Excavations at Historic Neelsville: life as a tenant blacksmith

Summary

From 2014 to 2015, excavations within the historic crossroads town of Neelsville in Montgomery County, Maryland, now a residential neighborhood, revealed a complex of features including a structure with a stone foundation. Initially identified as a blacksmith shop based on historic research, the structure was later revealed to be an adjacent domestic structure, presumably where the blacksmith and his family lived. A nearby sheet midden showed evidence of shared usage between the household, the blacksmith shop, and a school on the next property.

The interpretation of the site, a location between domestic, industrial, and even educational spaces, provided an interesting case study of the limitations of our system of classifying sites primarily by function. In the end, a landscape-based study of the entire crossroads community and the interface between these different functional spheres proved more revealing than a narrower site-based analysis focusing on smithing activity alone.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Maryland, My Maryland": Current Archaeology in the State   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 648