Beyond and Between the Plantation; The Archaeology of "Everything But" in the American Southeast

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori C. Thompson. Jeffrey Glover.

The City of Atlanta was born from Terminus, a junction of rail lines, in the nineteenth century. Archaeological excavations for a modern transportation system, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), were conducted in the late 1970s. The results of this massive urban archaeological project identified 40 sites, along with 29 areas of artifact concentrations. The return of the MARTA Collection to Georgia State University has revealed new insight into nineteenth and twentieth century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Zierden. Elizabeth J. Reitz.

Charleston, South Carolina, is probably best known as an urban center servicing a plantation economy supported by slave labor, but this is only part of the city's function. The city was an important social, political, and economic port on the Atlantic seaboard, a vital link between interior centers of production and the transatlantic world. Charles Town began as a thriving hub for the Native American trade, as well as for cattle and forest products. This trade connected rural homesteads and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Stroud Clarke.

This paper presents a continuation of the bead study presented at the 2015 SHA conference in which beads from a South Carolina frontier site dating from c.1680-1734 on the Drayton Hall property were tested against Jon Marcoux’s 2012 correspondence analysis of 35,000 glass trade beads from Native American mortuary contexts dated c.1607-1783. The 2012 study discerned four distinct clusters of time from the beads within mortuary contexts. The current paper examines an additional dataset of beads...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Harrup.

Brunswick Town was established in 1725 on the Lower Cape Fear River by an influential anti-proprietary faction known as The Family.  Their purpose was exploitation of English mercantilist policy which provided a fixed price for naval stores. This singular focus and their monopoly of valuable land retarded the development of organic economic networks and linkages, restricted areas for settlement, and created the conditions for the town’s demise during the Revolutionary War.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Seifert.

Skidaway Island’s Benedictine monastery and Freedmen school provides us with a unique opportunity to examine one angle of African-American life post-Reconstruction. Located southeast of Savannah, Georgia, this mission was part of the larger Benedictine presence, whose members initially started Freedmen schools at the Bishop’s request. Though this site was only briefly occupied (1878- ca. 1890s), we are gaining insight into the lives of the European-born Benedictine monks, African-American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Ames Heyward.

New research at Drayton Hall is shifting decades-old interpretation of how the house and land were used by John Drayton in the mid- to late- 18th century. The previous narrative was of an agricultural lifestyle on a southern plantation, but the material culture and historical evidence indicates that Drayton Hall was built and used as an English country estate to display wealth and position to those visiting the property. This paper analyzes the artifacts recovered from the South Flanker well to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Westfield.

The Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah is one of only a handful of antebellum homes in the city's tourism industry to undergo archaeological studies. In spring 2017, excavations were conducted in the basement of the carriage house, where a depression in the floor was thought to be caused by the remains of a former enslaved woman. Completed in ca. 1841, the Sorrel-Weed House was built for merchant Francis Sorrel and is now the focus of a public interpretation program that involves infidelity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Fortenberry.

Archaeologists and architectural historians have long argued that Charleston’s Town Houses and urban landscapes were social stages for the Lowcountry’s gentry classes. But beyond their roles as socio-cultural theaters, cities and town played myriad economic, symbolic, and defensive roles in early modern colonial society. The challenge is understanding the intersection of these interpretive themes as realized through material cultural and the built environment.   To begin to formulate more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Platt.

Perched in a display case in the depths of the Charleston Museum in Charleston, SC is a seemingly out-of-place grass helmet, an artifact from Hawaii donated in 1798. At first, it may be unclear how this object has much to contribute to a museum with a mission focused on the history of Charleston and the broader lowcountry of South Carolina. However, the presence of this object in and of itself, and its itinerary that eventually brought it to America’s first museum (c. 1773) tells us a great deal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Brown. Kathryn Cooper. B. Lynn Harris.

As part of phase two of the 2011 East Carolina Maritime Studies Fall Field School, students, PI, and CO-PI split into two groups to record historic split-log dugout vessels located at the Charleston Museum and Middleton Plantation, South Carolina. As in most of colonial, and later American economies, transportation by water persisted as the most effiencent mode of moving goods and people to market. Canoes and periaugers were among the most common vessels utilized in the agricultural economy in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradford Botwick.

An archaeological and historical study of upper- and middle-class households in Mobile, Alabama provided an opportunity to examine how certain forms of material culture and the built environment served to demarcate social, racial, and economic differences in this city and how these compared with other cities.  The block under consideration and its neighborhood were generally homogenous, with residents being the families of professionals. Notably, most of the properties were rentals; land use,...