Material Evidence of Everyday Life in West Philadelphia’s Black Bottom Neighborhood: A Community-Centered Approach

Summary

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

Heritage West is an ongoing community archaeology project co-created by academic archaeologists, museum professionals, community organizations, and descendent populations. Focused on a historically Black neighborhood razed in the late 1960s by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, Heritage West aims to add material weight to oral historical evidence of the everyday lived experiences of Black Bottom residents. A during-the-semester field school in Fall 2023 combined public, community, and campus archaeology approaches to investigate the parking lot of West Philadelphia’s Community Education Center, where seven homes once stood. Open lab hours and community workshops throughout 2024 have allowed for community involvement through the processing and analysis of the collected materials. Using these collaborative excavation and lab methods, more than fifteen Penn students and forty community volunteers have cooperated to document details of the vibrant Black Bottom community, shedding light on the everyday lives of those who occupied the homes from 1850 to the late 1960s, as well as on the use of the Community Education Center building as a Quaker school in the 1930s.

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): 53818