Investigating the Archaeology of Shifting Community Values at Chrisholm Farmstead

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Throughout the 19th century, Amish and Mennonite settlers fleeing persecution settled in the United States. In this study, I focus on families who settled in what is now Butler County, Ohio. For these settlers, there is a robust historic record telling a story of the community shifting from conservative Amish to more liberal Mennonites. I investigate to what extent the archaeological remains recovered from the Augspurger family’s farmstead, Chrisholm, align with that story. Are the found possessions indicative of changes in identity in the same way that the documents are? I hypothesize that as religious tendencies of these families shifted, so did their personal everyday possessions, which should be seen in the archaeological record through change over time in artifact type. I expect to find positive correlations between my two data sources, archaeological data previously collected by the Cincinnati Museum Center in a preliminary survey of the Chrisholm site and written historical documents from this community. The results can help to understand if, for this group of people, possessions used for daily practices can be linked with known values of intentional communities, or if there are tensions between these data types that need to be considered.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25516