Subfloor pits, or root cellars, associated with African American housing and dating from the 17th through the 19th centuries, have been documented archaeologically in the Mid-Atlantic states and upland South. Excavations in 2014 and 2015 at the Bulow Plantation in Florida exposed the footprint of an early 19th-century slave cabin containing a stone-lined subfloor pit, which represents the only well-documented archaeological example of its type identified south of South Carolina. Two conflicting interpretations exist regarding the cultural origins of subfloor pits: that the subfloor-pit phenomenon, writ large, is an African tradition that was simply continued under enslavement in the United States, or, alternatively, subfloor pits are not African in origin at all, but were innovated in the British American colonies in the early years of enslavement. The combined archival and archaeological evidence gathered here entirely support the latter interpretation.

在大西洋中部各州和南部高地上，考古记录了与非裔美国人房屋相关的地下坑或根底酒窖，其历史可追溯至17世纪至19世纪。2014年和2015年在佛罗里达州Bulow种植园进行的挖掘工作暴露了19世纪早期的奴隶小屋的足迹，该小屋内有一个石砌的地下地板坑，这是南卡罗来纳州南部唯一有据可查的考古实例。关于地下坑的文化起源，存在两种相互矛盾的解释：地下坑现象广为人知，是一种非洲传统，只是在美国的奴役下继续存在，或者，地下坑根本不是非洲起源的。 ，但是在奴役的初期，英美殖民地就进行了创新。