AIC 53rd Annual Meeting

Penn Museum archaeologists began organizing Heritage West, a community archaeology project in West Philadelphia, in 2019. The initiative doubled as an undergraduate course in 2023 involving Penn faculty, staff, and students, as well as members of the public who live and work or whose families lived and worked in the immediate vicinity. Throughout 2024, lab work and processing of the materials took place at the Penn Museum, near the excavation site. Heritage West as a whole is a significant outreach and engagement opportunity that highlights local archaeological resources, makes field and lab experience accessible, and explores research questions of interest to people in the neighborhood closest to the museum.  

Archaeologists implemented extensive preparatory work to direct their focus and goals, concentrating on the Black Bottom, a once thriving Black community in the area now called University City. It was destroyed in the 1960s under the guise of urban renewal. The archaeologists believed that oral histories collected early in the project and existing archives about the area could be enhanced by archaeology. Excavation pushed the historical narrative of the neighborhood further back in time than living memory, adding material weight to stories of people who lived there, uncovering artifacts inspiring further memories and revealing aspects of daily life rarely recorded through other historical methods.  

Site conservation is about balance: the excitement of discovery and slowly revealing surfaces to avoid destroying historical data; the amount of material uncovered and the need for storage; the budget and the best supplies; the desire for democratizing access to archaeological training and the fragility of the archaeological record. The team experienced tight timelines and navigated continuously changing circumstances between the short excavation season (10 days over one semester), the physical location of the site in public spaces (a community center’s active gravel parking lot and yard), and the variety of excavators (from novice students and community members to practiced archaeologists). This excavation was not an example of perfect site conservation, but it exposed community members, undergraduates, graduate students, and museum staff to the effectiveness of a historical archaeological team that includes a conservator. Students in the class and community volunteers were interested in the relationship between the fields and had good instincts for asking questions most pertinent to each specialty. They quickly brought the conservator materials for possible identification, drew attention to more fragile finds for options for lifting and storing, and learned how to expose relevant maker’s marks, decorative surfaces, and other important details of recovered artifacts.  

The future of the collection is going to be decided in close collaboration with members of the team of volunteers who helped plan and excavate. This group of community volunteers all have current or familial relationships to the neighborhood or work in community organizations supporting current residents. It is hoped the artifacts will survive to be used in local artist efforts towards memorializing the neighborhood or on display in exhibitions, and that will be due to the efforts of the team to incorporate conservation considerations throughout the project.