracting a pure externalization of memory from the 
testimony of excavated objects, the Digital Archaeological Archive reveals the objects themselves as 
another sign, enacting an endless deferral of meaning in which what is analyzed contains always 
the residue of its own interpretation. In this way, rather than resolve the ambiguity of literary and 
witness testimony, the Digital Archaeological Archives embody the same “lacuna” of testimony, the 
inherent impossibility of bearing witness. 

This “lacuna” of material testimony within the Digital Archaeological Archive has specific 
implications to the field of plantation archaeology. The interplay of object and text within the 
Digital Archaeological Archive, in the very process of verifying slave status and reconstructing 
the memory of slavery, also participates in erasure and rhetorically replicates the dynamics of 
the violence of slavery itself. Within plantation archaeology and the Digital Archaeological Ar-
chive, the verification of slave status and reconstructing the lives of slaves via material testimony 
is supposedly intended to subvert the violence and erasure of slavery, memorializing memory 
and returning slaves to subjectification. However, in the process of verifying the presence of 
slaves at a site via material culture, the bodies and lives of slaves are represented by and reduced 
to objects. In this way, the extraction and exteriorization of the traumatic memory of slavery 
requires that the slave be made object, the process of subjectification engaging a simultaneous 
desubjectification. In this way, in the process of verifying slave status based on material evi-
dence, the Digital Archaeological Archive repeats the objectification and commodification of 
slave bodies and lives inherent to the violence of slavery itself.

In a similar vein, while the interplay between documentary and material evidence in the 
Digital Archaeological Archive is intended to externalize the memory of slavery by recreating and 
representing the lives of slaves, slaves themselves are strangely absent from the archive. Slaves 
are rarely mentioned; the few mentions of slaves within the archive rhetorically repeat dynamics 
of violence and erasure. Only three slaves are mentioned and given biographies in the archive. 
The biographies of the slaves Little George, Isaac Jefferson, and Joe Fossett can be found in the 
documentary evidence section of an archaeological site at Monticello called Building D/j, which 
functioned as a blacksmith’s and nailer’s shop. The biographies are presented alongside images of 
excavated objects from the site, as well as maps and images of the excavated site itself. The biogra-
phy of Little George, a mere four sentences, includes that George “…ran Monticello’s blacksmith 

71 Wolfe



shop from 1783 to his death in 1799 … George was selected to be the first manager of Jefferson’s 
nail-making business in 1794 and even received a small portion of its profits” (1). Similarly, the 
five-sentence biography of Isaac Jefferson includes that he “studied tinsmithing during an ap-
prenticeship in Philadelphia” and “became one of the most productive nail-makers in Jefferson’s 
nail-manufacturing shop” (1). Finally, the 4 sentence biography of Joe Fossett emphasizes that 
“[a]s a blacksmith, Joe was allowed to keep one-sixth of the blacksmith’s shop’s profits” and that 
“Joe was one of five slaves freed in Jefferson’s will” (1). The selective inclusion and framing of 
slave biography subtly erases and romanticizes slave labor and is invested in reproducing the a his-
torical idea of the “benevolent/kind master” in Thomas Jefferson. Rather than excavate and rep-
resent the cultural memory and experience of slavery, the ethnohistorical use of biography in the 
Digital Archaeological Archive rhetorically commodifies the lives and bodies of slaves in service of 
a perpetual, coerced production of white guilt and benevolent fantasy. Slaves are objectified and 
erased in biography, forced to perform a continuing ideological labor even in death. In this way, 
the ethnohistorical use of biography in the Digital Archaeological Archive rhetorically repeats the 
violence of slavery. The material testimony and ethnohistorical methods of the Digital Archaeo-
logical Archive, rather than externalize the traumatic memory of slavery and interpret its meaning, 
instead constantly undercuts its own project. The Digital Archaeological Archive illustrate again 
that plantation archaeology cannot speak outside of itself. The process of extracting the memory 
of slavery is always tainted by the very process of its extraction, endlessly deferring meaning and 
representation. Rather than resolve the “lacuna” of witnessing, plantation archaeology exists 
always within its impossibility.

