Ghosts in the Walls: Materiality, Temporality, and Identity at a Distributed Site

Rebekah L. Planto

Ghosts in the Walls: Materiality, Temporality, and Identity at a Distributed Site

Year: 2020

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Before, After, and In Between: Archaeological Approaches to Places (through/in) Time" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Bacon’s Castle in Surry County, Virginia, is rife with paradoxes. Home to over three centuries of plantation households, it owes its popular name to a man who never set foot there. Despite surviving as the “oldest brick dwelling” in English North America, lack of scholarship has rendered it more obscure than many of its long-demolished contemporaries. The 1665 house appears only as an isolated artifact—either an exemplar or an anomaly among elite domestic colonial sites—or as a backdrop for the drama of Bacon’s Rebellion. Sporadic primary and secondary references are often contradictory, yet simultaneously reproduce one narrative of the past while silencing others. This paper examines the fragmentations and absences in scholarly and popular understandings of Bacon’s Castle as products of its spatio-temporally and affectively distributed character. It brings together architectural, archival, and artifact analysis to lay the foundations for a long-overdue critical historical archaeology of Bacon’s Castle.