North America (Geographic Keyword)
426-450 (3,468 Records)
Besides learning from sherds that have been turned up by terrestrial and underwater archaologists, we can learn more about dating Chinese porcelain from pieces found with datable mounts in European collections. Five pieces of blue and white porcelain now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York were originally in Burghley House, Stamford, Lincolnshire, where they may have come via trade with Turkey. They are significant because there were very few pieces of Chinese...
Blue Willow Vessels and Life’s Other Mysteries: Understanding high value ceramics and their role in identity formation within contexts of company town economic deprivation (2018)
Historical archaeologists have long recognized the connection between material culture and identity. Ceramics, in particular, have the opportunity to inform researchers about economic choices, consumer decisions, and societal trends. However, when looking at communities that experience social and economic deprivation, the presence of (oftentimes more expensive) decorated vessels can cause confusion. Excavations conducted in 2016 focusing on the poorest workers’ housing in a coal company town in...
Blurred Boundaries: Internal and Illicit Plantation Economies (2015)
Craft production, hired time, personal cotton plots, theft, and diverse trade networks created a patchwork of economic opportunities for several hundred slaves on Witherspoon Island, a 19th century cotton plantation in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina. This paper explores the impact of household and community involvement in a myriad of economic practices that were at times sanctioned, expressly forbidden, or tacitly accepted by the plantation management. When the archaeological and...
Blurred Lines: Queering the divide between pre-historic and historic archaeology (2015)
The infamous divide between historic and pre-historic archaeology in the North American tradition often rests on the introduction of written texts or the arrival of Europeans to a region. With the division comes methodology that is considered acceptable by each group. Well-renowned archaeologists have discussed this divide in detail, yet we continue to maintain the boundaries due to lack of implementation of new theoretical/methodological paradigms. This paper discusses the queering of...
Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries: Historical Archaeological Investigations at St. Nicholas Abbey Sugar Plantation (2013)
Since 2007 faculty and students from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia have conducted archaeological investigations at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation, one the most important heritage site in Barbados. The interdisciplinary research program developed for the site seeks to uncover evidence that will help in the restoration, preservation, and celebration of this important historic landmark. While deeds, maps, paintings, and other documentary sources offer insights into...
Boats and Captians of Cahuita: Recording Watercraft and Small Boats of Costa Rica (2016)
The boats of Cahuita, Costa Rica vary in design, size and decoration. This poster displays the design variation and depicts the East Carolina University summer field school methods used to record these small watercraft. The differences in design are catalogued through photography and also with recorded measurements. The information gathered should be sufficient to reconstruct the vessel at full scale. In some cases, the data was further utilized to create more practical three dimensional...
Boca, California- House On The Hill Project: Results of 2016 Field Survey (2018)
During 2016, fieldwork was carried out in the California Sierra Nevada Mountains at Boca, a late 19th century company town that provided lumber for the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Comstock mine. Boca was also one of the largest producers of naturally harvested ice, selling to individuals and companies, including the railroad. Use of iced railcars provided the means for the transcontinental railroad to successfully ship perishable goods long distances, giving later rise...
Bodies Lying in State: Nationalism, the Past, and Identity (2013)
In the twenty-first century, nationalism continues to be a powerful motivating ideology in global, national, and local politics. In the hope of overtly and covertly strengthening cohesive nationalist sentiment and identity, individual states often use the very bodies of past peoples as symbols and ideological tools. This is evidenced in the differing display (or lack thereof) of human remains in the national museums of Denmark, Egypt, and the United States. In each case, the identification of...
The Body at the Washtub: A Bioarchaeological Reconstruction of Identity from a Purported 1849ers Oregon Trails Burial at Camp Guernsey, WY (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In late spring 2018, a team of anthropology students and faculty from the University of Wyoming, with support from the Wyoming Military at Camp Guernsey Training Base, recovered a historical burial from an eroding cutbank near Emigrant’s Washtub Spring. Members of the Oregon-California Trails Association marked the location based on interpretations of...
Body Histories, Historical Bodies: Adornment, Culture and Identity through Time (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The body is so many things simultaneously. It is an historical object, a site of experience and violence, a set of behaviors, and is both material and metaphysical. We cannot conceive of history without bodies. Bodily adornments add further nuances that are personal, symbolic, political, situational, and...
Body Mass Estimates of Dogs in North America by Geography, Time, and Human Cultural Associations (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs of North America share a long history of interaction with humans, yet little is known about how humans managed their dogs prior to modern breeding practices that became popular during the sixteenth century. European colonists recognized a few indigenous dog “breeds” and described these dogs as primarily “wolf-like” in appearance and phenotypically...
Bold Rascals: The Archaeology of Blockade Running in the Western Gulf (2016)
Archaeological study and historical research have combined to present a detailed picture of blockade running in the western Gulf of Mexico during the American Civil War. From the beginning of the conflict until weeks after Appomattox, the Confederate coastline west of the Mississippi was a hive of blockade-running activity, first with sailing vessels and later with steamships. The wrecks of the paddle steamers Will o’ the Wisp, Acadia, and Denbigh, all dating from the final months of the war,...
Bones and Barbeques: A Zooarchaeological Study of Alsatian Foodways at Castroville, Texas (2017)
Emigrating from Alsace, a contested border region, to the contested frontier of Texas, many Alsatians had to adjust to life in the American West. This included maintaining their identities as Alsatians in the face of a changing landscape, which manifested through different ways in quotidian life, including choices in food. Through Number of Identified Specimen counts, researchers use faunal assemblages associated with habitation sites to identify patterns of the frequency with which various...
Bones of the Frontier: Subsistence Practices at Hanna's Town (2016)
With the cooperation of the Westmoreland County Historical Society and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, faunal remains from three areas of the Historic Hanna’s Town site in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania were subjected to detailed zooarchaeological analysis in an effort to answer broad questions regarding the subsistence practices of eighteenth century frontier communities of Western Pennsylvania. As the first court and county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains, Hanna’s Town played a...
Bones Wearing Bow Ties: Differential Preservation in Funerary Taphonomy (2017)
The skeletal remains excavated from Scott Cemetery were well preserved while, in contrast, coffin and textile remains were generally poorly preserved. A soil pH test was conducted, with the sandy soil being an alkaline 7.8. The well preserved bone, adipocere formation, and poor textile preservation reflect established literature on the effects of alkaline soils. Burials with a high degree of roots, likely from remains of a tree that had grown through the grave shafts, were less preserved than...
Bonfire Shelter: A Zooarchaeological Reevaluation of Bone Bed 2 (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a rockshelter in Eagle Nest Canyon, a short tributary of the Rio Grande in West Texas, that contains three distinct bone beds of varying ages. The middle bone bed, Bone Bed 2, is a Paleoindian-aged deposit dating to ~12,000 years BP. Bone Bed 2 was originally interpreted as the remains of one or more bison mass kills;...
The Boom and Bust of Tungsten Mining: A View from the Johnson Lake Mine (2015)
The Johnson Lake Mine was an early twentieth century tungsten mine. It is located above 10,000 feet on the eastern slope of the South Snake Range in east-central Nevada in what is now Great Basin National Park. The mine was in operation from 1908 – 1950. It was owned and operated by Alfred "Timberline" Johnson, Thomas Dearden, Sr. and Joseph Dearden. This presentation will discuss the recorded historic features and artifacts with a brief synopsis of the capitalism of tungsten mining as it...
BOOM BABY!": engaging the public through social media in response to "American Digger (2013)
In this paper we present our public outreach efforts in response to the American "reality" television series "American Digger," which portrays looting of archaeological resources as a desirable and profitable enterprise at the expense of archaeological context and communal knowledge of our past. Our efforts included blog posts, the creation and dissemination of a Change.org petition, and the facilitation of involvement and open dialogue through the creation and ongoing administration of a...
BOOM BABY!: Archaeology and the ethics of edutainment (2013)
Archaeologists in the United States have been horrified by the debut of new reality shows featuring treasure hunters looting sites for fun and profit. Most troubling was that one of these shows, "Diggers", was the brainchild of the National Geographic Society, long time supporters of archaeology. Meetings with National Geographic have shown them willing to compromise to make the shows more ethical if they could still be profitable. However, the real question is, how willing are...
Boston Latin School: A Look At Ethnic And Engendered Spaces (2018)
Boston Latin School: A Look at Ethnic and Engendered Spaces Kathleen von Jena, Boston Landmarks Commission During the summer of 2015 the Boston City Archaeology Program conducted excavations on the site of the original Boston Latin School and neighboring Schoolmasters house dating to 1635-1748. Boston Latin was the first purpose-built free school in America where Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams and John Hancock attended. Public Archaeology conducted at this site provided an...
Both local and lointain: Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoecology at the îlot des Palais site, Quebec City. (2018)
A decade of environmental and palaeoecological research at the îlot des Palais or Intendant’s Palace site in Quebec City has yielded rich and detailed datasets that document the site’s transformation from a marshy riverside setting to an important hive of activity for Intendants, artisans and occupants. The methods presented in this paper include archaeoentomology, zooarchaeology, dendrochronology and macrobotanical analyses. They demonstrate that products imported from the metropole and within...
Bottles at the Biry House: Consumption and Economic Choice in a Texas-Alsatian Household (2018)
In 2014, students from Binghamton University excavated several historic features in the rear yard of a Texas-Alsatian homestead in Castroville, Texas. This poster presents the analysis of the glass bottles found in Feature 7, a well built in the 19th century and filled in during the mid-20th century. During this time, the well became a dumping ground for a range of historical materials discarded by later occupants of the house and other local residents, like the American Legion next door. The...
Boundaries In Greensboro's 19th-Century Landscape: Households, Estate Lots, And Urbanization (2015)
During the early decades of the 1840s several of Guilford County's wealthier citizens constructed artfully designed estates within a short walk or ride of burgeoning downtown Greensboro. The finest example of an urban estate with picturesque landscape is the Italianate Blandwood Mansion, designed by A. J. Davis for Governor J. M. Morehead. Blandwood, The Elms and other large estates circling the one square mile core of Greensboro held numerous outbuildings, including housing for enslaved...
Bounding Uncertainty and Ignorance: Archaeology and Human Paleoecology in Washakie Wilderness, Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming (2018)
In the early 21th Century, the Washakie Wilderness, which encompasses roughly 2850 km2 of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, was a virtual blank spot on the map of prehistoric archaeology with only three sites reported and no systematic inventories having been completed. By 2017 cooperative investigation between the Shoshone National Forest and Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) has completed 16 field seasons in the Washakie and documented 388 previously unknown prehistoric...
"The Brandywine Creek has two branches which are very good for crossing" : The search for Trimble’s Ford (2016)
On the morning of 11 September 1777, Hessian Captain Johan Ewald was leading an advance force ahead of the Crown Forces column that outflanked the American position along Brandywine Creek. The precise location of Trimble’s Ford, where the Crown Forces ultimately crossed the west branch of the Brandywine, and the road system that was traveled by the Crown Forces to reach the ford was the subject of a multi-faceted study. Geophysical investigation utilizing ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and...