Adam David Fracchia

The Stockade Research Project is a community archaeology research project aimed at examining the pattern of prisoners’ daily lives and the ways the material, built, and social environment shaped prisoners’ sense of self and how prisoners attempted to negotiate their position. This research is focused on the Grundy Lakes Valley, located in southern middle Tennessee, and specifically explores the Lone Rock Stockade, a late-19th century convict labor prison in the valley. The project’s research goals are to understand how the prison owners reduced and maintained people as exploitable to maximize industrial output. Additionally, the project asks how workers used material to counter these efforts and how has this identity and memory been marginalized and expressed in the community over time. This will work will be accomplished through an analysis of the material recovered from recent archaeological excavations at the site and conducting historical research as well as collecting oral histories in the community.