




































 

Re-evaluating the Place of Race in Historical Archaeology  

Review by Adam Netzer Zimmer 

 

The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast  

by Christopher N. Matthews and Allison Manfra McGovern, eds 

University Press of Florida, 2015 

 

The authors in The Archaeology of Race in the Northeast, edited by Christopher N. Matthews and 

Allison Manfra McGovern, are part of the growing cohort of researchers within historical archaeology 

that reject a simple search for racial identity in material culture. Instead, they advocate for more critical 

studies addressing the processes of racialization and power structures inherent to the ideas of race. 

What makes this volume stand out are two main points. One is that it shifts focus away from the 

American South, where many, if not most, previous studies have been conducted to instead focus on an 

area of the country where issues of race and racism have often been obscured. The other key 

contribution this volume offers is that it refuses to use “race” as interchangeable with ethnicity. The 

contributors instead use their various studies to show how ideas of race are constructed, perpetuated, 

and interpreted by many different groups in the Northeast. They highlight how Native Americans, 

African Americans, and white European Americans intersected across many different spaces and how 

these relationships complicate our interpretation of the material past.   

 In their introduction, Matthews and McGovern describe how, unlike the popular histories of the 

American West or Southeast, the history of race in the Northeast is rarely discussed. If it is discussed, 

the narrative is often framed with Northerners as champions of freedom against a villainous South. The 

editors reject this idea and instead squarely align themselves with critical race scholars in other fields 

by stating that “the making of race in the Northeast, like the making of history there, has always 

involved the use of social power to structure the material worlds of people and to symbolize the 

communities people claim for themselves and/or assign to others” (p. 2). Therein lies one of the 



greatest strengths of this volume: it invites the reader to ask questions about our interpretations of 

archaeological sites rather than simply accept the authorial interpretation.  

 The first section of the book focuses on archaeological investigations of African and African 

American presences in the Northeast. This section comprises by far the largest portion of the book 

(nine chapters out of sixteen total), but Matthews and McGovern specifically address this imbalance as 

a reflection of current research agendas within the field. Nor would it be accurate to portray these 

sections as falling into neat racial categories as their titles might suggest. In Chapter 2, Cantwell and 

diZerega Wall focus on the African presence in New Amsterdam through the interpretation of the 

contents of a barrel feature found at the Broad Financial Center site in lower Manhattan. By using the 

contents of this midden to ask questions about who may have made it and why, rather than offer 

definitive interpretations, the authors seek to expand upon the history of New Amsterdam that often 

obscures the African presence in favor of a purely Dutch versus British narrative. In chapter 6, Yamin 

and Ziesing engage in a similar study, focusing on the questions brought about by the discovery of 

chamber pots bearing the American Eagle symbol. Like Cantwell and diZerega Wall, Yamin and 

Ziesing use these objects to guide their research questions and gain more insight into the former 

residents of their site, rather than offer definitive interpretations of the objects’ utility or meaning.  

Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how the careful integration of historical documents with artifact 

analysis in the history of upstate New York can aid in our interpretation of spaces of racialization. 

Lindner and Johnson discuss how the artifacts and documents associated with the Primus Martin site 

near Hyde Park, New York demonstrate the African American residents’ resistance to racialized 

discourses by the surrounding Euro-American communities. The excavation also shows how the site 

may have been a hub for community-building in a region where other community spaces may have 

been largely absent. Delle and Fellows show how the Rose Hill site along Seneca Lake in upstate New 

York transitioned from a Virginia-style plantation with enslaved Africans into a capitalized farm with 

black tenant farmers, and finally began utilizing Irish immigrant tenant farmers paid at lower rates than 

the previous workers. The site, therefore, demonstrates the racialized nature of space itself, showing 

“the material legacy of the relationship between economic change, labor demographics, and racial 

hierarchy” (p. 95). In chapter 8, McQuinn contributes the idea of marronage, as defined by Sayers 

(2012, 143), to the interpretation of a site in Albany, New York to better understand its place as a 

refuge for those seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad. Barton and Orr continue this theme of 

negotiated space in their chapter on the practice of yard-sweeping at a site in southern New Jersey. 

Instead of seeing sweeping as a simple cultural continuation study, Barton and Orr use it to analyze the 

negotiation of space and community building further, advocating for research into what they call 



“practice theory of improvisation” where marginalized people create and maintain specific responses to 

their marginalization that are carefully weighed against other life factors.  

In an especially well-crafted chapter, “The Character of a Woman”: Womanhood and Race in 

Nineteenth-Century Nantucket, Bulger uses the material culture associated with two women, Mary 

Boston Douglass and Eliza Boston Berry, of Nantucket, Massachusetts to discuss the intertwined 

nature of race, gender, embodiment, and performativity experienced by middle-class black women in 

the nineteenth century. This chapter emphasizes the archaeology of domestic space as showing how 

these women balanced middle-class ideals of respectability of their time with personal priorities to 

themselves and to their families. Chapters 7 and 9, by Kruczek-Aaron and Geismar respectively, 

discuss archaeological sites whose interpretation is enriched by the involvement of descendent 

communities in the excavation and management of the sites. Kruczek-Aaron emphasizes 

commemoration and the archaeologist’s complicated role as site steward in the Adirondack’s Timbucto 

site, while Geismar highlights the importance of the preservation of the Hunterfly Road houses which 

now comprise much of the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn.  

