Building a Sustainable Community Archaeology in Black Appalachia: Notes from Junaluska, North Carolina

Junaluska is a historic Black neighborhood perched on the northern edge of Boone, a fast-growing college town in western North Carolina (figure 1). First settled by enslaved farmers in the early nineteenth century, this area came to be owned and occupied by several Black households in the years following emancipation. Over the next century, the area steadily grew into a vibrant Black Appalachian community with its churches, schools, and families largely segregated from the surrounding white population. Although their numbers have dwindled in recent decades, the Black residents of Junaluska maintain a strong sense of community in the face of local development and shifting demography across the town of Boone.

Other than by its residents, the story of Junaluska has, until recently, been underappreciated if not entirely unknown, reflecting a longstanding tendency of silencing narratives of Black Appalachian life that archaeologists have only recently begun to address.¹ One reason is that written and oral archives relating to the history of Junaluska have been profoundly shaped or even erased through the sordid processes of enslavement and segregation.² Another reason is that the tangible heritage of Junaluska—namely, historic buildings and cemeteries—has been ignored or, in many cases, destroyed. The eastern slope of the Boone Cemetery, for example, has no markers for the dozens of Black residents buried there—a striking contrast with the hundreds of tombstones commemorating white residents on the cemetery summit. The Boone Methodist Episcopal Chapel, a centerpiece of the Junaluska community since 1898, was condemned and demolished in 1995, despite local preservation efforts.³ More recently, the area in and around the Junaluska neighborhood has begun to experience real estate development to build new student apartments and single-family homes, gradually pushing out long-time Black residents.

Thankfully, there are now several initiatives underway to better acknowledge and preserve the heritage of Junaluska in relation to the wider Boone community. Beginning in the 1980s, Susan Keefe, an anthropology professor at Appalachian State University, began working with her students to document Junaluska history by collecting written records and oral histories and by locating historic Black-owned houses and businesses in and around the neighborhood. In 2011, in a somewhat parallel effort, Virgil Greer, a Junaluska resident and community historian, and Faith Wright, a white member of Boone’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, organized the Junaluska Heritage Association (JHA).⁴ The JHA became a partnership of local community leaders and Appalachian State University faculty, including Keefe and others, “to help record and preserve the unique and rapidly eroding history of Junaluska and its surrounding area…[and] to assure the inclusion of that history as an integral part of the overall story of the town of Boone, NC and its home region.”⁵

Over the past decade, the JHA has led a number of projects in pursuit of these goals. These include the recording of oral histories from dozens of community members, culminating in the publication of Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community, the production of a website (junaluskaheritage.org), and the collection of historic photographs and other written materials for curation in the Special Collections section of the Appalachian State Library and the Watauga County Public Library. With prodding from the JHA, the Town of Boone also commissioned a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the aforementioned Boone Cemetery that identified 165 mostly unmarked graves of probable enslaved and free Black townspeople from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶ This work helped to make the case and raise the money for placing a granite memorial to the Black residents interred at the cemetery in 2017 (figure 2). Most recently, on June 19, 2021, the JHA and the Boone Historic Preservation Commission unveiled an historical marker explaining the significance of Junaluska to local and regional history. Ongoing efforts by the JHA aim to push back against development and gentrification through the creation of a Neighborhood Conservation District.

Building upon this established foundation of public history research and outcomes in the Junaluska community, we initiated the Junaluska Community Archaeology Project (JCAP) in 2020 as a partnership between the JHA and the Appalachian State University Landscape Archaeology Lab. Archaeology offered a means of answering questions about and calling attention to history and heritage in Junaluska, given its low visibility in the extant historical record of early Boone and the inevitable haziness of oral histories about previous generations of residents. To truly succeed, JCAP had to go beyond mere survey, excavation, and artifact analysis to document Junaluska’s past; it required thoughtful engagement and creative collaboration among diverse stakeholders with interests in Junaluska’s past and present to explore, interpret, preserve, and share this evidence. In other words, this project was suited to a community archaeology approach prioritizing collaboration with multiple stakeholders at all stages of research.⁷ The project also stood to learn from and contribute to a wider movement toward an antiracist archaeology that directly confronts the past and present Black experience through community-based scholarship, activism, and conscious dismantling of racist structures.⁸

Drawing on our initial and ongoing efforts with JCAP, we argue that archaeology—as a collaborative process—can help to illuminate the rich histories of Black Appalachian communities and others marginalized in regional and national narratives. We first summarize the history of Junaluska, highlighting efforts by the JHA to document and preserve community heritage, as well as the historical gaps and silences these efforts exposed. Next, we situate our project in wider discussions about the opportunities and challenges for the community archaeology of Black experiences. We then summarize our research activities and preliminary findings at two locations associated with the history of Junaluska, namely Clarissa Hill Cemetery and “the Mountain” (figure 1). Although we offer no definitive answers to questions about the early history of Junaluska, we argue that the process of community archaeology, from research design to fieldwork and analysis, nevertheless makes an important contribution to the broader goals of the JHA. Reflecting on issues of sustainability and antiracism, we conclude by proposing some possible directions for the future of JCAP.

Until recently, the history and heritage of Junaluska were poorly known and underappreciated outside of the community. Indeed, “the community” itself is somewhat amorphous. People tend to use “neighborhood” and “community” interchangeably in reference to Junaluska, and neither is defined in the traditional sense; there are no clear lines on a map to define the area, although there is a specific landscape connection, which will be described below. Junaluska is generally understood to encompass the historically Black community in Boone, begun by people who had been enslaved and their descendants. Today that community includes those descendant communities and others who have moved to the area and is largely centered on the Boone Mennonite Brethren Church. Members of the JHA include Black residents of the community as well as white and Black residents elsewhere in Boone and employees at Appalachian State University.

Initiatives carried out by the JHA in the last ten years have worked to more broadly share the stories of Junaluska and emphasize the contributions of this historically Black community to the history of Boone, a town located in Watauga County, North Carolina, near the western edge of the state in the Appalachian Mountains. The town was incorporated in 1872, and the county courthouse, which held all of the land records and many other formal local records, burned down in 1873. Destruction of these formal records meant that much of the early history of the Black community was lost. The area had been settled by white people for more than a century at that point, and several of those settlers enslaved people. Their Black descendants and other African Americans who moved to the area in the subsequent decades maintained the community’s history, mostly through oral tradition, while much of it was missing from the more formal, white-created sources that survive from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, Black oral sources shed light on the segregation of the town’s historic cemetery. Nineteenth-century planter Jordan Councill or his close heirs deeded the land for Boone Cemetery; the area that was incorporated as Boone in 1872 had been known as Councill’s Store by local non-Indigenous people until the new name was chosen by town leaders. Oral tradition holds that people Councill had enslaved were buried on one half of the land, while white Councills and other white locals were buried on the other half.

By the later decades of the twentieth century, white scholars and their students began researching more about the Black community in Boone and recording oral histories that were stored at the Appalachian State University library. Members of the Junaluska community, including Sandra Hagler and Virgil Greer, began pulling together their research into their own community as well. With many formal records having been destroyed in the courthouse fire of 1873, Hagler turned to funeral home records from various companies to begin compiling a list of those who had been interred in the historic Boone Cemetery and adding those names to those who had been remembered by their descendants. There are very few permanent markers on that side of the cemetery, though there had been fieldstones to mark some interments. Those were moved, either from malice or ignorance. Meanwhile, university property holdings encroached on the town cemetery, and students and other residents either did not know the grassy hill was a burial ground, or, if they did know, used this knowledge to generate urban legends and fuel pranks. People would party and walk their dogs in the area.

By the early 2010s, members of the JHA, again including Hagler, had come together with several specific goals. One was to see to the maintenance of the historically Black portion of the cemetery and to discourage disrespect to those resting there. They enlisted the assistance of several others, including members of the Appalachian State Departments of Anthropology and Geological and Environmental Sciences, to do a preliminary ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the area. A local historian also assisted by compiling the complex deed and legal research to determine who had responsibility for maintenance of the area; people living in Junaluska believed it was up to the town, and the town believed it was up to the community. Research showed it was the town’s purview, and to credit the leadership of the time, they took on the task and have been as supportive as they deem their budgets to allow since then. JHA spearheaded a fundraising effort to place a marker in the historically Black section of the cemetery. Members of the Black Student Association at Appalachian State raised the first funds, and many members of the wider Boone community contributed. Hagler and other JHA members worked out the text, and the monument was dedicated in 2017. Even as the JHA raised funds for the marker in the Boone Cemetery, they grew concerned that a similar forgetting would happen at Clarissa Hill Cemetery, which has been the primary burial ground for the Junaluska community since the 1950s. People were eager to locate and place as many permanent markers for individuals as is possible there while they still control the land.

