I fully admit to being most titillated by weird tales of spite houses and diarrhea from green corn, but in between those cheap thrills I do attempt to do some actual learning.
Recently at the Eddie and Sylvia Brown African American Collection at the Pratt Library I came across a book called “Eating in the Side Room” by archeologist and anthropologist Mark Warner.
“The story of how the house lived in by the Maynard and Burgess families came to be excavated and ultimately preserved by the city of Annapolis is inextricably linked to the ongoing relationship between black and white communities in present-day Annapolis. It is a story that starts with some nails and really old graffiti and continues to this day with debates about whose pasts deserve to be preserved.” – (Mark Warner, ‘Eating in the Side Room’)
Not too far off State Circle in Annapolis, several generations of two African American families made their home on Duke of Gloucester Street alongside a few of the other most affluent black citizens of the town. Working as waiters, washerwomen, and cooks at the nearby Naval Academy, these families built lives and navigated their way through a culture of oppression and second-class citizenship.
They also, like all people, left behind clues about how they lived and what they ate, bit by bit as garbage was discarded into a privy and scattered about the yard.
John Maynard was born free around 1800. In the 1830s with his newly-minted freedom papers in hand, he worked to purchase his own wife and her daughter from slavery. In 1847 for just slightly less than the cost of their freedom, he purchased two lots in Annapolis. The property he built became their home and the home of their decendents, plus a network of in-laws, relatives and boarders from the 1850s to the 1980s.
What was left behind provided insight into the lives of some of the less famous citizens of one of Maryland’s most historic cities.
This book was most interesting to me in that it revealed some archeological methods, and illuminated the ways in which archaeology and food history intersect. The science of archeology became apparent once I got to “epiphyseal fusion” and a chart summarizing “faunal data.”
The past, revealed by trash discarded into a privy a century ago, luckily for excavators, did not contain an “identifiable quantity of human waste.”
Maynard Burgess House “before renovations” Halpern Architects
Excavated bones reveal the types and cuts of meat consumed by the families & the ways in which the meat was obtained – commercial butchering versus wild-caught or home-butchered. For example, the presence of chicken heads in comparison to other body parts may reveal that chickens were raised and not store-bought. From the bone of a turkey, it is apparent that the bird had a bacterial infection and was nursed back to health rather than summarily slaughtered. Remnants of shot indicate hunting.
“Fishing and raising chickens ultimately provided black families with added social and economic benefit. Foods that African Americans were able to procure or grow on their own… helped family members form bonds with their neighbors, assist relatives and friends.. [and] shielded them, to some extent, from the challenges they faced when confronting white society.”
– (Mark Warner, ‘Eating in the Side Room’)
In bottles found on the site, archeologists noted a preference for national brands, as opposed to bottles labeled by local merchants.
“In purchasing national brands that were sealed by the manufacturer, the Maynards and other blacks in the region were shielding themselves from local white merchants misrepresenting the medicines they were dispensing or the age of the milk they were selling or the strength of the alcohol”
– (Mark Warner, ‘Eating in the Side Room’)
Shopping for food in a society where they weren’t afforded the same respect and trust that white neighbors enjoyed exposed them not only to potential humiliation but to fraud.
Antique bottles, Etsy sale
In in “Eating in the Side Room,” much is made of the Maynard/Burgess families’ apparent preference for pork. During eras where the white middle class was aspiring to eat more beef, families like the Maynards may have continued to enjoy pork along with the tradition and social ties of that food.
The book also references some local oral history interviews. Black Annapolis resident Margaret Green recalls raising chickens and rabbits, growing kale and carrots, canning tomatoes and baking black walnut cookies. While these individual stories can never fully speak to every experience, they have been influenced by and then folded back in the greater narrative of Maryland food culture over time.
