Community as Client: A Descendant-Based Archaeological Research Approach at a Presidential Plantation Site

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Clientage Model, as defined by Dr. Michael Blakey and his team, is one in which the archaeologists give the descendants primacy in defining the research and interpretive agenda directed towards their ancestral material record. We have strove to have descendants guide our approach to the archaeological record at Montpelier. One of the more significant questions descendants have raised is how the archaeological record reflects their ancestors’ intellectual contributions. This has helped us rethink our approach to interpreting the archaeological record--and moved us towards an archaeology of intellectual labor across the landscape. In this presentation, I will explore the insights gleaned from this perspective and how this has changed our collective understanding of the plantation landscape--both for staff archaeologists and for descendants. From this work, descendants have termed the larger archaeological record as an ancestral memory device and have become a primary partner in preserving this resource.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow