Archaeologies of Legacy: Southern Memory and the Archaeological Archive at 87 Church Street, Charleston

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

87 Church Street, now known as the Heyward-Washington House, is one of the most extensively excavated sites in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, representing a cross-section of urban life spanning the earliest decades of the eighteenth century to its reimagining as a historic house museum in 1929 on the leading edge of the historic preservation movement in the city. Most of the excavated material now forms the basis of an expansive legacy collection, produced by Dr. Elaine Herold in the 1970s whose long career appears in flashes throughout the midwest and eastern United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. The collections she generated represents the complex entanglement of curatorial practice, social memory, and interpretation in the production of the archaeological archive. Particularly profound are the impacts of Lost Cause perceptions of the Southern past on understandings of this site that are prevalent in Charleston during the initial period in which these collections were produced. Following the lead of historians, this paper considers the formation processes of the 87 Church Street archive, and how the taphonomy of memory impacts our interpretation and understanding of this collection.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Storeroom Taphonomies: Site Formation in the Archaeological Archive   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38418.0