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Collections
NEAAAL analyses and houses the archaeological materials and associated records that illuminate the contributions of African Americans who worked to overcome race-based inequality to obtain political and economic parity in New England. The management and study of these assemblages is the result of a partnership between the UMass Boston Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research and the Museum of African American History (MAAH).
African Meeting House
Boston, MA
The Boston African Meeting House was built in 1806 by free Black artisans and served as a cultural, educational, and political gathering ground for the free Black community on Beacon Hill. The Meeting House was home to the African Baptist Church of Boston and the African School before it moved into the adjacent Abiel Smith School building in 1835.
Abolitionists such as Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, and William Lloyd Garrison were also frequent visitors to the Meeting House. The artifacts maintained at NEAAAL were recovered during the Fiske Center’s 2005 excavations of the backlot of the African Meeting House. Objects include architectural materials, which shed light on the African Meeting House’s physical appearance during the 19th century, as well as ceramics, seeds, and animal bones which have highlighted the entrepreneurial activities of several African American members of the Beacon Hill community.
Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House
Nantucket, MA
The Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House celebrates approximately 200 years of Black history on Nantucket Island. Named for the property’s former owners, the historic home along with the neighboring Nantucket African Meeting House mark the location of New Guinea, the island’s earliest free Black community. In 1774, Seneca Boston, a Black weaver, purchased the land where this home sits. Boston bought this property two years after he was manumitted from slavery and resided here with his wife Thankful Micah, a Wampanoag woman, and their six children. The Bostons were part of a large and rather prosperous family, comprised of landowners and mariners. While Seneca’s son, Absalom, gained prominence for serving as captain of a whaling vessel staffed with an all-Black crew, subsequent generations of the Boston family owned and resided at this residence for approximately 126 years and contributed to the growth of the New Guinea community. Following the decline of the island’s whaling industry, an African American woman named Florence Higginbotham purchased this property in 1920 and later the nearby African Meeting House, which led to the preservation of these two landmarks of local Black history. More than 30,000 artifacts were uncovered during the archaeological excavations conducted in 2008 and 2014, which document the lives of these two prominent Black families.
African Meeting House
Nantucket, MA
Constructed in the 1820s as the African Baptist Society Meeting House, the property served as a church and community center for the New Guinea community until the final decade of the 19th-century. The care of the Nantucket African Meeting House collection was conveyed to the NEAAAL in 2018. The site was excavated by archaeologists from Boston University under the direction of the late Dr. Mary Beaudry and Ellen Berkland in 1993 and 1996. The excavations of the site documented several phases of architectural and landscape changes at the African Meeting House. Archaeologists also uncovered several educational items such as writing utensils that were associated with the use of the property as a school for Black and other non-White children.
SYLVESTER MANOR
Shelter Island, NY
The Sylvester Manor collection is a legacy collection that has been at UMass Boston for over 20 years. Starting in 1998, faculty and students from the University of Massachusetts Boston began an extensive program of excavation and analysis that continues to unfold. Excavations were carried out every summer between 1998 and 2005 with subsequent, more limited excavations carried out in 2006, 2007, 2019, and 2024.
Sylvester Manor, established in 1651, lies on Shelter Island, the Ancestral homelands of the Manhansett tribe. This site originally functioned as a slaveholding provisioning plantation that shipped goods to two sugar plantations in Barbados that were owned by the same family for whom the Manor is named. Sylvester Manor is an important location for understanding Black History and the history of slavery and freedom in the Northeast because of the central role that African American occupants played in the long history and memory of the Manor over 370 years.
Recent work on this collection has aimed to organize and account for the extensive physical collection and paperwork, as well as study the 19th century on the landscape and learn more about the lives of the free black people who lived and worked on the property at this time. Surveys of the Afro-Indigenous cemetery on the site are currently underway, in order to understand the extent of the cemetery’s boundaries.
How To Cite This Page
New England African American Archaeology Lab
2025 Collections. University of Massachusetts Boston. <web address>. Accessed [Date].
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