(Re)building the 87 Church Street Chronology: Archaeological Legacies and Telling Time in Urban Charleston

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Emergence and Development of South Carolina Lowcountry Studies: Papers in Honor of Martha Zierden" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

87 Church Street, an urban townlot in Charleston, SC and the site of The Heyward-Washington House, has been the subject of a series of excavations since the 1970s. This has resulted in an expansive legacy collection and a foundational dataset for numerous studies of eighteenth- century Charleston. Martha Zierden has spearheaded efforts to revisit the remarkable assemblage- representing a broad cross-section of Charleston life from the 1730s onward. This paper addresses one facet of the ongoing re-analysis of this collection- the development of an updated chronology for the site across fifty years of archaeological campaigns. Deploying the chronology development workflow established by DAACS consisting of a suite of statistical methods, coupled with a close examination of the stratigraphic and documentary record, the following explores how continued research and curation of old collections can continue to challenge fundamental assumptions about archaeological sites, site histories, and the people who dwelled on them.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Emergence and Development of South Carolina Lowcountry Studies: Papers in Honor of Martha Zierden   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology