Excavating Hidden History in the Adirondacks with the Timbuctoo Archaeology Project

Faculty Bio

Hadley Kruczek-Aaron is a historical archaeologist whose research examines the ways that class, gender, race, and religion have been lived in 19th-century America. She explored these topics in her 2015 book Everyday Religion: An Archaeology of Protestant Belief and Practice in the Nineteenth-Century, which focused on archaeology carried out at sites associated with central New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Since then, she has continued to explore similar questions at sites across northern New York, including those associated with Civil War soldiers, loggers, reformers, tourists, and farmers (especially those associated with Timbuctoo, a 19th-c. community of African Americans in the Adirondacks that is the subject of this Kilmer lab). Committed to collaborative approaches to archaeology, she has partnered with public institutions, private landowners, descendants, non-profits, and other educators to carry out research and develop curriculum and public programs relating to her work. Hadley, who earned her Ph.D. from Syracuse University, has been a professor at SUNY Potsdam since 2005.

Project Abstract

Research carried out as part of the Timbuctoo Archaeology Project aims to reveal details about the everyday lives of those connected with a mid-19th-century reform experiment that brought hundreds of Black New Yorkers to the Adirondacks to establish farms, gain the right to vote, and fight against slavery. Students involved in this work will document how a diverse set of 19th-century Adirondackers responded to the challenges of their environment and will clarify how their material worlds and farm landscapes changed over time. This work remains significant since little research of this nature has been done in the region, and because many of these historical figures (as women, as African Americans, and/or as members of the working class) have either been left out or misrepresented by early historians of the period. Thus, the data recovered as part of this Kilmer Lab give us the chance to craft new narratives about Adirondack and American history.

Students - 2024

• Sebastian Herrera
• Emmalee L. Clements
• Christopher Schwartz
• Matthew Johnson
• James Besenval
• Braden Choulas
• Jose Parrilla
• Leia’lani Dibble
• Sydney O'Melia
• Owen McNally
• Katelin Babbitt
• Ana Schmid
• Kathryn Nelson