Historical Archaeology of Race and Class in the Antebellum South

Greer, Matthew Clark, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Brandi MacDonald at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR), this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist studying historical racial identification. While prior research has not systematically assessed how class shaped racial identity, this project seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of racial identity in the Antebellum South by analyzing eight archaeological sites in the Cedar Creek drainage of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Archaeologists have long argued that people used consumer goods and food to perform various identities. Therefore, this project will focus on the consumer goods and food remains from these sites. To gain a broader view of the role consumer goods played in local identities, this project will also look at ledgers from local stores to compare purchases across customers from different classes. The funded research will provide new insights into the intersections of race and class in the Antebellum South. More broadly, it will provide new insights into the way different groups of people laid claim to racial identity in the 19th-century that can inform future archaeological, historical, and sociological research. The results will be shared with the public through lectures and the creation of a museum exhibit aimed at broadening the way racial identities are understood in the past. This project approaches racial identity using theoretical insights, allowing it to explore what identity meant in the past and the diverse ways racial identity was experienced and performed through consumption practices and foodways. Specifically, by assessing the connection between racial identities and class, the project provides insights into the ways socioeconomic status shaped the various meanings, experiences, and performances of racial identity. Four archaeological sites will be excavated for this project and collections from four more reanalyzed. The analysis of foodways will include an assessment of 4,000 faunal fragments and a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry study of absorbed residues from 330 ceramic vessels. Consumption practices will be assessed using archaeologically recovered ceramics. This will include a minimum vessel analysis to look at the choices these households made about what types of imported ceramic tea and tablewares to purchase and a use-wear analysis to determine how members of these households used ceramic vessels. To map out where these ceramic purchases took place, and by extension where these racial identities were being performed in local stores, the provenance of 280 locally-made utilitarian wares will also be assessed using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, neutron activation analysis, petrography, and Raman spectroscopy. To further assess consumption practices, an archival database will be created for the project using 10 merchants' ledgers, with consumers cross-referenced with census and tax records to determine their socioeconomic status. This project’s use of provenance and residue analyses make it the first study of racial identity to use analytical techniques from archaeological science and its successful completion will show how these provide new lines of evidence that enhance the methods archaeologists use to study racial identities. Data from the project will be used to create a workshop and a subsequent course syllabus along with training datasets for teachings students how to use archaeological science to answer research questions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.