The Archaeology of Frontier American Judaism: Exploring the Mosaic of Jewish Domestic Religious Practice in the 19th Century

Summary

The Block Family Farmstead in Washington, Arkansas represents the first documented Jewish immigrant family to arrive in the state and their home is the most extensively excavated Jewish Diaspora site in North America, dating to the first half of the 19th Century. The site gives unique insight into the domestic practices of a Jewish family on the frontier in absence of an ecclesiastical support network or coreligionist community. The faunal assemblage recovered primarily from the home’s detached kitchen may indicate the manner in which the Block family transgressed against the tenants of their faith, either intentionally or through pragmatic necessity. However, two key features, an articulated fowl burial and a trash pit feature, also adjacent to the home, may provide material evidence to suggest that the family attempted to atone for, or mitigate these potentially unintentional lapses in faithful religious observance, while masking the more orthodox elements of their religion from their potentially xenophobic neighbors. Although they appear isolated, when these features are viewed within the same context of the yard space of a known Jewish family, they provide the artifactual evidence to explain the complicated mosaic of practice required of frontier Jews for their religious, social and economic survival.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage