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Archaeology News
Preserving the past
03-22-08 - North America — United States, Texas
Archaeological students from Rice dig for Freedmen\'s Town artifacts
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In the Saturday morning sunshine, Rice University students flop on their bellies, studying the excavation site in front of their noses. The pit is so precisely dug, they might be wielding scalpels.
``Oooo, a bottle neck,\'\' says one young man as he rakes the dirt with a trowel and hits glass. Carefully he works it out of the ground and cradles it in his hands.
Welcome to the backyard of the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum, in the shadow of downtown, and an advanced Rice class called Archaeological Field Techniques.
In addition to grades and credits, the 20-odd students are getting hands-on excavation experience and sharpening their powers of observation, organization and analysis. Also they\'re helping to preserve Freedmen\'s Town, one of the nation\'s last post-Civil War, National Historic Districts founded by freed slaves.
A stone\'s throw from the pit, other students press chunks of excavated dirt through metal screens. They, too, are probing the black gumbo for artifacts - little bits of ceramic and glass, marbles, nails, broken perfume-bottle
tops, steak bones, ham bones, cracked teacups, anything and everything that speaks to the lives of the African-American families who thrived in the community in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
These opportunities to study the past are disappearing fast. Near the museum at 1314 Andrews and in and around Freedmen\'s Town, only a few dozen of the old buildings still stand. More prevalent are ritzy loft apartments and condos, and rows of affordable and low-income homes.
For the most part, the students know nothing about the political battles that have swirled around the community over the years or the fierce fights that have pitted residents and preservationists against the city and developers. Suffice it to say, the old is losing ground to the new.
The four students working the pit, a square two meters by two meters, are digging in short, careful strokes. The goal, says Rice anthropology professor Susan McIntosh, is to dig about 55 centimeters down, to the flood plain and the place devoid of artifacts.
Catherine Roberts, one of the founders of the Yates museum, whizzes by with guests. In the late 1860s, she is explaining, the chunk of land now bound by West Dallas, West Gray, Taft and downtown was one of the few places in Houston freed slaves could buy land and build homes.
The real estate in Freedmen\'s Town, which brings top dollar now, was considered worthless then.
\"It flooded all the time,\" Roberts says.
Over the years, resourceful residents brought in tons of landfill. Andrews, Roberts says, became the highest point in the neighborhood. Families paved brick streets and built homes, churches and businesses. "
Full story:
chron.com
Contributed by:
eCultural Resources
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