“By Some Little Compositions of Their Own”: The Archaeology of Literacy at the Williamsburg Bray School

Summary

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

The curriculum of the Williamsburg Bray School is discussed in several correspondences between the school’s trustees and sponsors, and inventories of the textbooks provided to the school offer additional insight into what the students were learning. While these resources clearly indicate the purpose of the school was to indoctrinate Black children into the Anglican faith and to teach them reading, spelling, sewing, and “such other things as may be useful to their owners,” the subject of writing is never explicitly mentioned. This omission has sparked debate among scholars regarding whether writing was taught at the school, and Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists have been asked to weigh in using archaeological data from the site. This paper explores the complexities of identifying literacy in the archaeological record, discusses evidence of writing at the Williamsburg Bray School, and reviews the results of a comparative analysis of slate writing artifacts from various sites.

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): 53993