Thoughts from the Field…

I’m just coming off about 7 weeks in the field…first the University of Arkansas archeological field school at Historic Washington State Park, then the Arkansas Archeological Society Summer Training Program at Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park…Pics can be found on my Flickr page:

2010 Field School at HWSP:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72157623991075607/

2010 AAS Dig at Toltec:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72157624318138098/

More on the digs later…but for now, I am reminded of a HST quote:

I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday’s refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.

Hunter S. Thompson. Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979)

Block House Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Artifacts of Abraham Block

by David M. Markus and Jamie C. Brandon (submitted to Field Notes: the Newsletter of the Arkansas Archeological Society)

As we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Arkansas Archeological Society is appropriate to look backward and revisit some of our important past projects.  The Kadohadacho Chapter and the Southern Arkansas University Research Station of the Arkansas Archeological Survey have been doing just that at Historic Washington State Park (HWSP).

Dr. Leslie "Skip" Stewart-Abernathy screening with local youth during the 1982 excavations at the Block House in Historic Washington State Park.

Archeological investigations at HWSP have been intermittent for the past thirty years—including the 1981 Arkansas Archeological Society Summer Training Program at the Sanders House and the subsequent programs at the home of Abraham Block in 1982 and 1983. At the Block House excavations, under the direction of Dr. Leslie C. “Skip” Stewart-Abernathy (then the Arkansas Archeological Survey Research Station Archeologist at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), society volunteers and Survey staff unearthed the remains of the Block family detached kitchen.

In 1827 Abraham and his wife Fanny along with their seven children moved to Washington, Arkansas in Hempstead County on the western frontier of America in search of economic opportunities. Originally from Bohemia and later from Richmond, Virginia Abraham was a merchant by trade and moved south and became an important regional merchant.  Abraham Block has also become famous in Arkansas and American Judaism as a very early Jew on the frontier and thus, the family figures strongly in the hagiography of Judaism in the United States.

Although many of the homes of prominent figures in the Washington community, Block included, have survived (the railroad went through Hope, eight miles away, and thus preserving Washington) the associated outbuilding such as kitchens, smokehouses, barns, privies, slave quarters and wells have been lost. Arguably these building are the most revealing in terms of the daily lives of their inhabitants.  The work of Dr. Stewart-Abernathy and the Society digs has done much to reconstruct the landscapes of these “urban farmsteads.”

During the 1982 and later 1983 society training programs held at the Block house, Dr. Stewart-Abernathy recovered the remains of a sealed trash deposit dating to the early 1840’s under the expected footprint of the Block kitchen. Within this pit were a variety of household ceramics that likely represent discards from the Block home as well as the family business and faunal remains related to food consumption. These remains provided an opportunity to closely examine the Blocks’ attitudes and adherence to a major tenet of traditional Judaism: the system of kashrut relating meat consumption. With the assistance of Dr. Barbara Ruff of the University of Georgia, Dr. Stewart-Abernathy analyzed the remains and found that despite kosher laws forbidding the consumption of pork and catfish, there were in fact a respectable amount of both recovered the pit. When this finding is taken in conjunction with documentary evidence, it is apparent that Block family efforts to adapt their Judaism to frontier conditions led to sometimes painful results closely similar to the currents and experiences that in turn led to Reform Judaism.

Kadohadacho Chapter volunteer Bob Campbell finishes cleaning out the mysterious chimney feature.

The archeological record became increasingly complex in 1998 when the Sponsored Research Program of the Arkansas Archeological Survey, under the direction of Randy Guendling, returned to the Block yard space as part of work done at the Park. Guendling, along with Mike Evans and Jared Pebworth, tested both the side and back yards with augers and based on those findings dug several backhoe trenches in an attempt to locate early nineteenth century features. One of the trenches skirted the base of a long-since dead tree where brick remains were being exposed due to soil erosion. This trench, dug not five meters from the location of the kitchen excavations in the 1980’s, revealed the intact base of a brick feature—possibly a chimney or pier. This complicated the view of the Block urban farmstead landscape. Is this possibly an earlier structure?  Is it an end chimney for the kitchen uncovered in the 1980’s? Is it a previously unknown building contemporaneous with that kitchen?  These questions, along with the further contextualization of the Block family yard space, will serve as the basis of the senior author’s Master’s Thesis in Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

During Archeology Month in 2010, the Kadohadacho Chapter assisted the authors in answering these questions. Between March 22nd and March 27th and again on April 9^th and 10th a total of 8 units (four 2×2 meter units and four 1×2 meter units) were dug surrounding the mystery brick feature. These excavations resulted in the complete exposure of the brick feature confirming that it is, in fact, a chimney. A sealed midden (probably protected beneath a structure) to the north of the chimney indicates that it likely relates to a building separate from the kitchen located to the east.  This was a dense deposit containing a multitude of artifacts including: many fragments of ceramics (often with the same transfer-print patterns as those excavated in the kitchen pit), nails, glass (including an etched glass goblet), food remains (animal bone ), artifacts of a more personal nature including children’s toys (marbles, toy teas sets and doll fragments), music-related artifacts (mouth harp and harmonica reed plate), armaments (gunflint, lead shot, bullets and cartridges), and objects related to personal adornment (i.e., buttons, small metal clasp, straight pins).  These artifacts are of a domestic nature (so this is not a barn, smoke house or privy) and date to the same period as the artifacts recovered in the 1980’s.  So…who is living in this structure? Likely candidates are enslaved Africans in the service of the Block Family.

You can see pictures of the Block House excavations at Farther Along’s Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72157623521464409/

The authors discovered documents in the historian’s files at Historic Washington State Park, specifically a hand drawn map from an informant named “Moss Rowe,” that seems to confirm that the building was used as a slave quarters. Such an interpretation fits with the idea of the Blocks’ as slave owners. While not terribly involved in the trafficking of slaves, the Blocks did own and sell slaves gained as collateral in their merchant ventures. Period documents show that at most the Blocks’ owned five slaves at any time, and given their location in an urban context this number seems correct.

We are currently processing the rather large number of artifacts that were recovered from these excavations.  Watch for future talks, and articles in Fields Notes and other journals for further interpretations as the senior author’s thesis develops.

Thanks to Historic Washington State Park for being great hosts—we appreciate all the hospitality.  Thanks to all of the Kadohadacho Chapter members, volunteers and staff who helped make the dig possible:  Hannah Berry, Joseph Berry, Maggie Berry, Finn Buckley, Hayes Buckley, Bob Campbell, Pritam Chowdhury, Rick Conkey, Charlotte Conkey, Daniel Conkey, Kyle Farmer, Canaan Gideon, Debra Hartley, Cole Herberg, Thomas Herberg, Holli Howard, Andre Levvorn, Connie Masters, Myrtle McGeehee, Duncan McKinnon, Karen Mills, Tom Purdin, and Sarah Wade.  A special thanks to Dr. Leslie “Skip” Stewart-Abernathy, who lead the excavations at the Block House in 1982-1984, for coming out and working with us during the dig!

Jamie Brandon screens with help from Finn Buckley, Hays Buckley, Cole Herberg, Thomas Herberg and HWSP Superintendent Joe Buckley.

On a Mission…

I’m back from a brief working vacation–helping my friend James Davidson and the University of Florida’s archaeological field school on Fort George Island near Jacksonville, Florida.

For the past two years James (and his very competent minions) have been excavating at Kinglsey Plantation–the birthplace of African Diaspora archeology. Last year I blogged about Kinglesy’s place in archeological history and the big shoes that James had to fill…I also hinted at the fact that James had made some interesting discoveries…but not wanting to steal his thunder, I did not say what those discoveries were. As several papers have been given on last year’s excavations, I can now finish my report.

As I mentioned in my post last summer, one of the things that Charles Fairbanks was looking for in the 1960s Kingsley excavations was evidence of “Africanisms” or cultural traits retained from the myriad of African cultures from which the slaves came. Fairbanks did not find evidence of Africanisms, and now we consider the entire concept an over simplified one that reifies Africa and underestimates the complicated ways that culture changes and adapts to new surroundings and interactions…nevertheless, in a way, Davidson has seceded where the great Dr. Fairbanks had failed. On the last week of last year’s field school Davidson and the UF students uncovered what appears to be an intentional chicken burial inside the threshold of one of the tabby slave cabins. I’ll let Davidson draw the parallels between various West African rituals (including house blessing rituals) that involve sacrifice (and sometimes burial) of animals (often chickens)…but I’m here to talk a bit about one of the “other” projects going on at the UF field school.

This year I spent two weeks helping out not at the Kinglsey Plantation, but at a Spanish mission site which is also situated on the island–San Juan del Puerto. I was serving as “aide-de-camp” to Rebecca Gorman, one of James’ graduate students who has also been trained by Kathleen Deagan and Jerald Milanich…She was great to work with and it was a great group of students that cycled through the San Juan dig as well (Rebecca and students are shown screening at San Juan above).

San Juan del Puerto was a Roman Catholic mission founded around 1587 on Fort George Island, near the mouth of the St. Johns River (thus, Rebecca informed me, the name). The mission was one of the oldest and longest-standing missions in Spanish Florida (1587-1703). It was established by Jesuits & Franciscans to proselytize to the Timucua Indians who lived along the coast, but was quickly also a haven for the Guale Indian refugees fleeing attacks in their home territory along the Georgia coast.

The mission core area is now overgrown, but we had a good time finding majolica, gun flints, beads and the two dramatically different pottery types used by the Timucua and Guale…Like last year, I do not want to steal any of the UF thunder, so I’ll let them tell you about this year’s finds at the next round of conferences before I spill my guts….

More of my pictures from the UF field school can be found posted to my Flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcbrandon/sets/72157594171810221/

Kingsley Plantation

Kingsley holds a special place in history for archaeologists interested in the African Diaspora as it is one of the earliest sites to be dug specifically to understand the enslaved Africans and African-Americans that labored on the plantations of the South. In 1968, Dr. Charles Fairbanks, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, began excavations at Kingsley in order to understand the nature of cultural transformations that enslaved Africans went through after they arrived in the Americas. Fairbanks was looking for “Africanisms“–cultural traits retained from the myriad of African cultures from which the slaves came.

Why did Fairbanks choose Kingsley to look for these Africanisms? Well, here’s a bit of information on Kingsley Plantation… The Kingsley Plantation, now administered by the National Park Service, is located on Fort George Island (near Jacksonville, Florida) and includes the plantation house, a kitchen house, a barn, and the ruins of 25 of the original slave cabins. The Kingsley Plantation was named for one of several plantation owners, Zephaniah Kingsley, who operated the property from 1813-1839. Kingsley operated under a “task” system, which allowed slaves to work at a craft or tend their own gardens once the specified task for the day was completed. Proceeds from the sale of produce or craft items were usually kept by the slaves. Also, Zephaniah–born as a Quaker–didn’t seem too sympathetic to Christianity…he ran off missionaries and encouraged the enslaved folks to practice whatever religion they claimed as their own. Moreover, Kingsley’s wife, Anna Madgigine Jai, was purchased as a slave, but freed in 1811. She was active in plantation management and became a successful businesswoman owning her own property. As an American territory, Florida passed laws that discriminated against free blacks and placed harsh restrictions on African slaves. This prompted Kingsley to move his family, impacted by these laws, to Haiti, now the Dominican Republic, where descendants of Anna and Zephaniah live today.

Fairbanks thought that these unusually circumstances of enslavement might help Africanisms flourish…After his excavations, however, he confessed that deciding what is and what is not an Africanism is a tricky business. In retrospect we can see Fairbanks’ approach to as fairly simplistic in the way that it reifies and essentializes African (and African-American) culture. Nevertheless, he was a pioneer and his moral mission to understand the lives of the enslaved can still be admired.

Now my old friend and colleague James Davidson attempts to fill the rather large shoes that Dr. Fairbanks left behind–both at the University of Florida and at the Kingsley Plantation. Davidson ran his first University of Florida archaeological field school this summer at Kingsley and, from what I saw during my visit, it was a success. Davidson has uncovered the floors of two of the tabby slave cabins and lots of interesting facts and artifacts are coming to light.

I’m fighting the temptation to write about all of the interesting things Davidson is uncovering, but I don’t want to either “jump the gun” with preliminary interpretations nor “steal his glory” so I’ll leave the specifics to another day. Suffice it to say, that I had a good time excavating with the UF field school…a great group of students and a very competent group of graduate students.