Date of Award
2014
Document Type
Open Access Thesis
Department
Anthropology
First Advisor
Kenneth Kelly
Abstract
African and African American communities have faced pressures of marginalization and racism in the South Carolina Lowcountry since their arrival with Europeans in the seventeenth century. These pressures have been felt physically, socially, economically, politically, and even academically, through misrepresentations in historical portrayals. The field of historic archaeology is uniquely situated with access to informative sources from both the past and the present, and as such exhibits great potential in taking strides to replace the limiting presentation of a static and homogenous single African American culture with views that instead emphasize a focus on unique cultures and identities. This thesis attempts to contribute to conversations on the archaeology of identity by investigating the site of an African American family's occupation in coastal South Carolina. In looking to the material evidence of occupation at the Ferguson Road Tract uncovered through archaeological endeavors, historical documentary records spanning the time of local occupation, and oral accounts of descendants and current occupants of the property, this thesis will demonstrate the potential for interpreting the interactions of place and the identity of its occupants within the local social environment in the form of a multidisciplinary framework for researching African American archaeological sites in the South Carolina coastal region that may be used as a template for future African American Lowcountry sites.
Rights
© 2014, Katherine Elisabeth Goldberg
Recommended Citation
Goldberg, K. E.(2014). Identifying Identity: An Archaeological Investigation of the Intersection of Place and Identity at an African American Lowcountry Site. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/2603