African-American (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Wagner.

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The African-American inhabitants of the Miller Grove community in southeastern Illinois lived within a dynamic landscape of interlocking natural and cultural features that expressed their identity as a free people as well as their resistance to slavery. Bluffs and caves...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Paresi. Jennifer McCann.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Meanwhile, In the NPS Lab: Discoveries from the Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archeologists at Boston’s African Meeting House were surprised to discover an intact porcelain plate on the site’s surface. More shocking was the mark identifying the plate as coming from the exclusive Porcellian Club, one of the storied finals clubs of Harvard University. The club was founded in 1791 and boasts...

DOCUMENT Citation Only boyd sipe.

The Columbian Harmony Cemetery was established in the mid-19th century to serve the District’s African American community and continued in use until 1960 when approximately 37,000 burials were exhumed and remains were re-interred in the National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland.  However, the burial removal process at Columbian Harmony Cemetery was not complete; not all burials were exhumed and re-interred.  Headstones and other cemetery monuments, entire coffins, coffin fragments and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Fennell.

The cultural landscapes of African-American communities in the nineteenth century were often anchored with a church, cemetery, and school. Sectarian and secular dynamics interacted in shaping the terrains of those social networks. This presentation explores such developments in the impacts of religious beliefs, practices, and congregations on the strategic locations and configurations of churches and cemeteries before and after the Civil War, with a focus on the Midwest region. For example, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dena Doroszenko.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Bridging Connections and Communities: 19th-Century Black Settlement in North America" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Josiah Henson was known as the patriarch of the British American Institute (BAI) in 1842 which began as a school for the growing freedom-seeker population living at the Dawn Settlement. The Dawn Settlement was a farming community which grew to 500 people by 1850. While the history of the BAI...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Ewen.

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Prior to the Civil War both whites and free African-Americans were interred at Cedar Grove cemetery in New Bern, North Carolina. In 1914, the Jim Crow Era city fathers decided to remove 14 African American burials to the black cemetery three blocks away. A century later, a local reporter and a community activist joined forces to right the past wrong and return the burials to their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith M. Poole. Ywone Edwards-Ingram.

Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg has always involved African Americans in different levels of its practice.  Members of this community have worked behind-the-scenes and in more public roles at the museum since its founding in the late 1920s. This presentation addresses the unique ways in which archaeologists have worked with African Americans, and how this interaction has allowed archaeologists to reach descendant communities.  Examples from past and ongoing activities are used to illustrate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chandler E Fitzsimons.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Northeast Region National Park Service Archeological Landscapes and the Stories They Tell" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Slabtown, Virginia (also known as Uniontown) was an African-American settlement established in 1863 on the site of Yorktown’s Revolutionary War battlefield by formerly-enslaved individuals who achieved freedom by crossing Union lines (so-called “contraband”). Slabtown/Uniontown remained...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany L. Brown.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This study centers on four historical African American cemeteries in Jacksonville, Florida: Memorial, Sunset Memorial, Pinehurst, and Mount Olive. Collectively, these cemeteries contain thousands of African American burials. Contrary to the local government’s critique of these cemeteries as ‘abandoned and neglected’ spaces; interviews with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeff Burnett.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Little archaeological research has been conducted on the historic black communities of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts despite the long history of African and African American life on the island. This paper discusses potential archaeological sites related to African American presence in the town of Oak Bluffs,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brianne L. Greenwood.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Recent Past" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Established in the early 1900s, The Foot was once a thriving African American neighborhood located below Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri.  The Foot was home to black-owned businesses that provided goods and services to a segregated population not always welcome in the white-owned businesses.  In the 1950s and 60s, highway construction and urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chandler E. Fitzsimons. Margaret A. Perry.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Towards a More Inclusive Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The United States’ bicentennial celebrations from 1976-1981 prompted a nationwide attempt to reconstruct and commemorate Revolutionary-era landscapes with unprecedented vigor. These efforts were particularly widespread in Tidewater Virginia. At Yorktown, the site of the final surrender of the War of Independence, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew R. Wyatt. Clelie C. Peacock.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Since 2017, the Bass Street Community Archaeology Project has conducted excavations at the site of one of the earliest African American neighborhoods in Reconstruction era Nashville. The Bass Street Community was located at the site of Fort Negley, a Civil War era Union fort. Black Nashvillians-...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer McCann. Victoria Cacchione.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Meanwhile, In the NPS Lab: Discoveries from the Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During excavations of the African Meeting House on the north slope of Boston’s famed Beacon Hill, archaeologists collected an intact, gilt decorated porcelain plate from the site’s surface. This plate, with an obscure Latin phrase and boars head emblem, seemed out of place. The maker’s mark on its base puts it...