 The second section of the book, Native American Historical Archaeologies, is comprised of 

only two chapters but is especially theoretically-rich. In the introduction to the book, Matthews and 

McGovern push for the idea that studies based on race cannot simply be thought of as a recoded study 

of culture and/or ethnicity. This is because racial analyses are explicit in the idea that people have never 

been “living in distinct and isolated groups but must be seen as having lived in complex and conflicted 

communities that were defined by competition for resources and an unequal distribution of power” (p. 

5). McGovern echoes this in chapter 11 by situating the Montaukett’s resistance to detribalization in 

nineteenth-century East Hampton, New York within the framework of a larger pattern of racialization 

and displacement experienced by many people of color. With a similar dialectical frame, Handsman 

discusses how the Mashpee and Narragansett communities dealt with those they deemed as “coloured 

foreigners” (i.e. other Native groups, African Americans, and other people of color) and how this 

differed from the Mashantucket Pequot, who apparently never had such distinctions based on race. 

These two chapters are a particular highlight of this volume because they demonstrate that racialization 

is not the sole province of those of African descent, nor is it a process that can be described 

monolithically even within so-called racial groups. Instead, both chapters show how race is dialectical 

and must constantly be negotiated by those groups in conversation with one another. 

 The final section addresses Archaeologies of Whiteness in the Northeast. It is perhaps framed 

best by Gorsline’s chapter, An Archaeology of Accountability: Recovering and Interrogating the 

“Invisible” Race. Gorsline addresses the reservations many may have of critical whiteness studies’ 



intrusion into archaeology, namely that in attempting to address white identity formation in the 

archaeological past, researchers may simply be re-centering white narratives at the expense of the 

stories of people of color. As a manner of redress, Gorsline proposes an “archaeology of 

accountability”, which was inspired by Bernbeck and Pollack’s “archaeology of perpetrators” (2007). 

Gorsline’s proposal specifically advocates that this type of archaeological research should expose how 

exploitation and oppression enacted by whites was key to white identity formation. However, the 

archaeology of accountability must explicitly connect past and present manifestations of white 

privilege to prevent an uncritical celebration of white history. The other two authors in this section, 

Matthews and Lewis, seem to follow this proposal with their own studies. Matthews draws upon the 

idea of the symbologies of freedom kept within the home as key to cementing an aggregate white 

identity in the Northeast. Material culture of Euro-American and European immigrant sites are 

therefore not free of race because the very symbology encoded within this material is built upon racial 

and racist structures. Lewis presents a more longitudinal study, showing how the memorialization of a 

violent event in the history of Deerfield, Massachusetts must continue to be reexamined if we are to 

uncover “the cult of whiteness” (Paynter 2001) inherent in our histories and archaeologies. 

The volume ends with a reflection by Orser. In it, Orser presents three topics brought by the 

authors deemed worthy of further investigation: the mutability and stubbornness of racialization, the 

power of research to make visible such invisible processes, and the issue of scale in archaeology. The 

Archaeology of Race in the Northeast is praise-worthy for its efforts in all three of these arenas. The 

editors and authors have made a concentrated effort to show that processes of racialization affect every 

group within the history of the United States. They also show how archaeological analysis can help to 

shine light on how spatial and temporal peculiarities enact change on these processes of racialization. 

The authors contained in this volume are clearly part of a cohort of archaeologists eager to show what 

archaeology can offer to larger social science investigations of race in the United States. Following the 

examples outlined in this volume, future researchers will no doubt build upon these studies and 

hopefully work to finally break down, as Orser puts it, “the tyranny of racialization’s silence and 

invisibility” (p. 324). 

 

 

References Cited 

Bernbeck, Reinhard, and Susan Pollock. “‘Grabe, Wo Du Stehst!’ An Archaeology of Perpetrators.” In 

Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, edited by Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke, 

217–34. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.  

 



Paynter, Robert. “The Cult of Whiteness in Western New England.” In Race and the Archaeology of 

Identity, edited by Charles E. Orser Jr., 125–42. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001. 

 

Sayers, Daniel O. “Marronage Perspective for Historical Archaeology in the United States.” Historical 

Archaeology 46, no. 4 (2012): 135–61.  
 

 

Adam Netzer Zimmer is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 

where he holds a Graduate Research Fellowship through the National Science Foundation and the 

Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellowship. He currently lives in Reykjavík, Iceland where he is 

researching the processes of cadaver recruitment and the skeletal collections left over after anatomical 

research in both the U.S. and Iceland 

 

 

© 2018 Adam Netzer Zimmer  


