ANNAPOLIS, Md., June 13 (UPI) -- Household items from a historic African American home in Annapolis, Md., provide a glimpse into a middle-class black home in the late 1800s, archaeologists say.
The University of Maryland archaeological team is working at the James Holliday House, bought in 1850 by one of the first African Americans to work for the U.S. Naval Academy, the university said Monday in a release. Team members say their finds show how a well-off African American family adapted their middle-class lifestyle to the realities of post-Civil War Annapolis.
James Holliday, born a slave in 1809 and freed in 1819, was a messenger to the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy for nearly 40 years.
The team of students began work in the summer of 2010, identifying an intact archaeological find at the site, recovering large numbers of broken dishes and bottles, both whole and broken.
The Holliday family was well-off, based on the quality of the dishes used for dining, the team concluded.
"African-Americans in Annapolis displayed the outward appearance of conforming to Victorian etiquette by buying and using fancy, up-to-date dishes, but uniquely, only in limited numbers," University of Maryland archaeologist Mark Leone, who created and oversees the Archaeology in Annapolis program. "They bought them in small numbers, perhaps for financial reasons, perhaps to put their own unique stamp on their dining."
Leone said he and his students found a similar approach only in other 19th century Annapolis African American households; white families do not appear to have set their tables in this manner.
The absence of matching dinnerware indicates black families exhibited a "conscious choice to acquire dishes in small quantities rather than in matching sets," said Kate Deeley, a University of Maryland archaeology graduate student co-directing the work at the site and the lab analysis.