Anyway, this entry isn’t just a book report.. it also happens to be an interview. I reached out to Mark S. Warner in what proved to be an interesting interview that disproved many of my misconceptions…
1) What led you to working in Archaeology in Annapolis? You live in Idaho but now are forever connected with these Annapolis families…
My relationship with Archaeology in Annapolis predates my time in Idaho. I actually was living in Washington DC when I decided to go to school to see how serious I was about anthropology. University of Maryland accepted me and it was pure serendipity a faculty member there, Mark Leone had already built the Archaeology in Annapolis project. I just happened to be there when there was a concerted effort to begin to understand the histories of African American Annapolitans through archaeology.
2) Is it possible to give a quick overview for a layman on archaeology methods used at a site like this, for history of that era? A lot of people may not be aware that work of this nature is still being done, or that there is anything to uncover.
In many ways an archaeological excavation is quite similar regardless of whether you are working on a site that is 100 years old or 10,000 years old. We are trying to recover past histories through the things that people leave behind, either intentionally or unintentionally. Talking about historical archaeology in particular, a quick definition is that is it is the archaeology of the recent past. As for why you would excavate a place where people lived so recently I would make two points. First, the trash anybody leaves behind tells a story about people’s lives that is almost certainly one that would not be recorded in their diary or anywhere else. What someone ate, for instance is a routine part of daily life – but because it is so routine it is often forgotten. My second point is this. In the case of the Maynard and Burgess families, there are almost no records of their lives, other than their names in the census and some notes in newspapers, their lives are almost forgotten, but what we happened to find through archaeology tells us a great deal about how they lived 150 years ago.
Maynard Burgess House, Maryland Historical Trust
3) It seems that a lot of the material studied relies on methods used for trash disposal at that time. Can you comment on that? Are we losing links to the path by the way we live and dispose of our garbage and human waste?
Nope, humans have always been pretty messy. However, how we get rid of our trash has changed. In many (but not all) locales folks have their trash hauled off to a landfill. Those things are going to be of incredible interest to archaeologists thousands of years from now – and even if you look at the work of the late Bill Rathje you will see that they are already attracting some attention from archaeologists. As an FYI Rathje made a long career of studying contemporary trash, first by conducting surveys of the trash contemporary households were throwing out and somewhat more recently by literally excavation small portions of landfills. His book “Rubbish” is an interesting look at contemporary trash and what it tells us about our behaviors.
4) Why a book? Is this material for a course? If so, what other types of materials are used for teaching about this (further reading for us ‘independent scholars..’)
Well, part of it is a convention for what us teaching types are supposed to do. That being said do know that this book was very slow in coming out, several years ago some of the findings from the project were part of a display at the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis.
It’s also important to recognize that there are different things for different audiences, yeah this book is kind of an academic book, but hopefully some of what I was able to talk about can be shared with different audiences as time goes on .
5) You mentioned surveying old cookbooks as part of your research – can you name a few that were particularly notable or illuminating?
Actually I’d like to mention a person. Barbara Jackson-Nash. She was the Director of the Banneker-Douglass Museum when we were working on the Maynard Burgess house. She also collected cookbooks and she was the one who kind of led me to realize that indirectly cookbooks can also tell you things about the people who wrote them.
6) Is there anything about the ideas you put forth in the book that might be seen as controversial or will be under particular dispute?
You never know. The thing is I don’t necessarily think it’s controversial but I would certainly hope some of what I have in there is at least thought-provoking. In some ways I’m looking at the relationship between food and identity. Think about everyday life today, you aren’t necessarily thinking explicitly about making a statement about how you represent yourself by your food choices, but studying them can be revealing and in some circumstances food can be a very, very important symbol of community, of family, of whatever.
7) Have you experienced any particular frustrations or barriers in studying the history and lives of ‘everyday’ people? In Annapolis of course, there were many ‘notable’ citizens whose pasts might receive the lions share of funding, attention, etc..
Actually it’s just the opposite. One of the things I love about historical archaeology is it’s power to recover fragments of people’s lives that are lost. To me it’s a more unique narrative to talk about the Maynards and Burgesses than it is to talk about yet another prominent community figure in the nineteenth century. I would also say that while there certainly is a ways to go it is gratifying to see progress on some fronts. It’s taken 25 years but it looks like the Maynard Burgess house is actually going to be renovated.
