Padlocks as Negotiated Freedoms within Enslavement.

The archaeological recovery of a padlock from an eighteenth- or nineteenth-acentury domestic site seems ordinary, offering mundane interpretations for a prosaic piece of material culture. However, a lock found in association with a slave cabin is more evocative, suggesting confinement, or alternatively, a negotiated social relationship, conditional privacy, and limited freedoms within enslavement. A survey of the archaeological literature is undertaken to determine the pervasiveness of these locks in enslaved contexts, and then these data are contextualized and interpreted using historical accounts, the WPA ex-slave narratives, and the tenets of American jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]