Charleston: An Archaeology of Life in a Coastal Community by Martha A. Zierden and Elizabeth J. Reitz (review)

Charleston: An Archaeology of Life in a Coastal Community traces Charleston, South Carolina's evolution from frontier outpost to modern city through the material culture of daily life. Authors Martha A. Zierden, curator of historical archaeology at the Charleston Museum, and Elizabeth J. Reitz, professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia, began collaborating in 1982. Their monograph synthesizes not only their own copious research but also that of generations of archaeologists, architectural historians, and preservationists.

Charleston spans the years 1670–1900 and is organized chronologically. Zierden and Reitz set out "to tell the story of Charleston through the lens of foodways and animals" but sell themselves a bit short in suggesting that "entire classes of artifacts are absent" from their book (p. 6). In fact, their dedication to following the acquisition, distribution, preparation, consumption, and disposal of domesticated and wild plants and animals necessitates their consideration of ceramics, glass bottles, tablewares, specie, and arms in addition to landscape features like work yards and wharves. The authors repeatedly aver that "the city is the site," and their attention to foodways creates glimpses of the experiences of Charlestonians generally, with special attention to people from diverse walks of life, such as enslaved Africans and Indians, Irish immigrant laborers, operators of trading posts, guards of public facilities, and elite townhouse residents (p. 263).

The first section of Charleston provides an orientation regarding historical archaeology, the Lowcountry's geography and environment, and seventeenth-century geopolitical dynamics in South Carolina and Florida. The second section considers early-eighteenth-century developments, including hostilities between Spanish St. Augustine and the British Carolina colony, the construction of fortifications around the city of Charleston, and the emergence of civic venues such as markets and theaters. The penultimate section juxtaposes townhouses, bastions of "gracious living," such as the Miles Brewton House with the work yards and commercial core on which they depended (p. 145). The final section surveys nineteenth-century changes wrought by fires, hurricanes, an earthquake, the Civil War, and postbellum socioeconomic conditions.

The monograph's major conclusions include the dominance of beef rather than pork in the diets of most Charlestonians regardless of differences in status or era and the multifunctional nature of virtually all sites—colonial Charleston was "a community of farmsteads on urban lots," and residents kept and slaughtered livestock behind houses great and small into the early twentieth century (p. 110). Likewise, even seemingly specialized structures such as the Powder Magazine contained extensive domestic components. Other themes that appear throughout the book are the mixing of Native American, African, and European people and cultures; the divergence between "social distance" and "physical distance," as rich, poor, enslaved, and free individuals lived in close proximity; and the evolution of the landscape, as influenced by residents' efforts to make land by filling in swampy areas and to address the persistent challenges of managing refuse (p. 6).

One of Charleston's strengths is its tacking between broad trends and specific information about species and sites. Examples of such specificity include the discovery of a floor paved with cow phalanges and a nineteenth-century recipe for bobolink: "Hold the bill of the bird in one hand and crush your teeth through the back of the head, and thank Providence that you are permitted to live" (p. 223). As these examples suggest, Zierden and Reitz regularly use written sources to complement archaeological finds. They note that archaeology "augments, expands, and amends" information from other sources, and they are candid about the discipline's strengths and limitations (p. 24). The authors succeed admirably in marshaling an immense body of research, conducted by themselves and many others over the course of decades, into an accessible and fascinating book.