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.