Research Questions and Objectives:

 

At its most abstract, this project seeks to:

* Examine the ways in which the material world is implicated in the development, maintenance, and negotiation of social relations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

But to understand why it is important to examine the relationship between the social and the material during this period, and to understand how this examination contributes to an understanding of contemporary society, we must first travel back to the mid-nineteenth century. Well in advance of mass production geared towards mass consumption, the years from the 1850s to the 1870s mark the establishment of our modern pattern of industrialization and urbanization. Over this period, consumerism and early consumer culture develops and moves in two opposing directions: on the one hand, consumer culture emerges from a world of urban experience, commodity display and public spectacle. On the other hand, consumerism emerges from its increasing connection to respectable, private domesticity, often presented not in terms of goods, but of time, leisure and public order. Thus, mid-nineteenth century consumer culture is defined by social struggle and debate within spaces increasingly dominated by commodities.

If the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the establishment of consumerism, the period 1880 to 1930 witnessed the birth of a culture of consumption. It is in this era that all the features of modern consumer culture take their form: mass manufacture; the geographical and social spreading of markets through new transportation infrastructures; the rationalization of production; and the integration of markets through new forms of marketing (e.g. branding, packaging, advertising, and standardization). But more importantly, it is during this period that a norm emerges concerning how consumer goods are to be produced, sold, and integrated into everyday life. As Don Slater (1997:14) observes, during this period goods are “sold to a population which is increasingly seen as consumers: they are not seen as classes or genders who consume, but rather as consumers who happen to be organized into classes and genders.”

From the 1920s onward, the link between everyday consumption and the social themes of modernization, entitlement, mobility, status, affluence, labor, and individualism become increasingly normalized. Consumerism itself is seen as the path to modernity (Slater 1997). So, the study of consumer culture is not simply the study of consumer wants and needs, of choice and desire, but rather the study of such things in the context of social relations, structures, and systems. It is the study of how personal and social needs and the organization of social resources mutually define each other. Dismissing the popular idea that modern consumer culture has reduced social life to trivial materialism, Slater (1997:3) aptly explains:

"The great issue about consumer culture is the way it connects central questions about how we should or want to live with questions about how society is organized – and does so at the level of everyday life…. The most trivial objects of consumption both make up the fabric of our meaningful life and connect this intimate and mundane world to great fields of social contestation…. ‘Consumer Culture’ is therefore a story of struggles for the soul of everyday life, of battles to control the texture of the quotidian."

Thus, the study of consumer culture is necessary if the development of our modern social world is to be understood, but the primary goal presented at the start of this section is really too broad and abstract to act as a useful guide. Therefore, the Mann-Simons Project examines two specific material/social relationships within the framework of consumer culture:

1. Document the complex relationship between social segregation and consumerism on a local scale and how this relationship affected middle class African American social mobility, status, and identity in Columbia, South Carolina, between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century through the lens of six generations of Mann-Simons family members.

In doing so, this research is an opportunity 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. As consumer culture reached maturation in the years between the 1880s and the 1930s, the growing commercial and semi-public spaces in the South that came with urbanization created new places for old social conflicts. Although the growth of consumer culture drew the South into the nation, it also played a central role in the (re)creation of racial identities. The culture of segregation that developed in the South during this era is largely due to two other related developments that occurred in tandem with the adoption of racial segregation: the expansion of consumer culture and the growth of the African American middle-class. As Elizabeth Grace Hale (1998:123) explains, “the multiplying spaces of consumption within the growing towns and cities of the … South became key sites for the white southern creation of and African American resistance to the culture of segregation.”

That the 1403 Richland and 1904 Marion Street lots played a meaningful role in the lives of the Mann-Simons family is clear, but the significance of these properties over the past three decades has continued, albeit in a radically new form. Today, meaning emerges from heritage tourism and the consumption of place, thus prompting the second goal of the project:

2. Understand how ethnic identity and authenticity is commodified and reworked within consumer culture by examining the evolution of the Mann-Simons property as an ethnic heritage site; specifically, the relationship between the conscious manipulation of the site by various agencies and that of local communities and the resulting type of place/landscape created through this relationship, as well as how the site helps shape public memory and cultural representations.

Recognizing that the conspicuously constructed landscapes that are cultural heritage sites both reproduce and transform social relationships (Hoelscher 1998), at the core of the Mann-Simons site’s preservation in the 1970s and its later incarnation as a tourist site in the 1980s are the twin issues of authenticity and commodification. Heritage sites are an organizing medium through which communities remember, consumed as place and experience by tourists seeking “authentic” “reconstructions” of the past. But heritage sites are always inventions, offering for consumption selective versions of the past (Hoelscher 1998). Definitions of authenticity and heritage, far from being politically neutral, hinge on who has the authority and power to say what is real. Power is unequal and those who possess it will be able to have their account of history accepted as the public version. The central question then becomes: whose authenticity is at stake at the Mann-Simons site and who has the power to define what is authentic?

The Mann-Simons African American Archaeology Project is both archaeology and ethnography, with equal weight given to both the past and present. In doing so, the project seeks to dissolve the artificial divide between conceptions of the “past” and “present” by focusing, ultimately, on a single politically defined unit of space—a rectangle formed by the lot boundaries of 1403 Richland and 1904 Marion Street, a rectangle that is the same size today as it was when Ben DeLane purchased the property in 1825—and the ways in which people have always created meaning through this place.

In terms of archaeology, the primary objective is straightforward:

* Excavate those properties continually occupied by Mann-Simons family members so as to establish 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.

To realize this objective, we excavated a representative sample of the entire area occupied by the Mann-Simons family between 1825 and 1970 within accessible spaces (i.e. the site boundaries defined by modern features, for example, the paved parking lot east of the site). A stratified random sampling strategy was used to determine the location of excavation units. The number of units excavated reflects the desire to sample twenty-percent of each stratified area. In some cases, additional units were placed judgmentally to explore specific areas, for example, structural foundations.

-Jakob D. Crockett