12,240 Square Feet; The 1740 Fire and Disaster at the Household Scale in Colonial Charleston

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1770, the Provost-Marshal of the city of Charlestown (now Charleston, SC) advertised the land of a former gunsmith as for sale in The South Carolina Gazette. The valuable lot, situated in the center of the oldest part of the city, was described as “fifty-one feet, more or less” on front and in depth “two hundred and forty-one feet.” This property measuring at just over a quarter acre at one time may have housed as many as seventeen people. Seven of those individuals enslaved the other ten. These interactions internal to a single property, writ large, describe the individual relationships and small-scale networks that unfold into the large-scale moments of conflict and subversion under the system of urban slavery in colonial Charleston. This paper will deploy legacy archaeological data and collections to explore the relationships within a single household and their interactions with city-wide societal tensions in the late eighteenth-century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology