Exploring America's Stories in the Clemson Landscape: An NEH American Rescue Plan

FAIN: ZPA-283484-22

Clemson University (Clemson, SC 29634-0001)
Lee Morrissey (Project Director: May 2021 to present)

The retention of one post-doctoral researcher and the hiring of two others, along with partial funding for three faculty members, to expand and coordinate interdisciplinary research on enslaved African Americans at Clemson University and in the community and to restart an archaeological field school operating on Clemson’s campus.

Clemson University, in formerly Cherokee territory, includes several former plantations (including John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill) on which enslaved African Americans were forced to reside and work, buildings built by African American convict laborers, and CCC work sites. Clemson’s 17,000 acres tell a national, hemispheric and transatlantic story with local materials. Some of this history is buried, and in need of coordinated historical and archaeological recovery, documentation, interpretation, preservation, protection, and, when appropriate, dissemination. In Summer 2020, for example, we discovered over 600 unmarked graves in the on-campus cemetery. But Covid budget cuts threaten, and a hiring freeze deferred, post-docs. We apply for NEH American Rescue Plan funds to protect a current post-doc (threatened) and invest in archaeological materials (e.g., a geolocator) and two 1-year Archaeology post-docs (deferred) to document and explore America’s stories in the Clemson landscape.