Archaeologies of legacy: southern memory, disciplinary foremothers, and the archaeological archive at the Heyward-Washington House, Charleston

Much of the literature focused on work with archaeological legacy collections is highly methodological in scope, oriented toward the mitigative labor these past collections require to render them usable in the present. However, scholars are increasingly borrowing from concepts deployed in the “archival turn” in adjacent disciplines to investigate archaeological archives as sites of knowledge production in and of themselves. This article turns to the archive at the Heyward-Washington House (87 Church Street), an urban townhome site in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. It interrogates the formation of the associated legacy collection via the social context of decisions made by the site’s primary investigator, Dr. Elaine Bluhm Herold. When considered beyond collections-based methodologies, a different type of story unfolds about these collections beyond the frustrations of corrective collections management. Instead, the following unwinds and untangles a broader narrative driven by the challenges faced by the early foremothers of our discipline and the wider cultural memory of Charleston, the South, and this particular archaeological site. The formation of these and other similar legacy collections demands that we consider in the present how past and present social worlds materially imbue the archived remnants (artifacts, paperwork, and interpretations) of our practice.