Environmental Analysis of the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1805 the congregation of Williamsburg’s First Baptist Church established their first permanent building on a marginal piece of land within the city limits. The church, composed of enslaved and free Blacks, worshipped in two different structures here for 150 years and established a cemetery that was used in the first half of the 19th century. Colonial Williamsburg’s Department of Archaeology has been intensively excavating, researching, and analyzing this site since 2020 with a goal of rebuilding the first church and commemorating the cemetery. Environmental investigation, which has included pollen, phytolith, geomorphological, and faunal analysis, has allowed us to examine the ways weather, topography, vegetation, and environmental change shaped the congregants experience during the first two decades of establishing the church on this site. This research has also provided details on individual congregants with pollen analysis used to explore the diet of three early congregants interred in the cemetery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow