2026 Theses Doctoral

“Everything in ye universe in thair own nature”: An Archaeology of Natural History at Bartram’s Garden

Hansen, Alexandria Mitchem

This dissertation asks what the plants collected and cached by rodent inhabitants of a historic botanic garden can reveal, not only about themselves and the Natural Historians who cataloged them, but also about the laborers, residents, and non-human life that shaped and were shaped by the garden’s evolving landscape. Focusing on Bartram’s Garden, founded in 1728 by Quaker farmer and naturalist John Bartram and later expanded by his descendants, I explore how plants, people, and animals together generated knowledge and transformed domestic and intellectual life across the 18th and 19th centuries.

Drawing on archival, archaeological, and ecological sources, I develop interdisciplinary methods that center not only on human actions but also on non-human contributions to historical recordkeeping. This includes novel archaeobotanical analyses of desiccated plant remains stored by black rats in historic structures which offers insight into how pests, like humans, curated fragments of the past. These rodent assemblages challenge traditional Enlightenment classifications, offering a new lens through which to interpret the botanical legacy of Bartram’s Garden.

By tracing how plants moved through scientific, commercial, and domestic circuits, this study contributes to archaeological, historical, and ecological scholarship. It argues that the production of natural history knowledge in this period cannot be fully understood without accounting for the diverse, entangled relationships between humans and non-humans. Ultimately, the dissertation shows that sites like Bartram’s Garden were not only nodes in global botanical networks but also lived environments where daily human-animal-plant interactions helped shape understandings of the natural world.