African-American Burial Practices and Community Identity, Cohesion, Social Resistance, and Autonomy in Ante-bellum Philadelphia

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "“We the People”: Historical Cemetery Archaeology in Philadelphia" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

There was a significantly greater occurrence of African-influenced or Creolized burial practices at the later of two cemeteries used by Philadelphia’s First African Baptist Church in the early nineteenth-century. Given that the process of laying the dead to rest represents a special social moment where individual identity can be recast/refined by family and community, this finding is suggests the maintenance, or revival, of certain signs and symbols of African identity within Philadelphia's African-American community, and particularly within that community's own newly-formed institutions, i.e., its churches. This paper will very briefly review this data and then explore its historical context to examine the issues of African-American community identity, cohesion, social resistance, and autonomy in ante-bellum Philadelphia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• “We the People”: Historical Cemetery Archaeology in Philadelphia   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology