Legendary Landscapes, Community Access, and Continued Relevance at the Nathan Harrison Site in San Diego County, California

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Nathan Harrison Historical Archaeology Project, a 20-year undertaking that sought to understand and communicate the life and legacies of San Diego County’s first African American homesteader, employs orthogonal thought and archaeological, anthropological, and historical tools of analysis to bring marginalized voices to diverse publics. The remote mountaintop site was home during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Nathan Harrison, who was born into slavery and endured horrors of the Antebellum South, the mania of the Gold Rush, and racial injustices of the Old West. Harrison, who has become celebrated as the region’s first permanent African American, gained mythical status during his life and after his passing; while alive, he was embraced by multiple communities, and his story has since been used by different groups over time for a variety of causes. This paper examines how Harrison’s archaeologically identified historical minstrelsy and the identity politics of the nineteenth-century Old West have continued relevance in the twenty-first century and the many ways the Nathan Harrison Historical Archaeology Project has been able to increase access to the site and its major discoveries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36299.0