Historic Cane Hill is known for its Cumberland Presbyterian roots and history. Today, visitors learn about its past and the Cumberland Presbyterians’ many contributions, especially Cane Hill College. While the 1886 college building still stands, it is not in the same location as the original campus. Despite no visual or documentary evidence, the local historical memory is that Cane Hill College originally sat on the crest of the hill overlooking the community.

Cane Hill also had a Methodist congregation, one whose history has largely been forgotten, or remembered incorrectly, despite their former church still standing in its original location. In this presentation, I provide an overview of the archaeology conducted at the former Methodist church and the suspected location of the original Cane Hill College campus. The results support the historical memory of one site, while providing evidence that contradicts the way the other has been remembered.

This paper considers the relationship between oral history and archaeology through two interconnected projects studying the Down the Bay neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama. The I-10 Mobile River Bridge Archaeology Project focuses on 13 bounded sites within the corridor of the proposed bridge expansion, which fall along the eastern edge of Down the Bay. The Down the Bay Oral History Project was only feasible with a much broader, neighborhood-level focus. While differences in spatiality and temporality present significant challenges to collaboration, they also result in productive tensions. In this paper, we share case studies and lessons learned from taking a broad approach to oral history. It not only offers an opportunity to incorporate community memories into archaeological projects when direct descendants cannot be identified, it also allows us to better situate sites within the surrounding landscape.

Research for the Mobile River I-10 bridge replacement (MRB) mitigation brought to light that, although Mobile is touted as an ethnically diverse city, no one has systematically examined, synthesized, nor incorporated historical demography into studies of its past. Understanding the population and demography of a place matters to the study of our pasts and future. The number and composition of populations that change through basic life occurrences (birth, death, migration), impacts the decisions, choices, and actions taken by individuals. Here we examine the demographics of the Mobile River basin through time in relation to MRB research themes: landscape transformation, waste management, foodways, natural disasters, shelter, and health. We consider how the historical demography of the Mobile landscape affected and/or restricted cultural, social, political, and economic changes and how those in turn impact the number of people in the region and the archaeological record.

Germanna has been the site of archaeology over the last five decades. It is best known as the site of the 1714 Fort Germanna and for Alexander Spotswood’s “Enchanted Castle.” The current Germanna Archaeology Project has been built using an historic landscapes approach to excavations since 2016. The results have connected with stories of various Virginia Indigenous Peoples, the colonizing English, German speaking migrants, and enslaved Africans. Germanna’s landscape held myriad meanings for the various people who inhabited it. Exploration of Germanna’s landscape, today, continues to hold connection with a variety of contemporary stakeholders and descendant groups.

How and why do historic villages expand or contract? When do people decide to move between one existing house and another, or build an entirely new house? Drawing upon archaeological excavation, archival research, historical documentation, and oral history interviews with former islanders, in this paper we explore the interweaving of human action that created the nineteenth through twentieth century village of Inishark, a fishing village off Western Ireland that was abandoned in 1960. Integrating LiDAR research, Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1898, oral histories, and archaeological survey data, we seek to understand how village biography, household organization, and residential histories connect broader demographic trends with personal family histories.

Archaeology usually studies the static and solid. We think in terms of landscapes, sites, artefacts and buildings. This paper will focus on the first and last of these, landscapes and buildings, but in terms of movement through the landscape and to and from buildings. The daily journeys and activities performed in late eighteenth and nineteenth century towns and villages provide significant grist to our interpretations of the physical structures and locations of buildings.

By locating places within people’s activities we can understand better what people did where and why, and also what they might have experienced. To do this, we need tools and I will present some suggestions as to appropriate tools for analyzing these daily journeys and considering how we can apply them to different environments. The paper will develop several case studies from my research on late-eighteenth and nineteenth century soup kitchens in England.

“The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”

Few things are more evocative of the past that an abandoned house in a rural landscape. Anyone doing Cultural Resource Management (CRM) has encountered them. They are ghosts on the landscape. Once abandoned, they transform to artifact and in the United States they are typically assessed singularly as objects to determine their significance. This is usually based on their aesthetics and as such their cultural meaning is often lost in the process. Who last lived in the house? What economic, social, or technological shifts lead to their abandonment? On a micro scale the abandonment of a house represents a significant event for a family. Without addressing the circumstances of the individual structures there is no way to identify larger trends of abandonment that relate to larger communities. This is largely due to the adherence to the National Register criteria used in assessments.

In 1999 the discovery and excavation of a local mass killing site forever changed the urban landscape of a residential area in the capital of Bangladesh. The excavation of this killing site of the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide and later the establishment of a memorial at the site, transformed the locality into a major historical site inciting interactions among generations with this redefined landscape. In the earlier phases of the excavation the authorities in charge faced many challenges of maintaining international standards for archeological excavation. This resulted in a fascinating case study of the interrelationships between urban landscapes, local identity, shared memory and forgetting, and archeological excavations of a local mass killing site. Gradually, with the establishment of a memorial and its centrality to local identity, this site turns into a space of exchanging genocidal trauma within a generation, facilitated by archaeological excavations, revealing shared-memory of atrocity crimes of the locality.