Unearthing history across Long Island

History has long been written based on the documents and possessions left by the dead. Those who wrote and owned little have often been overlooked.

Archaeology is teaming with preservationists to change that.

“Most of Long Island’s history is from the interpretation of wealthy white landowners, literate European-American men whose documents and writings were preserved,” said Scott Ferrara, an archaeologist and the curator at Three Village Historical Society and Museum in Setauket. “Black and Indigenous communities were disregarded in the creation of these histories,” he said.

For example, archaeology enriched understanding at the Southampton site of the former home of Pyrrhus Concer, according to Georgette Grier-Key, executive director and chief curator of the Eastville Community Historical Society in Sag Harbor. Local historians had recorded that Concer, who was enslaved and became a free man around 1832, was also a whaler and one of the first Black men to sail to Japan. So when archaeologists, working with the historians, recovered a bamboo paint or calligraphy brush in 2016, the artifact shed light on his travels, while other finds — which included buttons, a bodkin and fragments of porcelain — were recently on display at the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum and Education Center.

“African-Americans were not the subject of consideration for the literate homeowners here who wrote about themselves,” Grier-Key said. “Our story has been left out, but when you are able to do archaeology, it sheds light on who the everyday people were and what their lives could have looked like.”

LOOKING WITH ‘FRESH EYES’

“Archaeology is more than just excavation,” said archaeologist Andrew Tharler, the education and engagement director for Preservation Long Island in Cold Spring Harbor. “We’re trying to understand how people were living in the past by looking at the architecture and artifacts they left behind and the places they were living.”

An excavation at the Southampton History Museum headquarters at the Thomas Halsey house revealed a fragment of stoneware by Thomas W. Commeraw, a free Black potter who lived in New York City whose work is being rediscovered. Its existence at the site, settled by the white Halsey family in 1648, is a story museum staff are still trying to understand, said Sarah Kautz, the museum’s executive director and an archaeologist.

How artifacts like the Commeraw pottery are interpreted is part of the aboveground work archaeologists do, said Tharler, 35, of Manhattan. “Once you’ve excavated stuff, you’re left with all this material to try and understand,” he said.

Archaeologists’ work develops with ever-evolving lines of evidence, said Kautz. “When you can compare original archives written by the white, privileged people of means with the artifacts found on their property, as well as supporting documents, and look at them together, you start to realize the material evidence is showing that these people were also here,” she said. “You start to look at the documents with fresh eyes.”

Oral history is another tool that archaeologists can utilize, said Kautz, who worked on a 2021 excavation of the Peter Crippen house in Huntington, which the free Black man purchased in 1864. The home was owned continuously by his descendants until 2019, and they helped archaeologists pinpoint spots on the property to look for materials, like where an old building had been.

Tharler, who helps oversee programming and interpretation at the Joseph Lloyd Manor site in Lloyd Harbor, said archaeology “really changes the way we look at the house and the way we tell the story.”

To study the Lloyd family, which the 1790 Census showed enslaved 15 people (including Jupiter Hammon, the first published Black American poet), he said he uses records: letters, account books and inventories that speak to their work and activity.

But he said these documents offer a skewed impression because they don’t include the nonwhite household members. Tharler pairs these limited records with artifacts and architecture to tell their story.

“That means actually walking through the enslaved quarters in the house and thinking about what the experience would be like in a room for the enslaved people,” he said. “And being aware of how enslaved people may have interacted with the materials in a room, like a desk or a mahogany tea table. It’s about being aware that artifacts and architecture can tell many different stories at the same time.”

Tara Cubie, preservation director for Preservation Long Island, said she works closely with archaeologists who do surveys of the sites overseen by the nonprofit, calling it “like a sibling type relationship with preservation.”

“Traditionally in preservation the focus has been on the aboveground architecture. But in the last 20 years our definition of historic preservation has become a lot broader,” said Cubie, of Mattituck. “We look at the importance of the history and the cultural significance of a site. That’s become especially important as we’ve really tried to rectify past mistakes in not including underrepresented people in historic preservation and what we choose to save.”

