Using Historical African American Scholars’ Writings to Understand the Materiality of Nineteenth-Century African America Communities in Annapolis, Maryland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In exploring how archaeologists can apply concepts and practices from Black Studies in our investigations of the materiality of daily life in the past, the easiest theories to see archaeologically may be those promoted by theorists who were contemporary to the people we are studying. The forerunners of Black Studies today, scholars such as W. E. B Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Copper, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune, just to name a few, provide insight into the recommended practices of daily life in the African American community of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We can examine the writings of these scholars as blueprints being offered to the people we are studying archaeologically. This paper explores the writings of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American scholars to better understand how their theories can be translated into daily living and therefore reflected in the material culture, looking specifically at the examples of several late nineteenth and early twentieth-century middle-class African American families from Annapolis, Maryland.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36779.0