Dr. Alexandra Chan - Within Without – The Archaeology of Partitions

Dr Alexandra Chan

Becoming American: the archaeology of enslavement and racialisation at the Isaac Royall House, an eighteenth-century Massachusetts slaveholding estate

Three seasons of excavation at the last standing slave quarters in New England offer a look at the experiences of master and slave on a large eighteenth-century Massachusetts estate. Material culture of early African Americans in New England contains powerful insights into the ‘contested spaces’ of slavery, master–slave relationships and the eighteenth-century ‘racialisation’ of American society. In the material we find evidence of both the definition and the expression of ‘race’ in a given time and place, as well as how those categories of ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘other’ might have been forged and negotiated in the first place. While race, as a biological category, has no scientific validity and is, in fact, ‘not real’, racism is very real. The people and societies who operated within its paradigm had tangible effects on the world, the landscape and the people who lived—and live—within it, and these can be retrieved archaeologically. We will examine artefacts, landscapes, architecture, floral/faunal remains and the documentary record at this site as uniquely social objects, actively engaged in communicating messages, advertent and inadvertent, about who was ‘within’ and who was ‘without’ in colonial American society.

Dr Alexandra Chan taught historical archaeology, archaeological ethics, comparative colonialism and the archaeology of early African America at Vassar College, and worked for many years as a principal investigator in cultural resource management. She directed excavations at the Royal House and continues to serve on the Academic Advisory Council of the museum.

Within Without – The Archaeology of Partitions

Almost all archaeological sites and monuments include a ditch, a wall, a fence or a bank—something that divides space physically and sometimes symbolically. The space on either side of these dividing features, whether enclosed or separated, can have its own significance or meaning. Conceptual divisions like inclusion and exclusion, privacy or social standing can be more challenging to identify but are no less significant. Using archaeology to examine socially and physically constructed partitions, and the spaces they divide, can help to give us insight into how spaces were used and what they meant to the people who used them.

8th Annual National Monuments Service
Archaeology Conference organised on behalf
of the National Monuments Service by
Wordwell | Archaeology Ireland.

Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin, 18 October 2025