Abstract
Spring 2020 marks a dozen years of collaboration with community members, descendant from the Palatines who were Rhenish refugees in the early eighteenth century, along with local college students and faculty. We have combined research and educational efforts to focus on this earliest substantial German-speaking settlement in the Americas that after New York State’s emancipation also included an African American neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter prepares for a reevaluation of effects on the community from excavations, events, and exhibits at the 1767 Parsonage on Maple Avenue. The three generations of African Americans who lived there into the twentieth century overlapped in residence with German and Dutch-American ministers and physicians. Evidence of Bakongo spirituality exists under and beside the Parsonage cellar’s hearthstones, as ritual concealments and a distinctive cosmogram.
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Acknowledgments
I profoundly thank my community colleagues for their collaborative support and my students for their assistance and active involvement in the Germantown Archaeology Project. I quite appreciate the editorial contributions of Grace Murphy. I’m also grateful for the recognition and the trenchantly constructive criticism by the editors of this volume, John H. Jameson and Sherene Baugher.
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Lindner, C. (2022). The Germantown Archaeology Project: A Hudson Valley Community Collaboration. In: Jameson, J.H., Baugher, S. (eds) Creating Participatory Dialogue in Archaeological and Cultural Heritage Interpretation: Multinational Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81957-6_7
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