Multidisciplinary Research on "Rebels Rest": A 150 Year Old Log Frame House Site in Sewanee, Tennessee

Summary

This poster summarizes the preliminary results from a multidisciplinary research project that began as a salvage project when a 22 room, 150 year old log frame house burnt on the campus at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Faculty, students and volunteers are actively involved in an integrated program that includes archival research, architectural history, dendrochronology, dendroecology, geoarchaeology, paleoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and historical archaeology. The 7 acre site included two homes, one constructed in 1860 and the final in 1866, and several outbuildings. The site offers significant challenges archaeologically as it represents a palimpsest of over 150 years of intensive use in an area composed of shallow and easily eroded soils. The occupants of these households represented a small group of affluent, white, Episcopal Euroamerican Plantation owners who had come to the remote Southern Cumberland Plateau to avoid the heat and fevers of the deep south and to build a University to rival any in the north. We present preliminary summaries of the data from these integrated research foci to begin to reveal everyday life within this small community in a local and market economy. Comparisons are drawn between local excavations of small subsistence farmsteads in this rural community.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage