Using Material Culture to Understand Freed African-American Lifeways in Early 19th Century Borderland Communities of Indiana and Illinois

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of historic assemblages from two Antebellum African-American communities to better understand resilience among these freed groups. Recently excavated materials from the Lick Creek Community within the Hoosier National Forest and the Miller Grove Community in the Shawnee National Forest are used to examine activity patterns and land use in free African-American communities during the nineteenth century.  Such comparisons have the potential to further our understanding of household activities, ritual behavior, and land use between two antebellum borderland free African-American communities separated by hundreds of miles. Variation in cultural materials in particular between the two artifact assemblages can contribute to enriching our understanding of early 19th Century African-American lifeways in the southern parts of Indiana and Illinois by providing information on the types of choices free African-American consumers  made in regard to purchasing household and other items for daily use.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Silenced Lifeways:The Archaeology of Free African-American Communities in the Indiana and Illinois Borderlands

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 392