An Archaeological Perspective on the Hancock-Clarke Collection

Christa Beranek is a Historical Archaeologist at the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at U-Mass Boston. She has been working with the Society to evaluate the Hancock-Clarke collection and prepare it for exhibition. She also led the excavation at Munroe Tavern this summer, which you can read more about here.

I’ve worked with a number of archaeological collections in Massachusetts, and the Hancock-Clarke collection is really exceptional as a large body of material from place and period that are not very well represented. When I was writing my dissertation, I looked for collections from rural, 18^th-century, Massachusetts that I could use as comparative material for my site in Tyngsboro. What I found was that while there were large collections from urban areas (some unearthed during the Big Dig) and large collections from later 18^th-century sites (including some held at Minute Man National Park in Lexington), there were very few from the countryside outside Boston that dated to the first half of the 18^th century.

I’m not sure exactly why this is. It may be that these sites are still preserved and remain to be found, since the outer suburbs haven’t been subject to the same intensive development that the area closer to Boston has. It may also be that large collections from rural household in the early 18^th century are rare because these rural residents had relatively few things that would preserve to be found. Their houses may have been outfitted mostly with perishable materials: wooden trenchers, fiber storage baskets, wooden shutters on windows that had no glass panes.

Whatever the case, the collection from the Hancock household, with most items dating to before the 1740s, is unusual. The more than 20 boxes of glass, ceramic, and metal items offer an unparalleled view into the family’s house. Hancock’s position as a minister and his relationship to merchants in Boston meant that his family was probably better connected to urban markets and new goods and practices than most of their neighbors. Thus, the material that the Lexington Historical Society is curating is exceptional in two ways: it is a collection from an under represented time and place, and it comes from a household that would have stood out from its contemporaries.

I am extremely grateful for the chance to work on this collection. University students and staff from UMass Boston, and historical society staff, board members, and volunteers from Lexington, have been working on many aspects of this material since 2008. The excavation itself took place in the 1960s, with a huge amount of volunteer work to wash and sort the artifacts in the years immediately following. The exhibit will be the first public presentation of research that has been going on (with some long pauses) for more than 45 years!

Christa M. Beranek

Research Archaeologist

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research

University of Massachusetts Boston