University of Massachusetts, Amherst

With Historic Deerfield, Inc.

 

2003 Summer Field School in Archaeology

 

 

July 14 - August 8, 2003

 

Anthropology 577

 

 

 

New!—Updates from the front lines:

 

·      Week 1

 

·      Week 2

 

·      Week 3

 

·      Week 4

 

Director: Robert Paynter, Department of Anthropology

 

Teaching Staff: Kerry Lynch, Elizabeth Norris, Quentin Lewis

 

 

Rural New England has been a locus of human activity for thousands of years.  Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans, admittedly here due to very different circumstances, have all contributed to the creation of the Western Massachusetts we know today; the towns, fields, forests, industries, and objects that are all around us.  The distinctive character of this region is a result of the shifting struggles and cooperations among the people who have called this place home.  Often overlooked in the history of the region are the contributions of the Black Yankees.  Enslaved Africans were brought to Massachusetts within two decades of the arrival of the English.

 

 

The Black Burghardts

 

 

One of the oldest families in the region is the Black Burghardts of New York and Western Massachusetts. Family members have fought in the American Revolution, Shays’ Rebellion, and the Civil War.  Their most famous son is W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the most influential public scholars of the 20th century.  He was the first African American Ph.D. from Harvard University and was the author of numerous novels, pageants, short stories and scholarly studies in the social sciences and history. He was a co-founder of the NAACP, the editor of its widely read magazine, The Crisis, and an important leader of the Pan-African struggles to decolonize Africa.     

 

W.E.B. Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. He died in 1963, the day before the Civil Rights March on Washington, famous for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  This year is the 100th anniversary of the publication of his most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, from which comes one of his most trenchant observations: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in American and the islands of the sea.” (p.54)      

 

 

The W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite

"The house of my birth was quaint, with clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed; there were five rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious strawberries in the rear."  -The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois.

A small farm in Great Barrington was in Du Bois’s mother’s family, the Black Burghardts (the B. in W.E.B.), since the late 1700s.  W.E.B. lived on this farm when he was a youngster, and was given the house and land as a gift for his 60th birthday.  By the late 1960s, after Du Bois’s death, only a cellar hole remained of the farm.   The W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite has been the subject of study by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Summer Field School in Archaeology since our initial studies of the site in the early 1980s.  Our work is part of broader investigations into how historical homelots were built, used, and abandoned, and how the forces of race, class, gender, and the state affect these landscapes and the people who lived on them. This summer we will return to continue archaeological investigations guided by Du Bois’s writings and the results of our own laboratory and documentary studies.

 

 

The Archaeology of the Homesite

 

 

The immediate archaeological questions concern determining the extent and integrity of the remains at the site, issues we will address by consulting primary and secondary documents and conducting geophysical prospecting, surface collection, and test excavations.  As a result students participating in the Field School will learn the methods of research design, along with field and lab procedures for studying historical homelots – basic surveying and excavation techniques, the study of primary and secondary documents, historic period artifact identification and analysis, geophysical survey methods, and computer assisted cataloging and spatial analysis. We will also be interepreting our results for the visiting public; so by the end of the Field School you will be quite comfortable talking to folks about archaeology, about Du Bois, and about the history of his family in Great Barrington.  This all will help you learn more about New England’s African American history and the life and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois.  After conducting this work we will all better understand of the place of African and African American communities on the historical landscape of New England.

 

 

Logistics

 

 

Admission to the Field School is by approval of the Director and is based on filing the Field School application .  All applications must be received by the Director, Robert Paynter, by May 1, 2003.  The selection of successful applicants will be made by May 10. Excavation techniques and access to the archaeological site requires students to be in good physical condition.  The site is presently infested with poison ivy, so you should take this into consideration when making your application.

 

The Field School is offered under Anthropology 577, a 4 credit course open to undergraduate and graduate students through the University of Massachusetts Division of Summer Continuing Education.  The Field School usually operates from 8AM until 5:30 PM (though some days may be a bit longer), Monday through Friday for the four week session from July 14th to August 8th.  Students must be available for the entire four week Field School.  Tuition and materials fees are $1,276 ($319/credit).  There are also registration fees yet to be determined by Continuing Education (though in previous years they ran about $20).  A packet of required readings will be available from the University’s Textbook Annex.  Students make their own arrangements for accommodations in the Amherst area (http://janus.oit.umass.edu/~cshrc/) and we all travel to and from the site in Field School vehicles each day (about an hour one-way).  Registration is handled by the Division of Continuing Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst http://www.umass.edu/contined/.

 

For more information, contact: Robert Paynter, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 or rpaynter@anthro.umass.edu.