African American Archaeological Landscapes at Manassas National Battlefield Park

ABSTRACT Title of Document: HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW: AFRICAN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES AT MANASSAS NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD PARK Erika Kristine Martin Seibert, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Directed By: Dr. Paul A. Shackel, Chair, Department of Anthropology This dissertation examines how the categories of race, class, and/or gender intersected and informed life in an historic, rural, Southern community. Examining African American landscapes of consumption and production in historic, rural Virginia through the archaeological record is essential for understanding the development of African American cultural reproduction through time. Archaeological landscapes that include very early sites for this region and are comprised of material culture from pre-emancipation deposits can provide a framework for understanding how ethnogenesis worked as a method for the community to survive the harsh realities of slavery, redefine themselves as raced, classed, and gendered individuals with relation to their economy on their own terms, and build a foundation on which they could continually resist and transform the categories created for them during later periods in history. Sites that date to the mid nineteenth century and later provide information about the shift in these methods from ethnogenesis to racial uplift. Racial uplift during these later periods became the method which the African American families in this area used to connect themselves with citizenship and the American dream through their consumer and producer behavior. This behavior can then serve to illuminate how relationships of inequality became naturalized and institutionalized and how, through these methods, inequality was continually challenged and transformed. Examining historic and modern twentieth century African American landscapes through archaeological sites can also illuminate the response of the community to a period of intense commemoration by the Confederacy immediately following the Civil War and illuminate the lasting effects of the Lost Cause ideology on modern day race relations. Defining and understanding archaeology through this period not only acknowledges how and why African American history has been left out of modern interpretations, but helps outline new interpretive plans that both challenge visitors to our national parks and attempt a more democratic voice for the National Park Service and for our nation. HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW: AFRICAN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES AT MANASSAS NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD PARK By Erika Kristine Martin Seibert Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Paul A. Shackel, Chair Associate Professor Mary C. Sies Professor A. Lynn Bolles Professor John Caughey Dr. Barbara Little © Copyright by Erika Kristine Martin Seibert 2010 Preface: Identity Politics and the Life Site A colleague of mine once referred to his “life site.” When I expressed confusion about the term, he explained to me that a “life site” is the site an archaeologist works on that for one reason or another changes his or her life. It is the site where a moment in time profoundly impacts the formulation of your identity. It is that spot where, when you look back to it, you discover that there were two paths that you might have taken that seemed minor or insignificant at the time, but resulted in a course that makes you who you are. The place you met your spouse, for instance. The site of a major discovery, or even a small discovery that changed your thinking. The excavation that made you decide to become an archaeologist, that made you realize you wanted to work in the field, that made you realize you hated the field and wanted to work in the lab, where you found your niche. This dissertation is about transformations in identity formation. It is as much about how identities get processed, created, and transmuted in the past as it is about how the development of the identity of historical actors and actresses in the past, changes through time, speaks to us in the present, and revolutionizes how we think and who we are. It is about how one site, one artifact, one archaeologist, can impact many sites, many artifacts, many identities. Like many archaeologists who go right to work from a Bachelor’s degree, I went into the field knowing I was interested in archaeology, material culture, and a variety of topics in historic preservation, but I was not really more interested in one ii topic than another. You could say I was not particularly passionate about any one topic. That is, until I started working on a project called the Robinson House Site, when I was an archaeological technician at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in the late 1990s. The site was located on Manassas National Battlefield, and our archaeology team at Harpers Ferry was acquisitioned to conduct investigations at the property and to work with the Robinson family descendants to do an oral history project. What I didn’t know when I started that project, is that it would become my life site. It would inspire me to become passionate about telling the Robinson’s story and in turn, learning about African American history and archaeology here and elsewhere; it would challenge what I thought about the Civil War, material culture, and landscapes, and it would change what I understood about race, class, gender, and interpretation of the archaeological record. After working with the Robinson family and excavating this site, I decided to pursue a Masters degree and the analysis of one feature on that site – an icehouse that was used as a trash dump for the family during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became my masters project. That project further encouraged me to pursue a degree in American Studies where I could use an interdisciplinary approach to understanding multiple aspects of the material culture of the site – including examining more closely the cultural landscape. The Robinson House project eventually became Chapter 3 of my dissertation, but not before my thinking of the material culture and the landscape evolved significantly. Initially, when I examined the icehouse feature using a minimum vessel analysis for my Masters work, I focused very closely on race and class, building a iii context that considered broad, national views about consumption and race as well as male African American consumer discourse in the form of debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois about the appropriate roles for African Americans with regard to consumption and production and a larger, national, capitalist agenda. My focus was on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because that is the period that the majority of the artifacts in this feature dated to. In fact, when I wrote my dissertation proposal, I intended to focus solely on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and concentrate on issues of race and class. However, when I started to examine the other sites at Manassas National Battlefield and develop a context that included the influence of Jennie Dean, who founded the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth in the late nineteenth century, I found that I could not ignore the importance of gender roles and their significance in defining consumption and production in rural areas. Consequently, the Robinson chapter, and the whole dissertation, evolved into an examination of the importance of not just race and class, but women’s roles in defining community and identity through production and consumption in a rural, farm culture, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When examined this way, I found that at the Robinson House site, the analysis of ceramics and glass illuminates consumption patterns which pressed for African-American civil and material opportunities for their whole community as well as the necessity of sexual equality in production and consumption in rural areas for the purposes of racial uplift. The aspirations of the Robinson family, reflected in the goods they consumed, show how the Robinson women understood, redefined, and manipulated accepted patterns of iv consumption, while their position as a “farming” family provided these women with the ability to negotiate the need to operate within the mass-consumer marketplace. This part of the study also illuminates the roles of African American women in the transition of ideas from ethnogenesis to ideas about how to promote racial uplift for their families and their community. As noted above, it was the development of the context of women in the community, and Jennie Dean in particular, as well as the examination of other sites that transformed my dissertation into something larger than I anticipated with regard to categories of identity that I was examining and the influence of those categories. That study turned into Chapter 4 of the dissertation and the discussion of Jennie Dean, the Manassas Industrial School, her influence, and how this is reflected in the archaeological record, and in particular, the Nash Site. In Chapter 4, I reexamined the archaeological materials at the Nash site, the ceramics and glass in particular, in a minimum vessel analysis and compared it to the Robinson House site. This analysis shows explicitly how Jennie Dean’s ideas, born from expressions of black capitalism, gender, and racial uplift during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are expressed materially by these rural farming women and how this material culture both defined these women’s identities and were defined by the identity of these women. Further, it shows the explicit, but often tenuous connection between the archaeological record and ideologies of race, class and gender as this material culture is informed by black capitalism. It shows these local women and their families’, often dramatic, response to this black capitalist agenda based on their particular context. v Another avenue that this expanded thinking about gender prompted me to reconsider was the role of Colonoware and Africanisms is defining the community and in articulating methods that women used to survive under slavery.

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