New Orleans and the Long Nineteenth Century: The View from Faubourg Tremé.

Summary

The Tremé is often referred to as America’s oldest African-American neighborhood and has been the site of significant social, cultural, and political developments in New Orleans for the past two hundred years. From the colonial period onward, the neighborhood fostered the growth of the city’s Creole population and displayed a distinct cultural and demographic makeup unmatched in other parts of the American South. In recent decades, scholars have considered the Tremé as a rich site of cultural production, situating the history of the neighborhood within wider discussions of immigration, creolization and race. This paper examines the historical and symbolic importance of Tremé in light of current archaeology in the neighborhood, revealing how object-based methodologies are complicating the theoretical questions and concerns that New Orleans often inspires. New assemblages are discussed to demonstrate how archaeology is reshaping historical narratives of the early Creole faubourgs and life in the nineteenth-century city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Orleans Archaeology at the Tricentennial   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 596