Known as a Welcoming Place: The Construction of Community and Memory in a Black Summer Community, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, 1870 – 1950

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Marginalization and Resilience in the Northeast", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper reflects on and shares insights from the Oak Bluffs Historic Highlands Archaeology (OBHHA) project, a community-based historic landscape study that maps the construction and growth of an early-20th Black vacationing community in the Highlands area of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. The project focuses on the role of space, place, racialization, and collective memory in the construction of this community, in shaping the built and natural landscape, in residents and visitors’ experiences, and the production of meaning and historical knowledge.

The OBHHA project has sought to answer these questions by investigating how short- and long-term residents of this resort town shaped and experienced the landscape. The project also seeks to identify the ways in which these factors were shaped by Black vacationers’ experiences of racism, struggles against structures of racialized social and economic exclusion, and assertions of a right to leisure and joy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Archaeology of Marginalization and Resilience in the Northeast

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow