A must for both academic historical archaeologists and contract
archaeologists in the field, this book constitutes a comprehensive
look at the historical archaeology of Delaware from the eighteenth
to the early twentieth century. The approach to archaeological
management developed in Delaware over two decades and embodied in
this book has broad applicability. Many of the nation's historical
archaeological sites are agricultural, and they present cultural
resource managers with considerable challenges. Delaware's
historical archaeology program has begun to explore the "cultures
of agriculture" so central to the course of American history.
Historic agricultural sites contain stories waiting to be told
about the people who lived on and farmed them and about the
transformation of rural societies in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, a process played out across the eastern United States.
In a startling new way, Lu Ann De Cunzo takes a holistic approach
to the subject, integrating a scholarly research agenda with the
program of cultural resource management. Gathering ethnographies of
Delaware merchant-farmers, elite planters, middling farmers,
tenants, and agricultural laborers of European and African descent,
she examines the minute details of landscape, architecture, food,
and material goods. These ethnographies increase our understanding
of the structure and poetics of "improvement" negotiated by
Delaware's farming people.
By analyzing what she describes as richly detailed archaeological
site biographies, De Cunzo reconstructs how Delaware's farming
people actively created their identities and shaped their
interactions at home, at work, at church, and in the marketplace as
they began to confront industrial capitalism. Informed by a
contextual, interpretive perspective, this valuable work reveals
the complex interrelationships among environment, technology,
economy, social order, and cultural praxis that defined the
"cultures of agriculture" in Delaware during the last three
centuries.
Lu Ann De Cunzo is associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Delaware. She is the co-editor of Historical
Archaeology and the Study of American Culture, author of the
monograph Reform, Respite, Ritual: An Archaeology of Institutions,
and has published articles in Historical Archaeology, Northeast
Historical Archaeology, Landscape Journal, and International
Journal of Historical Archaeology.
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