Concluding Summary, Paths of Intervention, and Collective Healing
This analysis enacted multiple analytic processes to examine plantation archaeology as a form 

of testimony and bearing witness to the atrocity of slavery. By applying literary analysis to mate-
rial testimony of slavery, and by exploring representation of material testimonies in the literature 
of slavery, this paper aims to open up the relationship between literary and material testimonies 
of slavery and allow them to “speak” to one another. Analyzing the representation of Florens’s 
“telling” in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy reveals a fundamental slippage and dehierchization of wit-
ness, literary, and material forms of testimony that allows us to think toward the ways in which 
plantation archaeology also embodies a “lacuna” of bearing witness. The rhetoric of osteological 
analysis and the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery reveals that the methods 
and practice of plantation archaeology, rather than resolve the “lacuna” of testimony by recover-
ing an “objective” memory of slavery, instead embodies a site of paradox and traumatic rupture. 
Applying Felman’s concept of the “irreducibility” of literature to plantation archaeology reveals 
that its material testimony cannot be purely extracted and exteriorized but is always tainted by the 
very methods of its analysis. In addition, this critical examination reveals that the archaeology of 
plantation slavery often rhetorically repeats the violence of slavery itself.  

I wish to gesture at potential paths to address these sites of rupture within plantation archae-
ology and pursue both intervention and collective healing. Here, we return again to Agamben’s 
theory of the “lacuna” in which he says that this inherent crisis of testimony is not to be resolved 
in order to achieve representation. The location of testimony cannot be found by resolving its “la-
cuna”; rather, testimony can be understood as its inherent “lacuna” itself. Similarly, in her concept 
of the “irreducibility” of literature, Felman argues that this irreducibility is in fact the essence of 
literary testimony, embodying what she calls “the literary thing.” Any method of investigation and 

72 Wolfe



commemoration of the cultural trauma and violence of slavery will therefore be called to ac-
knowledge the inherent inability of testimony to “say itself,” to be extracted without being tainted 
by its very methods of externalization.

Weizman puts forth his concept of “Forensis” as means of intervening in the rhetorical vi-
olence and erasure of forensic archaeological practice. The term “Forensis” refers to a critical 
process in which the methods of archaeological analysis are subjected to simultaneous critique; 
“Forensis” therefore combines forensic methods of research and investigation, as well as simul-
taneous critical analysis of these practices, in order to interrogate their epistemologies, assump-
tions, protocols, and politics of knowledge production” (4). In this way, Forensis opens potential 
for harnessing forensic practice as a method of intervention via a turning of the forensic gaze.

In Testimony: The Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Felman and 
Laub engage with the importance of examining the relationship between literature and testi-
mony to understand the position of bearing witness within history and contemporary life. In 
addition, Felman argues that acknowledging and “claiming” the “irreducibility” of literature, 
the impossibility of testimony, enacts a form of “radical loss.” Enacting a claiming and recog-
nition of this “loss” of meaning, according to Felman, “is the only way one has of winning it” 
(127). By presenting a “Forensis” and literary critique of the methods of plantation archaeol-
ogy, this paper is intended to model the very paradigms of critical intervention and healing it 
pursues. In addition, the author of this paper wishes to recognize that, in an attempt to exter-
nalize the meaning of the testimony of plantation archaeology, this paper is further implicated 
in the deferral of meaning it attempts to orient and fix. By claiming the irreducibility of our 
own analysis, this paper also attempts to enact a form of “radical loss.”

To end our analysis, we again return to Florens’s testimony in A Mercy. Upon carving her 
“telling” into the walls, rendering it as image and object, Florens realizes her testimony cannot 
be extracted. “These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk only to themselves” (188). 
Here, Morrison pushes us to realize that the unexcavateable testimony of slavery, including its ma-
terial testimonies, cannot be said outside its own methods of saying.

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Agamben, Georgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: 
 Zone, 2002. Print.

n.p. Digital Archeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. Department of Archaeology 
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Felman, Shoshanna, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing Literature, 
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Felman, Shoshanna. Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis. Palo Alto: 
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Keenan, Thomas, and Eyal Weizman. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic 
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Lange, Frederick W., and Jerome S. Handler. “The Ethnohistorical Approach to Slavery.” The 
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Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Vintage International, 2008. Print.

Saltzman, Lisa, and Eric Rosenberg, eds. Trauma and Visuality in Modernity. New 
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Samford, Patricia. Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. 
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Sheikh, Shela. “Forensic Theater: Grupa Spomenik’s Pythagorean Lecture: Mathemes of 
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Stenberg UP, 2014. 166-186. Print.  

Weizman, Eyal. Introduction. Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. By Weizman. 
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