Revisiting Snowtown: A 21st Century Analysis of the North Shore Site in Providence, Rhode Island

Summary

In the early 1980s, archaeologists from De Leuw Cather/Parsons conducted a large-scale data recovery project in downtown Providence within the Providence Cove Lands Archeological District. In 2013, The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) began a multi-year project to assess, analyze, catalog, and re-curate the Cove Lands Collection. In total, PAL’s effort re-cataloged and re-curated an assemblage of approximately 150,000 artifacts dating from the Middle Archaic period through the nineteenth century.

One of the post-contact archaeological contexts within the North Shore Site assemblage is associated with Snowtown: an early nineteenth-century "poor" neighborhood in Providence most notable for race riots between free African Americans and working-class whites in the 1820s and 1830s. This paper will discuss the history and archaeology of Snowtown, blending the original data and interpretations from the 1980s effort with current historical research and modern digital data analyses to provide a more nuanced interpretation of the site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boxed but not Forgotten (Again!): The Importance of Collections-Driven Research   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 944