Green Fields of Americay: The Irish Diaspora in Rural Massachusetts

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Anthony Farmstead site (SOM.HA.4) in Somerset, Bristol County, Massachusetts was excavated as part of a mitigation project for proposed utility infrastructure upgrades. Documentary research established that the farmstead was settled in 1757 and passed father-to-son through multiple generations of a prosperous New England Yankee family until the mid-nineteenth century, when the property was rented out to tenants. The longest tenant occupation of the property was by a young Irish immigrant couple and their American-born children. Data recovered during the excavation will be used to shed light on the lives of the Irish tenant farmers, who are not as well represented in the documentary record as are the Yankee inhabitants who preceded them. Archaeological materials will also be used to articulate the immigrant family with the larger nineteenth-century Irish diaspora culture and to consider how the family engaged in identity formation simultaneously as Irish and as new Americans.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow