Summer Harvests, Winter Meals: Home Canning at the African American Community of Timbuctoo, NJ

Summary

This paper focuses on the continuing work at the African American community of Timbuctoo in Westampton, New Jersey. While our initial guiding questions sought to uncover cultural retentions that could be retraced to West Africa, the realities of our archaeological work shifted our focus to a complex discourse on social and economic class. Specifically, this paper discusses the practice of home canning as a medium to resist and improvise against economic marginalization. Through this discussion, the seemingly mundane presence of items related to home canning at Timbuctoo has led us to some interesting and relevant interpretations for historical archaeology. Our interpretations of home canning at Timbuctoo are further contextualized into broader sociohistorical events and moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Periphery of the Research Project: Tangential Narratives, Side Data, and Interesting Tidbits   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 486