Always Changed But Never Gone: A Century of Farming in Southeastern Massachusetts.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Anthony Farmstead historic site (SOM.HA.4) in Somerset, Bristol County, Massachusetts, was excavated through the data recovery level in anticipation of the construction of an electrical substation on the property. The site included remnants of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farmstead, including a cellar hole, well, outbuildings, field system, and burial ground. As a part of the data recovery efforts, extensive documentary research was conducted into the property’s ownership and residential history, as well as the family histories of the people who once inhabited the land. This paper will compare evidence of changes in the productive and domestic use of the property to the documentary results, particularly related to how these observable changes correlate with property transfers. The economic and productive histories of the various owners and tenants will be examined through the analysis of recovered cultural materials, and through the lens of Massachusetts’ history of pre-Revolutionary European colonization and later waves of immigration connected to the Industrial period, as well as the general trend across the region of a shift from subsistence to commercial farming.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24220