At Land’s End: Recovering wharf builders in the late 18th and early 19th-century Chesapeake

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

While sailing and dock work are both tractable through archaeological and archival records, the process of building out docks and wharves remains obscured. The moderation of meeting between land and water was formative in urban port placemaking, directly impacting the size of ships and quantities of storage a city could accommodate. Due to the itinerant nature of their work and the mixed fill that characterizes the archaeology of wharf and dock foundations, the people behind these processes are generally less understood than the technologies or economies. Through an archival study of laborers in multiple Chesapeake Bay ports, this paper complicates the recovery of the laborers building port spaces. Bringing together legacy archaeological data from wharf and dock excavations and multi-modal archival analysis, it comparatively examines the roles and agency laborers had in the placemaking of ports in the late 18th and early 19th-century Chesapeake.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Port of Call: Archaeologies of Labor and Movement through Ports

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow