Fort Frederick Analysis

Update: This fellowship has been postponed from July 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Summer 2022, I will be partnering with archaeologists from the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) Heritage Trust Program to inventory collections from the 18th-century site of Fort Frederick in Beaufort County, South Carolina. This site is undergoing intensive archaeological recovery work by SCDNR due to climactic and developmental threats to the site.

 Fort Frederick was acquired by SCDNR to protect and preserve the early/mid-18th-century British tabby fort; however, the site is an important property because it has the potential to shed light on the evolution of structural racism at the local level from its roots in colonial times through the Jim Crow era.  Climate change poses a particular danger to the site, as portions of the site’s architectural and archaeological remains are now submerged in the Beaufort River.

This project is a collaboration between myself and the SCDNR Heritage Trust Program to help bring their collections into the DAACS database. We will be cataloging the antebellum contexts from the Fort Frederick Heritage Preserve, which were recovered during recent fieldwork.