Undergraduates and graduate students from the University of Maryland excavated outside and inside the Maynard-Burgess House for three seasons. We proved conclusively that the house was the work and residence of African Americans. John Maynard, a free African American, built the house. No archaeological material excavated was earlier than his building, which was put there in 1847. In the middle of Annapolis, on one of the oldest streets in the City, right opposite City Hall, we had an archaeological treasure. The archaeology was exclusively the remains of free black people. This is very rare in any city and not only showed the details of African American life, but also life of free people almost twenty years before Emancipation. African Americans aspired to and embraced citizenship through the consumption of goods. In the second half of the 19th century a growing number of Americans shopped for an ever-increasing volume of consumer goods, and African Americans embraced the emergent consumer culture. For people who had themselves been commodities prior to Emancipation, African Americans embraced the rights reflected in material goods. Archaeology reveals that many African Americans assembled model Victorian interiors that reflected common period styles. Victorian parlors often had exotic goods evoking other cultures and times and America's national and industrial might. The Maynards' home had many typical parlor goods including: decorative bric-a-brac, as well as chromolithographs, rugs, and fine parlor furniture. Typical 19th-century backyards consisted mostly of hard-packed soil surfaces with small artifact scatters, and the Maynards’ yard is no exception. There is no evidence for distinct workspaces in the yard, but a variety of tasks such as laundering and maintenance were common. There was a concentration of fish scales and smaller bones around the rear door, which reflects fish cleaning on the rear stoop. A decorative brick sidewalk fanned out from the back door from the 1850’s until 1874 and a privy sat along the rear lot line. Perhaps the only universal feature on urban sites into the 20th century was an outhouse, and one of these was excavated at the Maynard-Burgess House. The Maynard-Burgess privy was simply two barrels whose ends had been removed and then stacked and placed into a hole in the ground. The household emptied the privy of its contents periodically, but sometime shortly after 1905 the privy was cleaned out a final time and filled with household refuse. Example of a 19th century backyard including privy and laundry line. Image provided by the Maryland State Archives.   Maynard Burgess House Artifacts Naval uniform button. Looking at census records from the second half of the 19th century and the early portion of the 20th century showed that many of the women in the Maynard and Burgess families found employment as laundresses. Many of these women were also recorded as working at the Naval Academy, which is why a large number of buttons from naval uniforms were uncovered in the backyard, where the laundry would have been done. Portion of a small porcelain statue of an animal, most likely a horse. Small figures like these were known as bric-a-brac and were commonly used during the Victorian Period to help decorate ornate sitting rooms.