Archaeology at Mann-Simons:

 

The Mann-Simons African American Archaeology Project was started in 2005 by Jakob Crockett (University of South Carolina—Columbia) in partnership with Historic Columbia Foundation. The primary objective of the archaeology is to determine how the material culture of the Mann-Simons family varied in relation to changes in both family structure and Columbia’s social environment throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. At its most abstract, the primary goal is to understand the ways in which the material world is implicated in the development, maintenance, and negotiation of social relations. To achieve this, we explore issues of consumption, landscape, race, class, and representation – highlighting the ways in which these issues are interconnected. But why archaeology?

Aerial Photograph courtesy of Richland County, South Carolina.

 

By the late nineteenth century, consumerism had become what it is today: a central part of the American economy, identity, and culture. Nonetheless, even as the consumption of goods was being proclaimed as the key to American identity, differing standards were used as instruments of injustice, discrimination, and as a way of marking outsiders and ‘others.’ But this is only part of the story, the part that is most easily reconstructed from historical documents. The integration of archaeology and oral histories has the potential to present an alternate history, one that illuminates the challenges and successes, and above all else, the complexities of everyday life as African American and middle class within a culture of segregation.

 

Site Map by Jakob D. Crockett

 

The project affords an opportunity to examine social relations among Columbia’s residents from the perspective of six generations of the Mann-Simons family residing at the same urban complex. The study was the first in South Carolina to focus on the archaeology of a free African American household of the antebellum period and remains the only excavation of an African American household in the greater Columbia area. Moreover, the study will help provide a baseline for the study of the African Diaspora and social, political, and economic interaction in nineteenth and twentieth century Southern urban contexts.

-Jakob D. Crockett