North America (Geographic Keyword)
3,201-3,225 (3,468 Records)
The brig Somers gained fame in the United States as the setting of a notorious mutiny in 1842 that directly inspired the writing of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. The vessel was subsequently lost while on blockade duty off Veracruz during the war between the United States and Mexico in 1846. Rediscovered in 1986, the wreck was an untouched archaeological resource. It also served as the means for a pioneering international collaboration between the two former combatants in the management and...
The U.S. Route 301 Archaeology Program in Delaware: Excavations, Historic Contexts, and Syntheses (2016)
The Delaware Department of Transportation is in the midst of its largest public works project in over 15 years. The U.S. Route 301 project will construct 17 miles of new highway across the central portion of Delaware. The archaeology program for Section 106 compliance for this project has utilized the talents of 10 cultural resource management firms (CRM). To date the CRM firms have identified 66 archaeological sites at the Phase I level, 27 at the Phase II level and 14 were found eligible for...
Ugly Duckling and Work Horse: A Mid-19th Century Lighter from San Francisco Bay’s Yerba Buena Cove and Its Scale Model (2015)
In 2013 WSA recovered a well preserved Gold Rush Era lighter from the original shore of Yerba Buena Cove. This boat, used to "lighten" the load of ships anchored off-shore, is providing new insight into the working craft of early maritime San Francisco. Found in strong association with the 19th-century ship breaking and salvage industry near the cove, the boat’s simple design and homely non-standard construction evoke images of the rugged Western frontier. Using in situ photographs and an...
Uncovering Evidence of Consumer Constraint in Archaeological Assemblages Using r-Matrices (2017)
The rapid increase in the cultural and geospatial distance between the individuals who produce household goods and the individuals who consume them which has occurred over the last few hundred years requires historical archaeologists to develop typologies which acknowledge artifact qualities which are meaningful to consumers as well as producers. In a previous SHA presentation, the author hypothesized that artifact qualities which only meaningful to producers should respond differently to...
Uncovering German Identity on the Colonial Virginia Frontier (2017)
Archaeological excavations began during the summer of 2016 at Fort Germanna, an 18th century piedmont Virginia fort. The fort was built in 1714 at the bequest of Governor Alexander Spotswood to expand the western frontier of Virginia. Fort Germanna was only in existence for 4 years, from 1714-1718, and inhabited by German miners brought to Virginia by Spotswood to set up an iron mine. While building the research agenda for this project we consider how a German ethnicity and identity could be...
Under Fire: An Experimental Examination of Heat on Lithic Microwear Evidence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic microwear analysis provides important insights into stone tool function by identifying various polishes, residues, and striations that ultimately represent microscopic evidence of how these tools were used. However, recent archaeological analyses have recognized an interesting pattern: burned lithic specimens do not appear to preserve microwear traces...
Under the Concretion: Examining New Evidence for H.L. Hunley’s Attack on USS Housatonic (2018)
On February 17, 1864, the Civil War submarine H.L. Hunley detonated its spar-mounted torpedo against the hull of USS Housatonic, sinking the blockading ship several miles off the coast of Charleston, SC. While successful, this attack also resulted in the loss of Hunley. Recent conservation work on the hull of the submarine has revealed more details about the condition of the submarine and provided new clues about the causes and relevance of some of the damage found to the submarine. This paper...
Underground Then as Now: Seeking Traces of the Underground Railroad in the Mount Gilead AME Church Cemetery (2015)
Mount Gilead AME Church in southeastern Pennsylvania formed the heart of a rural African American community throughout much of the 19th century. Oral history associates it with the Underground Railroad, but with little specificity. Since most of the church's congregation has dispersed over the past century, its extant cemetery is the main location where much of the church's history can be reconstructed. This study uses spatial, demographic, and GPR data from the cemetery as well as archival...
Underpinning a Plantation: A Material Culture Approach to Consumerism at Mount Vernon Plantation (2016)
This paper adopts an object-centered, material culture approach that triangulates between three primary sources – George Washington’s orders for goods through the consignment system, inventories from a local, Scottish-owned store, and the archaeological record at Mount Vernon plantation – lending fresh insight into the nature of the mid-eighteenth century consumer revolution and addressing questions about elite and non-elite consumer behavior. By quantifying the robust dataset of Washington’s...
Understanding 19th Century Indigenous River-Portage Travel in Maine and New Brunswick Through Network Analysis (2017)
The indigenous people of northeastern North America utilized the river systems of the continent to form an extensive network of travel and communication. While the riverine system offered the opportunity for local and long-distance connections between communities, the environmental dynamics of the system presented challenges for travelers. The directionality of water flow patterns, coupled with seasonal variations in flow magnitude and water temperature, meant that the difficulty of travel...