ARCHAEOLOGIS FOR HIRE

Archaeologists are hired to explore sites for proactive preservation projects and, by law, when there’s a planned development, said Matthew Spigelman, owner of ACME Heritage Consultants LLC, a Westchester County archaeological consulting firm.

Spigelman, 44, who often works on Long Island, said that federal and state regulatory laws like the National Historic Preservation Act, the New York State Historic Preservation Act and the State Environmental Quality Review Act all mandate that the impact on historic properties above and below ground be accounted for. He said that looking for evidence of Indigenous and Black communities is always on an archaeologist’s radar now.

“Some of the work has also been very inspiring and shows how Native American and African American communities really were intertwined in early historic Long Island.”

Spigelman added, “The majority of our work is in advance of development or construction and about 10% is preservation efforts, helping towns or communities that have historic cemeteries or historic houses to maintain the structure if you want to put in a new sewer line or a septic system for instance.”

For example, Spigelman pointed to a project by Dr. Christopher Matthews of Montclair State University at the Silas Tobias House, a historic Indigenous/African American settlement in Setauket. An excavation was done in 2015 that Spigelman said showed “evidence for one family having both African American and Indigenous heritage and practices. While I didn’t work on the project, it certainly expanded my view of Long Island history.”

‘LIKE ... IN THE MOVIES’

Kautz said once archaeological testing is done, if something is found, like the remains of a Colonial house foundation or an old Native American settlement, the process includes phases of excavations “and then it starts to look like what you see in the movies.”

Kautz, who lives in Sag Harbor, said the goal is to recover as much of the information as they can. “In many instances, it doesn’t stop a construction project from happening. We’re here to document, to make a record, so it’s not completely erased. And we have that information we can keep going back to. That’s the very important thing about archaeology — that we create all of this data that we save and that people can keep going back to.”

Sometimes they go back through items that were excavated decades ago, said Ferrara, 34, of Massapequa. Artifacts in the archaeological collections at the Three Village Historical Society include items from the Brewster-Mount House site in East Setauket, which was built circa 1800 and demolished in 1968.

Ferrara said it was also home to a few free people of color — some of whom were painted by the American artist William Sidney Mount, like his painting of “The Bone Player,” believed by researchers to be inspired by Andrew Brewster. According to Ferrara, artifacts at the Brewster-Mount House, like buttons and clay pipes, were likely the belongings of the free Black inhabitants too.

“Unless an item has a clear identifying mark [like a name tag], it’s impossible to attribute it definitively to a specific individual,” said Ferrara. “However, that’s not the primary goal of archaeology. Studying the archaeology of slavery and race in the North is particularly complex, as enslaved individuals and enslavers often lived and labored within the same household.

“The objects excavated from these sites — ranging from ceramics and food remains to toys, tools, pipes and buttons — were used by all members of the household. Rather than isolating ownership, archaeology helps us understand the shared material culture and daily lives of those who inhabited these spaces,” said Ferrara.

There are about 12 boxes of artifacts excavated from the East Setauket site in the 1980s on loan to Bradley Phillippi, director of the Center for Public Archaeology at Hofstra University in Hempstead.

Phillippi has been working with students to go through the collections and said that, in the past year, they have cataloged a box of 150 pieces of tobacco pipe stems and other materials that are “a ubiquitous artifact type on both early-Colonial and post-Revolutionary sites across the United States.”

Another box, he said, contained over 290 buttons from mostly exterior excavations. “Trying to determine how they got there and what they were used for is something that can be learned through the inventory,” he said. “Materials used and construction — is it shell or glass, does it have four eyelets or a shank in the back — can eventually create a historical narrative about the community.”

A DISAPPEARING RESOURCE

Phillippi emphasized the importance of studying the entirety of local history now.

“Even small-scale archival work or small-scale archaeology is a finite resource,” he said. “If we don’t embrace these opportunities and pursue them now, it’s not a guarantee that they’ll remain even 10 years from now.”