Where Have All of the Artifacts Gone: Examining the Impact of Structural and Environmental Racism on Site Preservation

Summary

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

A standard truism in archaeology is that studies that reveal no new material data are as important as those that recover many artifacts and features. This paper examines what this truism means when—by all accounts—data should have been recoverable but was not. Archaeological surveys of the Black neighborhoods from the former West Virginia coal towns of Tams and Wyco revealed very few artifacts, a result that was particularly surprising given the wealth of material data recovered from the white and immigrant communities at Tams. This discrepancy in material data can largely be attributed to the razing and industrial reuse of these Black neighborhoods in the latter half of the twentieth century, when many of these coal towns were more sparsely inhabited if not entirely abandoned. This paper interrogates these results, and attempts to situate them within broader systems of structural and environmental racism. I argue that this near total lack of artifactual data is an effect of racist systems that presents a new dilemma for archaeologists and demonstrates some of the limitations of the discipline.

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): 37041.0