When Walls Talk: Rodent-cached Botanical and Ceramic Assemblages from a 19th-century Charleston Kitchen House

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This poster focuses on the context of urban enslavement in the South Carolina Lowcountry, examining botanical and ceramic assemblages as mechanisms to create visibility for populations often who lived in close proximity with and are thus materially rendered less visible by their enslavers. The rodent-cached botanical and ceramic assemblage of the Nathaniel Russell House Kitchen House provides archaeologists with new data to draw out the lived experiences of the urban enslaved through networks of formal and informal exchange that encompassed both urban and plantation loci. Rodent caches inherently save materials that would otherwise be consumed, planted, or discarded in household middens. By focusing on rodent-cached materials in an urban context, this poster continues the research program of the archaeology of urban enslaved lifeways through a comparative examination of botanical and material assemblages that have not been preserved in similar contexts. The results of the first phase of this study are presented, along with potential future avenues of exploration as this project continues.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41517.0