Nate Harrison as Person, Myth, and Legend: Archaeological History and the Apotheosis of a Nineteenth-Century African American in San Diego County

Abstract

Historical accounts of famed San Diego pioneer Nate Harrison (c. 1833-1920), a formerly enslaved African American from the antebellum South, underwent meaningful transformations during the twentieth century. Secondary narratives of the region’s first African-American homesteader grew into some of San Diego County’s most popular and exotic legends. Local authors repeatedly altered specific details of Harrison’s emancipation, longevity, living quarters, and other biographical items, resulting in the creation of new myths long after Harrison’s death. Traditional archaeological seriations can be extended to historical texts to show when and how these narrative changes occurred. Some transformed gradually over time, while others changed in a punctuated manner that corresponded with groundbreaking, socio-political changes across the nation. In identifying dynamism in the historical records, this analysis situates recent discoveries from the ongoing Nate Harrison Historical Archaeology Project excavations within an archaeology of legend, one that evaluates spatial, temporal, and formal realities of the material past in the context of myth-making and the identity politics of the last two centuries.

Keywords:

• myth-making
• Nate Harrison
• archaeological history
• apotheosis