Investigating the Heart of a Community: Archaeological Excavations at the African Meeting House, Boston, Massachusetts

In collaboration with the Museum of African American History, an archaeological research team from the University of Massachusetts Boston carried out a data recovery excavation at the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill. The African Meeting House was a powerful social institution for 19thcentury Boston’s free black community. The site played an important role in the abolition movement, the creation of educational opportunity, and other community action for social and political equality. The Meeting House was originally built in 1806, and renovations in preparation for the 2006 bi-centennial celebration prompted an investigation of areas of the property to be impacted by the proposed construction. Archaeological fieldwork, conducted under Massachusetts Historical Commission Permit Number 2750, was spread over seven weeks in May through July 2005. The field team opened and explored about 19 m2 of the site in the backlot south of the Meeting House and alley to the west. These excavations recorded information about a series of significant features and deposits, and collected over 38,000 artifacts and a series of soil samples for a detailed archaeobiological research program. These excavations met the requirements of the data recovery program as outlined in 950 CMR 70.00 and in the Memorandum of Agreement for the project, and the proposed renovation work proceeded with a finding of no adverse effect (36 CFR 800.5(b)). The depositional history and the nature of the archaeological record allow us to separate the overall excavation into three sub-areas: 1) the west alley between the AMH and 2 Smith Court; 2) the historic Meeting House backlot; and 3) the south yard, which originally belonged to the 44 Joy Street property. In terms of significant features and deposits, the west alley was almost entirely a series of builders’ trenches reflecting the historic sequence of construction and remodeling of the Meeting House and adjacent buildings to the west. In the backlot, the units against the south wall of the Meeting House contained similar builders’ trenches. The backlot also contained a series of stone and brick drains and a trash-rich midden layer. The vast majority of artifacts in the Meeting House backlot date from about 1806–1840. The ceramics assemblage is particularly large, and reflects both community meals at the Meeting House and business of Domingo Williams, a caterer who rented a basement apartment. Finally, only one feature was studied in the south yard, a privy (outhouse) that was for the 44 Joy Street property. The bottommost layer of the privy was an artifact rich nightsoil layer, dating to about 1811–1838, and containing the trash of African American tenants living at 44 Joy Street. Together, the archaeological deposits in the backlot provide a variety of insights into living conditions, economic opportunity, foodways, health, and daily life for 19th-century Boston’s free black community. These results thus provide information to help further the research, interpretation, and public education goals of the Museum of African American History

Scrubbing the Whitewash from New England History: Citizenship, Race and Gender in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Nantucket

This dissertation examines how racial ideologies have historically been entangled with discourses on citizenship and gender difference in the United States. In looking at the case study of the 18th- and 19 th-century African American community on Nantucket, I ask how these ideologies of difference and inequality were experienced, reinterpreted, and defied by women and men in the past. Whereas New England has maintained a liberal and moralistic regional narrative since the early-19th century, this dissertation builds on scholarship which has increasingly complicated this narrative, documenting the historically entrenched racial divides in the region. Historic African American community philosophies and social ideals are investigated through newspapers, pamphlets, and other records of the time. To address the household and individual scale, an archaeological investigation was undertaken at the homestead of a prominent 19th-century black family on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House was home to a prominent late-18th- and 19 th-century African American-Native American family on the island. The materiality of the Boston home—the artifacts, architecture, and landscape features—are the basis for making interpretations of the lives of the individuals that once lived there. African diaspora theory, black feminist thought, and theories of performativity form the basis for the interpretive framework of this dissertation. The process of community formation and mobilization is considered with regard both for the uniting potential of cultural background and the uniting potential of political and social goals. The diversity of the African diaspora is seen as both an asset and a challenge to the uniting of the community on Nantucket. Race, gender, age, social status, and other vectors of social cohesion all contributed to the experience of intersectional identities. The concept of performativity, which proposes that identities are temporarily stabilized during actions, is also part of the foundation on which identity is theorized in this dissertation. The historical analysis which contextualizes this research project focuses on the establishment and perpetuation of African American community ideals in the northeastern United States during the 19th century. Notions of citizenship and gender ideals were racialized and defined according to white standards. Women and men of African descent, as well as of other cultural backgrounds, were seen by dominant white culture as outside the bounds of citizenship by virtue of not being white and outside the bounds of womanhood/manhood by not being white women/men. Black communities, or communities of color, in the Northeast countered these hostile ideologies with a complex set of strategies for redefining, rejecting, or transforming dominant ideals of womanhood and manhood. Black gender ideologies represented the synthesis of several sets of cultural traditions, economic circumstances, and political goals. While these changed in important ways over the course of the 19th century, black gender ideals were consistently based on a normative notion of respectability while at the same time critiquing the race and gender ideologies of the society that defined respectability. In addition to this, people of color were increasingly defining a sense of collective identity based on these shared ideas of respectability and uplift and the ways that women and men achieved this in the home as well as in more public spaces. This dissertation first examines how the Boston-Micah family of the late-18 th and early-19th centuries contributed to the founding of the community of color on Nantucket island. African American, Native American, Cape Verdean, European, and people from other lines of descent were a part of this community and in the early-19th century they united around the identifier of "people of color." Seneca Boston and Thankful Micah were among the first of these people to strike out and settle on the southern edge of town. Through an analysis of their material worlds—including ceramics, their house itself, and their plot of land—it is suggested that they were actively negotiating dominant discourses on racial exclusion, citizenship, and gender which excluded people of color from the rights and privileges of full personhood. The 19th-century occupants of the house contributed to the growth, florescence, and survival of the African American community through the boom of the whaling industry on the island, an economic depression, and the resurgence of the economy with the coming of the tourism industry in the late-19th century. Mary Boston Douglass, Eliza Berry, Lewis Berry, Phebe Groves Talbot Hogarth, Elizabeth Stevens, and Absalom Boston experienced the race and gender ideals of the black community in the northeast, and wider American society, in a variety of ways. An analysis of ceramics, personal adornment objects, and small finds is used to examine their experiences. (Abstract shortened by UMI.