Historical Ecologies of Botanical Gardens: Archaeobotany at Bartram’s Garden (Philadelphia, PA)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The collection and transport of natural specimens during the long eighteenth century had political, intellectual, and ecological effects. Botanical gardens are key loci to examine the material histories of these processes. Bartram’s Garden, the most prominent botanical garden in North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, provides the ideal site for studying these sites of knowledge production. While the historical plant communities found in this and other gardens are critical data points, reconstructing them archaeologically is difficult due to issues of preservation and requires atraditional datasets. Historic preservation work in the 1970s uncovered a large rodent cache under the floor of the Bartram House attic that contained eighteenth- and ninteenth-century material including animal bones, newspaper and handwritten fragments, fabric, insects, and large amounts of desiccated plants. Using this material, I synthesize macrobotanical, zooarchaeological, and entomological evidence of the historic garden environment. I use this data to explore life at Bartram’s Garden in more detail, in particular evidence of the plant communities present in the garden and the changing ecologies of the greater Philadelphia region. My investigations reveal new ways in which the cultural and intellectual ideal of the botanical garden articulated with its ecological background.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35572.0