Archaeologists look for Filipino relics in Annapolis

Check out this article on "Archaeologists look for Filipino relics in Annapolis" which features graduate students, Kate Deeley and Kathrina Aben and their research led by Dr. Mark Leone. 

 

In a musty Annapolis basement in the heart of the Historic District, students spend hours gently scraping away at a dirt floor around bits and pieces of history: a bone button, a porcelain doll arm, a fish scale, a plate shard with a decorative print.

They hardly notice it’s grunt work — shoveling and lugging pails of rubble — because they find it so riveting.  “I kinda want to stay sometimes,” said Edward McLaughlin, an undergraduate anthropology student.

 

It’s the third and final summer a University of Maryland team is conducting an archaeological dig at the James Holliday home at 99 East St. Holliday was a middle-class freed slave and one of the first African Americans to work at the U.S. Naval Academy.

 

Holliday bought the house in 1850, a decade before the Civil War. It has been passed down from generation to generation; Dee Levister, a descendant, owns it today.

 

In the first year of the excavation, archaeologists began to uncover the relics of a 19th-century African-American family. They dug through a wooden barrel-lined privy in the backyard — a trash pit — to find food, ceramics, nails, glass, naval uniform buttons and other items from everyday life.  Read more...

Published on Thu, 08/02/2012 - 09:47