Evidence of a Lost Cause, Fire, and Great Migration all Bound-Up in Redlines: A Century-and-a-Half of Archaeological Evidence from Chicago’s Bronzeville Neighborhood

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Neighborhoods and Communities (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Chicago’s Bronzeville Neighborhood generated and preserved deposits dating to the Civil War when Camp Douglas--a training/POW facility--existed in the area. In part, these deposits document the origins of the Lost Cause narrative, the consequences of the Jim Crow South, and the opportunities/constraints defined by 20th-century Chicago. Encouraged by post-war sentiment, the Northern memory of Camp Douglas faded quickly, and this active erasure rankled Southerners as hypocritical. As a part of Chicago’s forgotten history, efforts made to tell the camp’s story included the excavation of a residential backyard that yielded an undisturbed camp layer capped by a stratigraphic sequence of domestic materials generated by African Americans who came to the neighborhood as part of the Great Migration. Insights generated from emergent, domestic artifact patterns and research demonstrate the relevancy of archaeology as a counterforce to historical forces working to obscure the past from public memory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeology of Neighborhoods and Communities (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology