A Chesapeake Family and their Slaves : A Study in Historical Archaeology (New Studies in Archaeology)

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Summary: Eighteenth Century Nobles in Maryland
Review: Anne Yentsch has made an important contribution to the history of eighteenth century Chesapeake and the Calvert family (English nobles) who lived at 58 State Circle in Annapolis, Maryland. This monograph represents only a fraction of publications on the historical archaeology of the Chesapeake.

Charles Calvert, the Fifth Lord Baltimore, sent his young cousin, Captain Charles Calvert to govern the colony in 1720. Captain Calvert purchased the property in 1728, not as a townhouse for his immediate family but as an extended Calvert family site. He made improvements and purchased additional lots to expand the site. His tenure as Governor ended with his replacement by Benedict Leonard Calvert, one of the Lord's younger brothers. Edward Henry Calvert, another brother, came as an assistant. Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert made extensive improvements during the early 1730s. Credit is given to Benedict Leonard Calvert for making the site a showplace and powerful statement. Benedict Leonard enjoyed classicism, its architecture and its gardens.

The occupation of the Calverts would be short lived. Edward Henry Calvert died in 1730 and his widow returned to England. Benedict Leonard resigned his post in 1731, set sail for England, and died enroute. Captain Charles Calvert died in 1734, followed by his wife Rebecca. The home was left in the hands of five-year-old Elizabeth Calvert, the only living child of Captain Charles and Rebecca Calvert. Elizabeth was left in the care of a minor Venetian nobleman, Onorio Razolini, and his wife. About the same time, Lord Baltimore's illegitimate son, Benedict Swingate (Calvert), came to live in Annapolis. In 1748 he and Elizabeth Calvert would marry and occupy the house on State Circle. The site would undergo substantial renovations in the 1770s including a complete reorientation of the house and the demolition of the orangerie (structures wealthy men built to house tropical plants) and hypocast.

The book is primarily an archaeological case study supplemented with historical documents. The history of early Maryland is presented from a material culture perspective. For Yentsch, historical archaeology's location is "at the interface of history and anthropology" (p. 316). She uses material culture to interpret outward from the site to the complex culture of eighteenth century Maryland. Drawing on archival and pictorial evidence, historical and ethnographic literature, material culture studies and artifacts, Yentsch merges standard regional histories with ethnohistory, folklore, symbolic anthropology, and feminist theory. Typical of preservation-oriented excavations, her study was undertaken under the threat of redevelopment.

Yentsch uses the first and major portion of the text to establish the eighteenth century Chesapeake's cultural parameters. To this end, she describes the Calvert family's use of their social and economic resources to negotiate a New World power base. She explores the symbolic role of gardening and orangeries, which reflected the desire to dominate nature and people poorer than they.

In the second part, Yentsch relates the practices of the Calverts' African and African American slaves. Almost nothing is recovered in the way of artifacts. She draws upon comparative data from diverse regions and periods concerning West African and African-American values and traditions. The data comes from eighteenth century South Carolina, nineteenth century Georgia, and twentieth century Africa. Yentsch devotes several chapters to food, from its production and procurement to its serving and social meaning. Food was an important social, cultural, and economic indicator setting apart rich from poor, Anglo from African. For the most part, the chapters about the slaves leave the reader asking for more. The majority of the data comes from Captain Charles Calvert's inventory in 1734 showing 31 slaves of whom 19 were children.

In the final chapters, Yentsch proposes a multidisciplinary and multicultural orientation towards more humanistic interpretations in historical archaeology. Her explanations are more anecdotal than analytical. She fails to explain why and how the community assumed the appearance it did - the complex processes involving ethnic, racial, and social contributions to how and why colonial Marylanders changed.

A Chesapeake Family has few flaws. There are some grammatical and editorial errors. The book is accessible to both general and scholarly audiences. For the non-archaeologists, it is a good primer with a glossary of technical terms. However, archaeologists will not find statistical comparison of the evidence. Yentsch admits, this "is not so much about archaeology as about the ways one can use the historical record and knowledge about anthropology to supplement traditional artifact interpretation" (p. xxii). This book is a good example of what archaeology can offer to historians and others with an interest in the American past.

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Summary: Fascinating material but deceptive title & ponderous style
Review: Ms. Yentsch has obviously done a great deal of research on the Calvert site--and everything else even remotely related to it. If one is interested in the archaeology of the Calvert home and the story of the family and the slaves who lived there--as suggested by the title--he will have to sift through a great deal of peripheral material. And then he will have several questions still unanswered, especially about the Calvert slaves. It would be unreasonable to expect every archaeologist or historian to write with the wit and flowing style of Ivor Noel Hume, but we have a right to expect better than the pompous verbiage used in this volume. Following is a one sentence example--selected at random--about the privy near the State House:

"While the replication of style may have been a political act of appropriation (symbolically inverting the prior order), or the emulation and use of a newly fashionalbe form, in terms of the positional relationships it set up on the State Circle landscape, an opposition between the octagonal forecourt at the Calvert house and the outhouse was clearly set in place." (p. 274, 275)