Throughout this time, Hagler, Keefe, and other members of the JHA worked with the extant oral histories, recorded and transcribed more, did supplementary research, and held community reading and editorial sessions. This work led to the publication of Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community in the summer of 2020. People in the community are immensely proud of this work, even as it highlighted some of the things that still are not certain about the earliest history of the area.

At the same time, other historians at Appalachian State were working with the JHA to do more formal research on the twentieth-century history of the Junaluska community, investigating neighborhood buildings and crafting exhibitions about the lives of African Americans in Boone, usually with the assistance of students. The town’s cultural resources department mounted temporary exhibitions in a local historic house set aside for that purpose, as well as at the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum in Watauga County. As the town formed its Historic Preservation Commission, it, too, became involved in this work, along with the Watauga County Historical Society. People from all of these groups combed newspapers, historic photographs, city directories, and other documents in institutions across North Carolina.

The majority of this work centered on the twentieth-century experience of life in Boone. The oral histories were used to inform at least some of the exhibitions and recent presentations sharing Junaluska community history. All of this comes back to Sandra Hagler, who became the community historian, particularly after Virgil Greer’s death. Hagler and others found that most Junaluska community members are descendants of four women: Polly Grimes, Jane Hagler, Lucinda Bly Whittington, and Lyda Mott. Polly Grimes was born a free person of color in Boone of Cherokee and white heritage; Lucinda B. Whittington was enslaved at birth and was also Cherokee.⁹ For the first part of the twentieth century, members of the Black community continued to live and work on “the Hill” and “the Mountain” above the main street in town, mostly farming. The vibrant community in the middle of the twentieth century included a school, churches, a baseball team, at least one social club, and many small business owners, including people who ran small boarding houses. Although the town of Boone was strictly segregated and the university did not integrate until 1964, many in the community recollect relative peace and blurring of these lines. For example, at least one bank, the funeral home, and several doctors catered to Black and white residents alike.¹⁰ Yet, in 1932, brothers Ralph and Norwood Horton were killed in what the Equal Justice Initiative terms a racial terror lynching, and, while Junaluska locals simply refer to it as “the Horton Incident,” it prompted many of those related to the Hortons to leave the area in the following few years. The late twentieth-century history of members of the community has been well recorded in both formal oral histories and in religious, county, state, and educational records.

In contrast to the rich history of twentieth-century Junaluska, the origins and early history of the community remain poorly known. Oral histories clearly discuss the presence of African Americans before 1900, both as people enslaved by the Councills and other slaveholders, and as freedpeople after the Civil War in an area of “the Mountain,” particularly centering around “the Troy place,” where Troy Councill and his family settled. There were also seventy-eight free Black people living in the county by 1860, and many of this number lived in and around Boone.¹¹ Both before and after emancipation, African Americans from surrounding counties moved into the area. The first written account that mentioned the Black community in Boone was published in 1915 by a white man, John Preston Arthur, who noted that two Black brothers moved to Boone in 1857 and bought property near what we now call the Junaluska community.¹² Arthur was born in 1851 in Columbia, South Carolina; he made his way to Boone in 1912 and was contracted by locals to write the town’s history.¹³ It is possible but not particularly likely that Arthur interviewed some of the Black members of the community, and few specifics about locations for their homes are included. Early Black residents settled (or were forcibly settled) on and around land that was owned by Jordan Councill Jr.

The earliest oral histories from the local Black community that have been recorded are from people who were born at the end of the nineteenth century, and they report that, after the Civil War, people who sharecropped for local families on “the Hill” and “the Mountain” above the white Councills’ home and store were able to purchase their land and pass it to their descendants.¹⁴ Land- and homeownership is one of the key reasons that the community has been able to maintain roots in Boone. Today, there are no Black Councills in the area, as many of them were part of the early to mid-twentieth-century migration North, and their family history in the area is somewhat less clear. People knew this was a center of the early Black community in Boone and had an idea about where Troy’s family cabin was but had been unable to locate the exact site where it stood. Given the central role of “the Troy place” in oral histories on nineteenth-century Junaluska, this homestead seemed to offer a direction for historical, and perhaps archaeological, research to answer questions about the early history of the community.

As twenty-first century archaeologists confront the colonial history of our discipline, community archaeology has emerged as a vital strategy for supporting those disenfranchised by traditional models of research.¹⁵ This is particularly the case where community-oriented approaches can be integrated with Black and African Diaspora archaeology, whose practitioners are “eager to align their scholarship with the concomitant goals of decolonizing anthropology and challenging race, class, and gender oppression through archaeology.”¹⁶ Community-centered research has been a cornerstone of the archaeology of Black and African Diasporic experiences in the United States since at least the 1990s, and the ongoing police killings of African Americans and the fluorescence of the Black Lives Matter movement has lent this agenda new urgency as a means to elevate, and celebrate, those histories that have long been ignored or silenced by white supremacy.¹⁷

To achieve these aims, proponents of Black community archaeology must confront at least two challenges.¹⁸ First, these projects must negotiate the needs of multiple stakeholders, who may or may not share aims and interests and who may be subject to significant structural constraints that inhibit project implementation.¹⁹ Particularly in reference to painful, traumatic, and violent histories, there may be disagreements between community stakeholders about how to conduct archaeological fieldwork, interpret findings, and implement meaningful action—or even whether or not such research should be undertaken at all.²⁰ Second, community archaeology projects must be sustainable. At a minimum, this means working to ensure that community members can engage with archaeology “on their own terms” throughout the project—from the crafting of research questions to the interpretation of results and their applications toward community-determined goals.²¹ Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to meeting these challenges, our approach to JCAP has been to consider the range of possibilities and outcomes at the outset to dramatically improve chances for success over time and among diverse stakeholders in the history and heritage of Junaluska.

Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community arrived in summer 2020 to much local fanfare, but also coincided with demands for racial justice dominating the national consciousness in the wake of the George Floyd killing. As scholars whose work strives to illuminate the pasts of people excluded from dominant historical narratives in other contexts, we suspected that archaeology could extend the revelatory, politically salient work of the Junaluska oral history project further back in time. To that end, in August 2020, two of us introduced ourselves to the JHA, provided a brief overview of the archaeological methods that might shed further light on Junaluska’s history, and communicated that we were at their disposal if archaeology was something they would like to pursue.²²

From these early conversations, anticipating the challenges of community archaeology discussed above and in keeping with the model of community-based participatory research that defined the oral history project, we sought to “not drive research, but rather, if invited, act as technicians” for the community to explore topics and answer questions of interest to them.²³ Happily, the JHA had two clear ideas about how archaeological methods might be of use to their efforts at heritage documentation and preservation. First, they were interested in learning more about the earliest Black inhabitants of Junaluksa—those people enslaved by several of the white founding families of Boone. Second, having previously collaborated with archaeologists to document unmarked graves in the Boone Cemetery, the JHA wished to have a similar geophysical survey conducted at the historically Black section of Clarissa Hill Cemetery. Over the next several months, we met regularly (over Zoom, on account of the COVID-19 pandemic) with JHA to design a project that could meet these goals, culminating in ten days of archaeological fieldwork in April–May 2021 in conjunction with an undergraduate course in archaeological field methods.

In 1956, the Town of Boone deeded the Clarissa Hill Cemetery to the Junaluska Community and it continues to be in use today. Currently, there are over one hundred marked graves ranging from 1955 (according to date of death) to the present. JHA members suspect there are additional, unmarked graves in the cemetery, including some associated with the Watauga County Home, a poorhouse that utilized the property in the early twentieth century, and others whose original markers have been displaced. The JHA desired to locate unmarked graves to aid with the placement of future graves and landscaping, and ultimately to commemorate those buried in the cemetery with new markers.

GPR offers a demonstrated means of noninvasively locating unmarked graves at historic cemeteries.²⁴ The JHA was aware of its potential given its earlier success at the Town of Boone Cemetery, and through the JCAP collaboration, they were able to leverage the archaeologists’ professional networks to accomplish their goals at Clarissa Hill. One of us reached out to the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology (NCOSA) for assistance. Together, we developed a plan that would accomplish not only the goals of the JHA, but also those of other stakeholders (discussed below). Ultimately, a team of five NCOSA archaeologists traveled to Boone in May 2021 for three days to survey Clarissa Hill.

Using a GSSI Survey Scan Pro system, the NCOSA team surveyed approximately half of the Clarissa Hill Cemetery, including areas with and without markers (figure 3). The inclusion of marked graves in the survey area helped us build a set of expectations for what anomalies representative of unmarked graves would look like specific to local geological conditions and burial practices (e.g., depth of graves). Although data processing is ongoing and will be reported elsewhere, preliminary assessments have clearly isolated the type of signature that correlates with graves and have revealed at least a few such signatures that do not plainly correspond with grave markers on the ground surface. In addition to collecting geophysical data, the Historic Cemetery Specialist recorded information about and took pictures of grave markers in the survey area, providing JCAP with a template for future documentation of the remainder of the cemetery. The NCOSA team graciously involved the Appalachian State students in all stages of the process, from laying out survey grids, to pushing the GPR cart, to documenting headstones. They also enthusiastically engaged with visitors from the JHA and the wider Junaluska community, who shared their knowledge about funeral practices and possible grave locations, as well as their stories about the friends and family members, close and distant, laid to rest at Clarissa Hill. For example, Junaluska resident Gene Ray (figure 3), who assists with placing new interments, walked the cemetery with one of the archaeologists, offering recollections at nearly every tombstone about the individual buried there and their relatives, living and deceased. This casual conversation underscored the potential of future interviews of community members as an essential complement to the geophysical survey. Although time and weather constraints precluded full-coverage survey of the cemetery, we are confident that the expansion of the survey area in the near future, combined with community member interviews, will yield results that will help the JHA meet their immediate preservation goals.

As discussed above, the Troy Councill homestead (“the Troy place”) offered a well-known starting point for historical and archaeological research on the origins and early history of Junaluska. Over several months in late 2020, public history graduate students from Appalachian State compiled research on this homestead, including specific clues to its location. They also developed a community survey of local residents asking if they had found historic artifacts while gardening or doing small construction projects on their land as well as if they had any other questions that archaeology might help them answer about their ancestors who had lived in the community.

Based on this historical research, it became clear that “the Troy place” likely occupied part of the steep northern slope of the Junaluska neighborhood known as “the Mountain.”²⁵ Development of this area over the past few decades has created a patchwork of landowners, including long-time Junaluskan families and newer arrivals, often from outside the Boone community. These latter include homeowners in and around Weekapaug Grove, a subdivision initiated in 2010 to promote a sustainable, community-oriented lifestyle. We began our quest to locate the Troy Councill homestead by reaching out to members of the Weekapaug Grove Property Owners Association (WGPOA), including Eric Plaag, Chair of the Town of Boone Historic Preservation Commission, who offered several specific suggestions for where we might focus our field investigations. Ultimately, we received permission from four landowners to explore six lots with potential for the preservation of archaeological remains from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Diverse natural and cultural processes have shaped the geography of “the Mountain” over the past two centuries (figure 4). Beyond a shared southward aspect, the house lots in our sample had a range of slopes (0–20 degrees), distances to surface water flowing into Kraut Creek (0–120 meters), and histories of sediment erosion and deposition, including landslides.²⁶ Meanwhile, surface finds of plastic waste and machine-graded rocks and gravel attest to different uses of these lots over the past two or three decades: informal trash dumping, clandestine drinking and camping, and land grading for house construction. However, these recent activities, along with the density of historic and new homes, underscore the long-term suitability of “the Mountain” for settlement—a situation that changes immediately to the north where the slope becomes much steeper (20–50 degrees).

How did this geography shape, or perhaps obscure, a nineteenth-century occupation by Troy Councill and his family? To answer this question, we began with a program of shovel-testing to map soil stratigraphy and archaeological remains across our sample of six house lots. Over the course of five days, our team of Appalachian State students dug seventy-five shovel test pits (STPs), measuring 20–30 centimeters in diameter and 10–35 centimeters in depth (figure 4). In general, these STPs exposed a thin A horizon of dark topsoil, a modest B horizon of silty clay, and a dense C horizon of heavily eroded amphibolite cobbles (bedrock). Artifacts from the A and B horizons commonly included modern plastic debris, but also historic (pre-1950) artifacts, such as bottle and window glass, iron nails, and lumps of coal. The distributions of these finds revealed a sparse archaeological footprint across Lots 2–4 and Lot 6, owing either to a lack of historic occupation or to more recent processes of earth moving and erosion.

As illustrated in figure 4, two other lots did yield evidence of historic occupation. Our sixteen STPs across Lot 1, for example, turned up modest quantities of window glass, nails, and coal (figure 4), potentially associated with an outbuilding or other homestead activity. To test this idea, we opened eight excavation units (1 by 1 meter) in two different areas (see figure 4). Our excavations in Area A found very shallow (less than 10 cm) A–B soil horizons with high densities of machine-made bottle glass, round wire nails, and barbed wire dating to the mid- to late twentieth century, but no evidence for an earlier occupation. Excavations in Zone B uncovered the base of a coal pile—a thick deposit (5–10 cm) of dark soil with gravel-sized chunks of coal—consistent with Junaluskan accounts of using coal to heat their homes during the first half of the twentieth century (see figure 6).

Lot 5 became a strong candidate for the site of Troy Councill’s house, which local traditions place above a sharp bend in Junaluska Road.²⁷ First, the local topography, derived from high-resolution LiDAR imagery (figure 5), reveals a graded, rectangular zone measuring approximately 24 meters by 10 meters. Second, our STPs yielded greater amounts of cultural material in this zone than elsewhere across Lots 5–6, consistent with deposition beneath and immediately around a house.²⁸ In addition to coal, artifacts included undecorated whiteware and plain ironstone sherds, wire nails, and machine-made glass bottle fragments consistent with occupation in the early-twentieth century. Although we found no materials unambiguously dating to the nineteenth century, we plan to explore this hypothesized location for “the Troy Place” in future field seasons, if only as a means to further highlight oral histories of post-Emancipation settlement by Black families, specifically that of Troy Councill, on “the Mountain.”

Despite our short time in the field, JCAP made important inroads toward meeting JHA’s immediate goals of an archaeological project. We located some unmarked graves in Clarissa Hill Cemetery. We located evidence that, combined with oral histories, plausibly relates to one of Boone’s first Black residents, and we field-tested multiple archaeology methodologies that we will be able to more efficiently deploy in the future to elucidate our preliminary findings.

We were also able to meet the near-term goals of other stakeholders involved with the project. For example, one of our goals was to secure a location for an archaeological field course in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, minimizing group travel and time indoors for the sake of everyone’s safety. Our work on “the Mountain” and at Clarissa Hill fit this bill exactly. The project also served our pedagogical goals of exposing students to the potential of geophysical survey methods and the importance of a community-based participatory approach to archaeology. Meanwhile, NCOSA was seeking an opportunity to build stronger connections between staff in their central branch in Raleigh, western branch in Asheville, and archaeologists in northwestern North Carolina, where NCOSA presence has historically been limited; they found such an opportunity with JCAP.

Zooming out, JCAP served the JHA’s broader goal of calling attention to the rich heritage of the Junaluska community. The very public practice of our community archaeology project called attention to the history of Junaluska going back to the mid-nineteenth century and highlighted the relations of power implicit in the “silences” in the historical archive given disparities in land ownership, oral histories, and enslavement. Beyond documenting and interpreting heritage resources, the process of excavating and screening for artifacts in people’s backyards generated excitement about the fieldwork and its discoveries among both community stakeholders and public audiences.²⁹ For example, several members of the JHA, families in Weekapaug Grove, and Appalachian State faculty came to observe our excavations on “the Mountain” and our GPR survey of Clarissa Hill Cemetery. We also reached the public through a press release on this work to local newspapers, as a means of calling the greater town of Boone’s attention to Junaluska’s archaeological heritage.³⁰ Here, the application of terms such as “site” and “artifact” to the material culture of past Junaluskans helps to frame their tangible heritage as something to be valued and preserved, rather than dismissed as rubbish to be removed and erased.

