THE CONFEDERATE AND THE FREEDMEN: BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL COMPARISONS FROM THE RECONSTRUCTION-ERA SOUTH. Issue 1 (April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Davidson, James M.; Black, Rachel
• Is Part Of: Southeastern archaeology. Volume 34:Issue 1(2015)
• Page Start: 1
• Page End: 22
• Publication Date: 2015-04
• Subjects: Southern States -- Antiquities -- Periodicals; Indians of North America -- Southern States -- Antiquities -- Periodicals; 930.1
• DOI: 10.1179/2168472314Y.0000000002
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0734-578X

Abstract

Abstract : In 1999, the human remains, coffin, and associated artifacts of William Ayres Crawford, a Confederate colonel who died in Saline County, Arkansas, in 1874, was examined archaeologically. Comparisons to Crawford's biohistory are made to his contemporaries—African-American freedmen who lived and died in the 1870s and early 1880s and who were interred in Freedman's Cemetery in Dallas, Texas. The Freedman's Cemetery site was intensively studied archaeologically in the early 1990s. In the process, key disparities and similarities between a slave-holding confederate officer and people who experienced the horrors of enslavement are revealed.