North America (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (3,468 Records)
Investigation of the patterns of asymmetric warfare at the Wood Lake Battlefield, the location of the last armed conflict between the Oceti Sakowin and the U.S. Military, revealed evidence of tactics used in asymmetric warfare in 1862 Minnesota. Conflict archaeology provides a new way of understanding the complexity of the cultural conflict as it played out in battle. Dakota traditional warfare, which relied on knowledge of the landscape and avoided loss of life, was adapted to fight against the...
An Archaeology of Care in the Bakken Oil Patch (North Dakota, USA) (2017)
The University of North Dakota Man Camp Project has used archaeology to engage seriously the issues of workforce housing and industrial landscapes in the Bakken. Our work proceeds with a focus not on the ebullience (or catastrophe) of the Bakken, but rather on the material culture of housing in a dynamic extractive landscape. We do not advocate, nor do we analyze or make policy recommendations. Our work in the field epitomizes, however, an archaeology of care for the communities in which we...
Archaeology of Chinese Woodchoppers and the Forests of the Lake Tahoe Basin: Exploring the Intersections of Extractive Industries, Transportation, and Labor (2015)
During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Chinese "woodchoppers" lived and worked in the vast forests of the South Lake Tahoe Basin in the eastern Sierra Nevada, near Genoa, Nevada, leaving distinctive archaeological signatures wherever they worked and lived. The laborers in these isolated camps supplied Nevada’s Comstock mines with forest products, as the Comstock had already depleted its own local sources of lumber, approximately 30 miles away. This relatively well-preserved local cultural...
The Archaeology of Citizenship (2013)
This paper examines how a wide variety of communities and individuals have constituted and articulated what it means to be an American using material culture as a medium of social action. I oscillate back and forth from the institutions imparting ideals about American citizenship to the individuals on the receiving end of such ideological instruction. The vantage point historical archaeology affords permits a reading of citizenship that is multiscaler in methodology, nuancing previous studies of...
The Archaeology of Class, Status and Authority Within Mid-19th Century U. S. Army Commissioned Officers: Examples from Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon 1856-1866 (2015)
In 1856 Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins were established to guard the newly established Oregon Coast Reservation. Charged with controlling traffic in and out of the northern part of the reservation these posts served as "post-graduate schools" for several officers who would later become high ranking generals during the American Civil War. During their service these men, often affluent and well educated, held the highest social, economic and military ranks at these frontier military posts. This...
The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America: A Case Study from 18th-century Spanish Texas (2013)
Dress matters. More than purely functional, the color, fabric, and fit of clothing, along with adornments, posture, and manners, convey information on status, gender, bodily health, religious beliefs, and even sexual preferences. Colonial peoples created a language of appearance to express their bodies and identities through unique combinations of locally-made and imported clothing and adornment. In this paper, I discuss the active manipulations and combinations of clothing and adornment in...
The Archaeology of Cowboy Island: The Santa Rosa Historic Archaeology Project (SRHAP) (2016)
This paper presents the findings from the first year of a new historic archaeology research project on Santa Rosa Island, one of the five islands of Channel Islands National Park off the coast of southern California. A new, multi-year project dedicated to recording the extant historic structures and sites related to the 19th- and 20th-century ranching complex was started in 2014, instigated by the recent opening of the Santa Rosa Island Research Station. Since May 2014, four CSU Channel Islands...
The archaeology of cultural interactions in French Guiana (2013)
The Guyanese cultural map changed just before the arrival of the Europeans in the territory. The first European explorers to reach Guiana therefore met recently restructured Native Amerindian groups. When the French settled and brought with them African slaves to work on their plantations, they increased the ethnic diversity of the Cayenne region. In this perspective, Cayenne Island was an area where cultural interactions and blends between the various groups in place were intense and frequent....
The Archaeology of Enslaved Labor: Identifying Work and Domestic Spaces in the South Yard (2016)
While the domestic lives of enslaved families and communities are a critical element of understanding enslaved life, the majority of each day was spent carrying out work for their masters. Recent excavations at Montpelier have begun to examine structures related to the work of James Madison's domestic slaves. These excavations include work on the extant kitchen and two smokehouses, buildings clearly designed for the support of the Montpelier Mansion. However, the proximity of these structures to...
Archaeology of Environmental Inequality (2016)
The relationships between biopolitics and processes of capitalism and industrialization have come under increasing scrutiny by activists in the environmental justice movement. Ethnographic studies in modern industrialized (and industrializing) societies demonstrate marked environmental inequality, particularly disadvantageous to racialized groups and working-class communities. These discriminatory practices have resulted in the disempowerment of marginalized populations, loss of land,...
Archaeology of Excursion Steamboats: Recent Work on Late 19th Century Shipwrecks of the Midwest (2018)
Shipwrecks in inland lakes in the United States provide scholars with an opportunity to study the nautical archiotecture and technological design of early excursion steamboats. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inland lakes were important areas for resort communities, and leisure destinations for urban centers. An important aspect of these spots were steamboats designed exclusively for pleasure excusrions. Recent sonar imaging of the shipwreck Hazel A. in Reeds Lake, Michigan has...
The Archaeology of Forts and Battlefields (2013)
Forts and battlefields embody the conflicts between nations. Victory or defeat in past wars has helped determine the shape of modern society. This paper discusses some of the most dynamic and exciting archaeological projects ever conducted at sites of military conflict throughout the United States. Using case studies from all of the major conflicts fought on American soil, this paper discusses how archaeologists use modern scientific techniques to discover the remains of forts, battlefields,...
The Archaeology of Gender in Historic America (2013)
Gendered social relations are fundamental to human experience. The ways in which individuals understand their roles as gendered beings and their relationships to other gendered beings is constantly pushed and pulled by forces both internal and external to the individual and the family/social/economic unit to which they belong at multiple scales from the household to the community to the nation. Identity, sexuality, cultural prescriptions for social roles, socioeconomic class, ethnic heritage,...
The Archaeology of Gendered Resistance at the Industrial Mine in Superior, CO (2017)
The Industrial Mine at Superior, operating from 1895 to 1945, was one of many coal mines situated within a region known as the Colorado Northern Coal fields. It is exceptional only in that it was one of the largest coal producers in the area and because it was the sole mine in the region with both a company town and company store. This paper examines how camp housing structured the lives of women living at the Industrial Mine, as well as how women altered the camp. Through their gendered...
The Archaeology of God’s Wrath – A Major Earthquake on the East Coast in 1663 (2015)
On the evening of February 5th, 1663, an earthquake estimated to between 7.2 and 7.8 on the Richter scale begins. It is felt from the actual state of New York up to Quebec City and from Montreal to Tadoussac. For Christians this first quake represents the eve of Judgement Day. The earth continues to quake for seven months. The quake is interpreted as God’s Wrath following years of alcohol trade and consumption as well as generally poor behaviour in the colony such as a recurring failure to...
An Archaeology of Homeplace at the Parting Ways, an African-American Settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts (2016)
The paper will explore how the African-American residents of a late 18th- and 19th-century community called Parting Ways in Plymouth, Massachusetts constructed a homeplace in the years following their emancipation from slavery. Beyond their importance to household productivity, daily practices—for example, cooking, eating meals, taking tea, and household chores—constituted social interactions and exchanges between individuals that fostered a sense of security and strengthened the bonds of...
An Archaeology of Inventories: An 18th Century Jesuit Winery and Distillery in Nasca, Peru (2018)
Estate inventories offer archaeologists a synchronic assemblage of material culture including the built environment, and an opportunity to understand how aspects of such an assemblage relate to one another and the landscape from the perspective of the assessor. Two such inventories exist for the Hacienda La Ventilla, an annex of the Hacienda San Joseph de La Nasca owned by the Cuzco Jesuits. The first dates to the sale of La Ventilla by a lay proprietor in 1706 and lists the structures,...
The Archaeology of Irish Railroad Laborers in Mid-Nineteenth Century Virginia: Findings from the First Field Season (2013)
In 1850 the landscape 15 miles west of Charlottesville was dramatically altered as thousands of Irish immigrants were brought to the area to construct the Blue Ridge Railroad. The dangerous work consisted of several cuts and tunnels. One of the more difficult projects was the Blue Ridge or Afton tunnel. At its completion it stretched just under a mile and at the time was one of the longest tunnels in American history. During the summer of 2012, the excavations focused on standing dry-laid stone...
An Archaeology Of Jazz: Urban And Racial Identity At The Blue Bird Inn, Detroit (2016)
The postwar period was a transformative time for African American communities in Detroit. Mass migrations of African Americans from the south and shifts in the racial boundaries between neighborhoods led to dramatic changes in the urban makeup of the city. Located at the center of one such neighborhood in Detroit’s Westside was the Blue Bird Inn, one of the most important jazz clubs in the city as well as a social hub for the community. The Blue Bird rose to prominence in the late 1940s with the...
Archaeology of Pierre Metoyer’s 18th-Century French Colonial Plantation Site, Natchitoches, Louisiana (2016)
This paper discusses recent findings and interpretations at the 18th century plantation of Pierre Metoyer, a prominent resident of French colonial Louisiana. Metoyer is historically best known for his relationship with Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a freed slave of African descent living in the Natchitoches area in the 1700s and one of the most important founding ancestors of the regional Creole community. Since 2011 the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center (SEAC) has been assisting...
The Archaeology of Playing Indian: Boy Scout Camps as Colonial Imaginaries (2016)
Over the last 20 years archaeologists have come to pay close attention to the complexities of indigenous agency, cultural continuity and change, and survivance in colonial contexts. In their focus on materiality and everyday life, in their use of multiple lines of evidence, and in their connections to contemporary indigenous communities, archaeologists have the ability to challenge colonial narratives. In contrast, the ways in which these narratives (e.g., notions of savagery, authenticity, and...
Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: An Encyclopedia (1998)
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The Archaeology of Refugee Crises in Greece: Diachronic Cultural Landscapes (2017)
The escalation of the Syrian Civil War caused a refugee crisis in Greece as thousands of people crossed the Aegean, leading to tragic loss of life. When Balkan neighbors closed their borders in 2016, some 50,000 migrants and refugees were trapped in Greece. The country responded by a dispersing this population throughout the country in new camps over abandoned sites like army camps, tourist resorts, commercial spaces, gymnasia, fair grounds, and even archaeological sites. Using lessons from the...
The Archaeology of Religion in America (2013)
This paper provides a brief overview of our forthcoming book on the historical archaeology of religious beliefs and practices in America. The archaeology of religion has included traditional fieldwork, as well as aboveground archaeology. Many archaeologists have focused their attention on religious communities and places of worship: churches, Quaker meeting houses, Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples, Pueblo kivas and Mormon temples. In California, the Southwest, Southeast, and Northeast,...
The Archaeology of Rural Proletarianization in Early Modern Iceland (2016)
Categories such as capitalism, feudalism, peasantry and proletariat obscure more than they elucidate in Early Modern Iceland. The millennium-long occupation of farms in Skagafjörður, Northern Iceland reveals that during the initial settlement of Iceland in the late ninth century, land was freely available, but by the late seventeenth century over 95% of all farming properties were owned by landlords who frequently renegotiated tenant leases. In many ways these insecure tenants resemble...