Assembling Race in Domestic Space at Woodville, 1850-1900

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Building on decolonizing and postcolonial frameworks that highlight white supremacist ideologies within the disciplinary formation of archaeology, this paper addresses informal collecting practices of middle-class white families in the nineteenth century. By tracing a family of civil engineers across the Eastern United States, I connect their collecting to opportunity created by the Indian Removal Act, the capitalist calculus of railroad companies, and the generational wealth of cotton trade. Through examination of documents, objects, and spaces at Woodville (38AL26), an historic house museum and National Historic Landmark in Southwestern Pennsylvania, I argue its nineteenth-century occupants mobilized economic and kin networks to access Native American sites then negotiated their own racial identities vis-à-vis anthropological constructions of indigeneity by organizing extracted objects into a mock-scientific, in-home display. Using Bennett’s concept of assemblage, this project maps flows of Indigenous archaeological materials into white settler domestic space and beyond to museums and universities today.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow