Becoming Historic? Reassessing the Significance of Mid-Twentieth Century Debris in Nineteenth Century Cellars

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) archaeological collection has been providing students and faculty at Georgia State University (GSU) the chance to reinvestigate aspects of Atlanta’s past through this large legacy collection. Almost 500 boxes of material were excavated in the 1970s when the MARTA rail lines were initially installed. While these materials provide opportunities to highlight the importance of working with legacy collections, we want to take a slightly different angle and investigate materials now considered historic, but were not in the 1970s. This paper will investigate two cellars which were filled in the mid-twentieth century. While the original investigators considered the fill modern and unremarkable, we will explore what a fresh look at this garbage might reveal about the development of Atlanta 40 years after its excavation. In so doing, we critically examine whether this material should have ended up as part of this large legacy collection.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 684