... The archaeology of historic African American communities throughout the Americas lends to a burgeoning field of study with a culmination of work in history, anthropology, sociology, and Africana studies (see Blakey, 2001). With sites dating from the 18 th to 20 th Centuries, these studies include skeletal material from enslaved plantation laborers in the US and Caribbean (Corruccini et al. 1985;Rathbun, 1987), enslaved industrial iron-work laborers , enslaved urban populations in the South (Owsley et al., 1987(Owsley et al., , 1990, antebellum urban free Black African Americans in the North (Crist et al., 1997;Rankin-Hill, 1997;Blakey, 1998), reconstruction and postreconstruction rural Black African Americans (Rose, 1985, Shogren et al., 1989, Dockall et al, 1996, and reconstruction and post-reconstruction urban Black African Americans (Beck, 1980;Blakey and Beck, 1982;Condon et al., 1998;Davidson, 1999;Hazel, 2000;Crist and Washburn, 2000;Tine, 2000;Peter et al., 2000;Davidson et al., 2002;Davidson, 2004;Wilson, 2005). Bioarchaeological techniques lend significant insight into the complex interactions between these population groups and their social and physical world. ...