Keywords

Historical archaeology, polk county florida, nalaka, turpentine, debt peonage, jook joint, 1920s

Abstract

The extraction and distillation of pine sap for the naval stores industry reached its apex of production in the early decades of the twentieth century. Post-emancipation, the industry employed African American labor in the long leaf pine forests of the southeastern United States under a system of debt peonage that replaced the master-slave dynamic with a similar circumscriptive construct. Laborers rented company housing and were paid in scrip, a monetary system that limited their purchase of the basic goods of subsistence to the company commissary at inflated prices, resulting in an endless cycle of debt. Despite the oppressive circumstances of debt peonage labor, African Americans developed venues known as “jook joints” for the expression of agency through leisure. The jook was a structure where laborers congregated on weekends to socialize, dance, drink, gamble, and fight. The Polk County, Florida turpentine camp of Nalaka was in operation from 1919 until 1928. In 1942, the Nalaka site, and thousands of surrounding acreage, were purchased by the United States Government for use as an Air Force training range in anticipation of US involvement in World War Two. Although no structures survive, artifact scatters from the 1920s remain in situ. No known records exist to document the spatial arrangement of the structures at Nalaka. This study reconstructs the layout of the camp based upon artifact provenience, secondary iii ethnographic sources, and historical documents, to determine whether or not Nalaka supported a jook joint, and if so, where was its location.

Notes

If this is your thesis or dissertation, and want to learn how to access it or for more information about readership statistics, contact us at STARS@ucf.edu

Graduation Date

2013

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Walker, John

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Anthropology

Degree Program

Anthropology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0005080

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005080

Language

English

Release Date

12-15-2016

Length of Campus-only Access

3 years

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences, Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

Download

Share

COinS