Historical Archaeology of the Delaware Valley, 1600-1850

15. It Takes a Village: Archaeology at Timbuctoo, Burlington County, New Jersey

15 it Takes a Village: Archaeology at Timbuctoo, Burlington County, new Jersey Christopher P. Barton Introduction in recent years, scholars have gained a greater understanding of the heterogeneity of the African American historical experience through an explosion of archaeological investigation and documentary research. Though most research has been and continues to focus on sites associated with southeastern slavery, the subfield has shifted its gaze towards examining topics outside of slavery, ranging from northern antebellum free and “fugitive” black enclaves to post-emancipation life (schuyler 1974; Giesmar 1982; Catts and Custer 1990; Wall, Rothschild and Copeland 2004; sawyer 2004). This shift in concentration is important if the discipline is to maintain relevance as a viable subfield of historical archaeology. This is not to devalue the work that focuses on slavery, particularly that of plantation archaeology, as these studies have helped to establish archaeology pertaining to African Americans as a legitimate topic of archaeological and anthropological research (Orser 1998a; Wilkie 2004). However, to gain a better understanding of the dynamics and reflexivity of African American life, we must continue to shift our gaze towards other spatial and temporal landscapes. in exploring these other areas, such as the postbellum Delaware Valley, archaeology will add to anthropological discourses on everyday life. This paper has several distinct but interrelated components. first, i briefly discuss the application of the Herskovits and frazier debate on the origins of African American culture as investigated through historical archaeology. i examine the African American village of Timbuctoo, in present-day Westampton Township, new Jersey (figure 15.1). finally, i discuss the recent archaeological work at Timbuctoo and contextualize the findings into broader discourses of African American heterogeneity. The Archaeology of African Americans Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as 600,000 Africans were forcefully imported into what has become the United states (Murphy 1994:147). The debate over enslaved African Americans’ ability to retain African cultural practices has persisted for over 80 years (Orser 1998a). This scholarly debate has centered on two different theoretical models to explain the development of African American 376 Archaeology at Timbuctoo cultures. first, Melville Herskovits (1958) urged that dynamic elements of West African culture could be observed within the people of the African diaspora. Herskovits viewed these continuities as ethnic markers that could be ethnographically retraced from diaspora populations back to West Africa. According to Herskovits, these cultural continuities had resisted the effects of time, space, and acculturation; he further suggested that such “Africanisms” represent the cultural cornerstone for people of the African diaspora (Herskovits 1958). By showing the persistence of African elements within the Americas, Herskovits was attempting to instill a sense of pride and admiration of Black culture, specifically among white intellectuals. Herskovits argued that, “when such a body of facts, solidly grounded, is established, a ferment must follow as a whole, will influence opinion in general concerning negro abilities and potentialities, and thus contribute to a lessening of interracial tensions” (Herskovits 1958:32). The high admiration that Herskovits held for African diaspora communities is important to note, especially at a time when the prevalence of cultural evolutionist theories dominated academic discourses on cultural and biological hierarchy (Gershonhorn 2004: 23). As a result, these dominate and ethnocentric narratives characterized all sociocultural practices operating outside the bounds of white America as “primitive” and, thus, inferior (Orser 2004, 2007; Barton and somerville 2012). Herskovits, like his mentor, franz Boas, sought to challenge scientific claims to concrete categories of figure 15.1. location of Timbuctoo. Map by Christopher Barton. Based on Google Earth image. Christopher P. Barton 377 human races by arguing that ideologies of race were in fact social constructions that had no biological validity. These challenges to widely accepted ideologies must be contextualized in order to understand their importance. from the turn of the twentieth century into the 1930s (and later), not only were academics still perpetuating ideologies of biological races but American society was fixated on ideas of racial superiority. fear of the denigration of the white race through “mixing” resulted in the U.s. government’s limitation and exclusion of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia (Gershonhorn 2004:60–61). The founding of the American Eugenics society (AEs) as well as developments in popular culture (e.g. minstrel shows, toys, radio programs) sought to underscore both the biological and cultural superiority of the white race (Hasian 1996:53; Barton 2012; Barton and somerville 2012). The importance...