Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Archaeology at the "Old Hazard House"

It is not accurate to delineate archaeology solely as the study of excavated artifacts. Rather, archaeology is the study, through material culture, of the past and its present legacies. This purview is most obviously distinguished by things recovered through below-ground excavation methods, but archaeology is not limited to excavated or even curated objects. "Material culture" [End Page 213] includes structures, landscapes, bodies, and things in their broadest sense. Even such unlikely materials as soils and organic residues contribute to archaeological knowledge. Archaeologists use visual, oral, and written records with an agenda in mind: to illuminate relations among people and their material and physical worlds. These sources may be the same as those used by other disciplines, but a focus on things—materiality, physicality, embodiment, and lived experience—distinctly shapes both the questions that we as archaeologists ask and the answers we find.

Contrary to recent criticism, few historical archaeologists believe that we enjoy straightforward access to past social actors via their things.¹ With critical interpretation, however, material culture does reveal a different aspect of the past, distinctive from that of documentary records. Some archaeologists find a special urgency in the recent past, concluding that the last few hundred years are the best place to look for explanations of the ideas that structure the world we know.² This historical archaeology is characterized by the integration of multiple sources, providing new and challenging perspectives. It "brings an awareness of how much of daily life remains undocumented, unspoken, and yet is far from insignificant and often leaves material traces."³ How did the early modern consumer economy transmit consumption-based social identities of status and gender and standards of gentility, refinement, and propriety? How and why did new fashions become common necessities? With these issues in mind, archaeological excavations at domestic sites in Newport, Rhode Island, afford a field of interpretive possibilities. The Pratt, Tate, and Brown households are considered in the following two archaeological studies of colonial Newport.

The Wanton-Lyman-Hazard (WLH) historic site includes archaeological remnants of the Pratt household. The property is located on a mixed residential and commercial block abutting Broadway, Stone, and Spring streets in Newport, the first capital of the Rhode Island and Providence Plantations colony. The WLH property, now owned by the Newport Historical [End Page 214] Society (NHS), comprises a parcel of land and a late seventeenth-century dwelling house. The present WLH House was extensively reconstructed in the late 1920s by the noted architectural historian Norman M. Isham, who significantly edited the fabric of the house, removing centuries of additions and intensive reconfigurations. He likewise renovated the yard, regrading, paving, and planting to create a pleasant Colonial Revival backdrop for the "Old Hazard House" and the social events held there.⁴

The property today looks much as it did in the 1930s, although standards of historic authenticity have changed. The structure is now shingled and painted in historically accurate colors, and the geometrical hedges of the "colonial garden" are gone. It was, in fact, the Newport Garden Club's desire to create a more appropriate garden installation that motivated archaeological excavations at the WLH House in 1999 through 2004. The garden has yet to be realized, but archaeologists discovered a remarkably dense set of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century features relating to a range of activities and households.

As is true of any site, the WLH property is a nexus of scale and relevance. There are many periods, issues, and lives represented by such a data set. Although the only dwelling house on the property today is the Hazard House itself, foundations of two earlier homes were discovered through systematic survey and targeted excavation: an earlier seventeenth-century structure adjacent to the current house and, in the rear, facing Spring Street, the stone foundations of an eighteenth-century house on what was once a separate property. The principal data with which these articles engage is from the rear portion of the site, the middle decades of the eighteenth century, and a particular householder: Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and shopkeeper.

The foundation of Pratt's roughly twenty-four-by-sixteen-foot enclosed-end-chimney house was traced, and samples from her privy and refuse-strewn yard were taken. These features are archaeologically significant because, until their sampling through excavation, they had not been disturbed since their creation in the eighteenth century. Manufacturing dates, peak use dates, and styles of diagnostic artifacts from the trash midden and privy [End Page 215] fill suggest these two features accumulated between about 1720 and 1750. Documents show Pratt living at the Spring Street lot by 1723 and gone by 1749.⁵ Approximately eight thousand artifacts and fragments, as well as the durable remnants of tens of thousands of parasite eggs, pollen grains, and plant parts, are, therefore, attributable to Pratt's term of ownership and occupation, and hence, her household.

Artifacts and environmental evidence describe some of this woman's experiences, and documents recount others. A few other eighteenth-century Newporters are known in similar ways. The house lots of the merchant and militia captain James Brown and the blacksmith William Tate were excavated by University of Massachusetts Boston projects in the early 1990s.⁶ The Brown and Tate families lived in Newport during the same period as Elizabeth Pratt. Like Pratt, they were neither impoverished nor elite. Evidence from their privies and yards further enriches our understanding of consumerism, status, social values, and the vicissitudes of daily life in pre-Revolutionary Newport. Through sites such as these, archaeologists are building a new understanding of the colonial town and, more broadly, colonial cultural change. As always, multiple sources interweave with, reinforce, and pull at each other. It is the archaeologist's task to relate artifacts, organic remains, and documents (as they exist in the present) to the intangible aspects of life and experience (in the past and present). In the following two articles, the authors take up this task and address, archaeologically, daily experiences of status, identity, and community in Newport, an early modern commercial town. [End Page 216]