The Willing Suspension of Documentary Evidence: Centering the Artifact and Considering Tacit Knowledge

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Toni Morrison wanted to see books “where the gender of the narrator is unspecified. Gender, like race, carries with it a panoply of certainties.” What panoply of certainties do readers mobilize when thinking a character is female? What tacit knowledge do archaeologists bring to a site when thinking its occupants were Black? This paper reports on an experiment the presenter conducted with archaeologists, suspending documentary information and sharing only archaeological data from a nineteenth-century Virginia site. Documents had inclined previous archaeologists to see the stone foundation as remnants of a stable. The density of ceramics, buttons, and glass encouraged others to see it as a domestic site, but how did participants view it differently when supplied with different hypothetical information – site occupants being Black, White, free, enslaved, tenants, land owners, women, or men? How does re-centering the artifact enable archaeologists to perceive, and question, tacit knowledge informing our interpretations?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow