The Bass Street Community Archaeology Project: Digging Deeper into African American Heritage in Nashville

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since 2017, the Bass Street Community Archaeology Project has been conducting excavations at the site of one of the earliest African American neighborhoods in post-emancipation Nashville. The Bass Street Community was located on the north side of Saint Cloud Hill, the site of Fort Negley, a Civil War era fort constructed by the Union forces in Nashville. Formerly enslaved persons who joined with Union forces were pressed into service to construct the fort, forming settlements on the slopes of Saint Cloud Hill that developed into permanent neighborhoods following the end of the Civil War.

The neighborhood at Bass Street was a thriving yet marginalized community up until the 1960s when it was demolished and the people relocated for the construction of the interstate system. Despite the political and social marginalization, the residents of Bass Street maintained their collective identity within the Jim Crow Era South and through the Civil Rights Era.

This presentation we will provide an update regarding the more extensive fieldwork funded through our National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, and we will also present our preliminary findings from the lab work and artifact analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52430