Building on our first season of fieldwork, we are continuing on-campus work to pursue the goals of the JHA and our students through the analysis of excavated materials and the development of new outreach activities. This latter includes our participation in Appalachian State University’s Founders Day celebration, an event in September 2021 commemorating the establishment of the school as Appalachian Teacher’s College in 1899. To prepare for the event, we invited members of the JHA to tour the Landscape Archaeology Lab and reflect on some of the artifacts we recovered from excavations on “the Mountain,” with the goal of identifying those objects that could help tell the stories most important to Junaluskans themselves. Based on these conversations, we selected several artifacts and fieldwork photos for display at a temporary exhibit designed to amplify the voices of the community through associated quotes from oral histories (figure 6) and to emphasize the important contributions of Junaluska to the intertwined histories of Boone and the university.³¹ We found that the reception to this display was quite positive: visitor interest in archaeological fieldwork and the discovery of artifacts became a point of entry into learning more about the Junaluska community.

The sustainability of JCAP depends on continuing to follow community priorities for the design and implementation of research, while also mobilizing ties between Junaluska and Appalachian State University. Building on an historical town-gown dynamic, recent university commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion can, we hope, translate into support for JCAP through faculty and student participation and college funding. Already, we have designed and are teaching a new undergraduate course in community archaeology to continue our work with Junaluksa and expand its reach among multiple stakeholders. In the near term, this will involve the completion of GPR survey at Clarissa Hill, complemented by more intensive consultation with community members to record their stories about the cemetery and those buried there. We also plan to expand fieldwork to additional locations across “the Hill” and “the Mountain” areas of the Junaluska neighborhood based on community input from a recirculated version of the survey and conversations around the presentation of our initial findings (including this paper) to members and neighbors of the Junaluska community.

Looking ahead to the future of community archaeology in Junaluska, we hope to better align JCAP with the antiracist agenda of “archaeology in the times of Black Lives Matter.”³² This will involve actions such as removing structural barriers to inclusion in fieldwork, supporting Black and Indigenous students and collaborators, and developing and adjusting our curricula and research to confront histories of racism. We must also join this agenda not simply as allies, but as accomplices. According to archaeologist Ayana Omilade Flewellen and colleagues, this means “placing oneself in a position that indisputably communicates a stance on advocating alongside BIPOC groups, fully complicit in the struggle toward equality…The value of accomplices is rooted in their capacity to accept someone else’s mission as their own and to voluntarily and intentionally take on the risk of doing so.”³³ As white faculty at Appalachian State and residents of Watauga County, we are acutely aware of our own positionality and systemic privileges, and will continue to follow the lead of the JHA and marshal archaeology towards accomplicity as needs arise. Based on our observations in and around Junaluska, as well as the experiences of similar Black community archaeology projects across the country, these needs could include, among other things, mediation between the JHA and the interests of private developers encroaching on and steadily erasing the tangible heritage of Junaluska.³⁴ While we cannot predict the direction of these confrontations, we are encouraged by the foundation for accomplicity laid by JCAP through our ongoing, collaborative efforts to address concerns about the vibrant history and heritage of Junaluska.

We would like to thank the Junaluska Heritage Association, particularly Roberta Jackson, Diane Blanks, and Sue Keefe, for their support and participation in the Junaluska Community Archaeology Project, and for their feedback on this paper. Our fieldwork in April and May 2021 was made possible by twelve anthropology students enrolled in Archaeological Field Methods through Appalachian State University and collaboration with the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology. In particular, we wish to thank John Mintz for facilitating NCOSA participation, and Dylan Clark, David Cranford, Mary Beth Fitts, Casey Kirby, and Melissa Timo for their assistance at Clarissa Hill. Our archaeological work also benefited greatly from the background research and survey undertaken by four public history graduate students. Finally, we thank Eric Plaag, Andrew Saldino, Chuck Perry, and Jane and Vardell Smyth for good-naturedly allowing us to dig holes on their house lots in and around Weekapaug Grove.