Month: September 2015

Second-Year student Meredith Wilson, along with her classmate Michelle Thompson and alumna Amy Elizabeth Uebel, presented the results of the documentation of 59 Church Street, the Thomas Rose House, she coordinated during her summer internship at a gathering of Historic Charleston Foundation staff, historic preservationists, and realtors on September 22.

Following her presentation of how the documentation team assemble for the 59 Church street project carried out its work, Wilson presented full sets of documentation photographs, HABS-level drawings of the houses, and a history of the house to Cathy Forrester, owner of the house, Helen Geer, a member of Historic Charleston Foundation’s board of directors and agent-in-charge of William Means Company, and the Margaretta Childs Archive at Historic Charleston Foundation.  Meredith will be entering her drawings of 59 Church in the 2016 Holland Prize Competition.

The Thomas Rose House is one of Charleston’s oldest surviving eighteenth-century dwellings.  Restored in 1929, the house was later purchased by Connecticut architectural historian Henry Philip Staats and his wife Juliette, both active in the formation of Historic Charleston Foundation.  They and their descendants have owned the house for more than 80 years and maintained it with few changed over that period.  The house is thus a remarkable time capsule of of restoration practice and interior furnishings, an important aspect of this documentation effort.

Second Year student Brent Fortenberry will present a paper entitled “Stone, Timber, and Lime: Combining Archaeological, Architectural, and Conservation Science Research Strategies at the Gardener’s Cottage, Southampton Bermuda” at CHAT, Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory at the University of Sheffield, UK in late October.

ABSTRACT: Scholars from different disciplines often collaborate on the ‘big questions’ of the past, the broad processes of a region, or time period. Still too while crossdisciplinary perspectives are championed by scholars from across the academy often these approaches fall short of productive interdisciplinarity. Far rarer are the moments when scholars from various fields work together on a single site. Such collaborations provide genuine opportunities to push forward our knowledge of the past. One such opportunity took place at the Gardener’s Cottage site in Southampton Bermuda. Here archaeologists, architectural historians, and conservation scientists worker together to better understand the experiences of enslaved African in the site’s rockcut cellar.In doing so they combined approaches to the past that consider material culture, the built environment, spatial patterning, as well as architectural framing and finish. The strength of such an approach is that it envelopes differing ways of knowing and analyzing the material culture in pursuit of a more nuanced understanding of the past. This paper will explore how differing data sets and theoretical perspectives have enriched our understanding of enslaved life at the site and more widely on the island of Bermuda, and in a comparative Atlantic world.