Unearthed Legacies: Community-Driven Insights into Coffin Hardware from the Old Canaan Baptist Cemetery

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historical cemeteries and individual burials with limited documentation often must rely on mortuary artifacts for temporal evidence. Coffin hardware can provide this data and insight into individual and community socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and social identity. The descendant community of the Old Canaan Baptist Cemetery, located in Marshall, Texas, initiated an investigation into the cemetery. Due to racially motivated intimidation tactics, access was lost to the cemetery in the 1930s leaving the descendants with limited information on where their ancestors rest. In 2021, 2023, and 2024, the anthropology faculty and students at Texas Tech University excavated 13 burials at the community’s request. This research utilizes coffin hardware to determine burial date ranges and infer the socioeconomic status of each individual. Additionally, this research compares the hardware to that found in three other cemeteries to explore the socioeconomic status of the community.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• 2025 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow