Memory, practice and process at the Perkins-Dennis Farm, a 19th-century free African American farmstead in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.

摘要

Archaeological research was conducted at the Perkins-Dennis Farm, a 19 th-century farmstead in Brooklyn Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, home to a pioneering family of free African American people that remains in the hands of descendants into the present. Research was conducted to explore the following questions: What were the domestic routines of production, consumption and deposition established by the first settlers of the Perkins family, and when and how did continuities and breaks occur in the ways that people and materials interacted? These questions were investigated by establishing comparative genealogies across three domains of practice: deposition, foodways, and health and well-being. Goals of this project included contributing to anthropological thinking on the dynamic, embodied nature of social life, and critiquing received ideas about foundational categories like race that continue to structure archaeological investigation. The research demonstrates continuities and breaks in such practices as waste deposition, food preservation, health maintenance and intrafamily socialization. It is suggested that memory is a useful means of making sense of persistences and changes in practice, and one way of countering reliance on logocentric concepts of culture.