Understanding And Interpreting Indigenous Places And Landscapes (2016)
Since the earliest encounters of Native Americans and Europeans, places and landscapes with thousands of years of use and history in the "New World" have been renamed, depleted of resources, appropriated and stolen. Despite almost 500 years of contact, colonialism and repression by European settlers and their descendants, Native tribes continue to define places on the landscape in terms of tribal understandings, meanings and uses. This paper addresses the topic of place and landscape...
Understanding Archaeology in the Dunes: OSL Dating of the Tolleston Beach at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and Its Implications for Interpreting the Archaeological Record (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The puzzling scarcity of archaeological sites on the Tolleston Beach at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore prompted an investigation into the development of this dune field in an attempt to determine whether the distribution of known archaeological sites is governed by ancient human behaviors, or influenced by its dune setting, which can affect site preservation...
Understanding Section 3 of NAGPRA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Collections: Federal Archaeology and "New Discoveries" under NAGPRA" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) became law on November 16, 1990. In the 29 years since NAGPRA was enacted, much attention has been paid to Native American human remains and other cultural items subject to NAGPRA already in museum and Federal agency collections. However, there’s...
Understanding the African-Caribbean Landscape of the Wallblake Estate, Anguilla. (2018)
Historical archaeologists have explored the plantation landscapes of the Caribbean for more than 50 years, and there have been archaeological excavations at historical sites on every major island. However, there are still islands where there have not been any previous excavations at historic sites, including plantations. Anguilla was one such island until June 2017 when archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate to understand the plantation landscape and the major...
Understanding the Battlefield Terrain: Components of the Battlefield Archeological Landscape (2016)
Since its inception, the ABPP has made over 559 planning grants with over $18 million available to preservation professionals for the long term care of battlefield resources. Approximately 40% of those funds have driven both underwater and terrestrial archeological projects since 1996. The vast majority of those battlefield projects have centered on resource identification, inventory, assessment and setting boundaries for aggressive resource protection. A system of identification of the...
Understanding the Culture of Teaching and Learning: The Role Evaluation Played in Developing a Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter Case Study (2018)
Archaeologists have long been interested in developing and providing archaeology-based educational resources to teachers for use in the classroom, but they have spent significantly less attention on evaluating resource effectiveness. Evaluation was a key component in the development of "Investigating a Shotgun House,"one ofthe newest case studies in the Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter curriculum. This paper will discuss a pilot program conducted during the development of...
Understanding the Irish Famine Using Deep Neural Networks and Protolanguage (2017)
Drawing from historical records and archaeological data, we used multilayer neural networks to construct a sociocultural model of the Irish Famine. We found that Capital Exchange optimization for non-elites frequently contained polynomial-time mappings to the Assignment and Knapsack problems (which are both NP-hard). However, we only occasionally encountered nontrivial instances of these mappings when the same algorithms were applied to elites. That pattern of asymmetric computational...
Understanding The Material And Spatial Strategies Of Border Crossers Through Water Bottles And Beverage Containers (2015)
Because of the clandestine and complex nature of undocumented migration in southern Arizona, many aspects of this social process have proven difficult to systematically analyze using ethnography alone. Using a combination of ethnographic and archaeological data collected between 2009 and 2014, this paper uses statistical analysis to further understand the relationships between artifacts associated with clandestine migration and the material and spatial strategies migrants employ to cross...
Understanding the Placement of LA 20,000, a Spanish Colonial Settlement Located in New Mexico (2015)
This project will explore the environmental and social factors that influenced the placement of Spanish New Mexican sites by looking at the location of LA 20,000, a seventeenth-century secular ranch located about 25 miles southwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This project will use GIS to explore the environmental factors essential to the Spanish colonists who settled as farmers, specifically focusing on the natural resources around LA 20,000, including distance to water, soil fertility, and...
Understanding Variation in Utilitarian Ceramic Assemblages of the Chesapeake: The Impacts of Local Production (2013)
Utilitarian ceramics made of earthenware and stoneware were important tools in the early American domestic sphere. Milk pans, storage jugs, baking dishes, and other specialized forms made a variety of domestic industries possible. However, the abundance and characteristics of these wares were not consistent through time or across households. In turning analytical focus to this under-investigated class of artifacts, a better understanding of the relationship between domestic and economic life in...
Underwater 3D Imaging with Structured Light: Implications for Ethics and Economics (2015)
A prototype underwater 3D imaging technology is discussed that is both inexpensive and creates accurate, high resolution 3D data. We focus on the connection between this technology and archaeological ethics and economics. First, we discuss a cutting edge, low cost, highly portable and user-friendly 3D imaging system using structured light, which has generated very high resolution images in both terrestrial and underwater contexts. Next, we compare it to other low-cost 3D techniques. Finally, we...
Underwater Archaeology in Cuba: a Critical Review (2017)
This paper endeavors to take a critical look at underwater archaeology research in Cuban coastal areas, mostly after 1959. Stress is made on the early research and the organizations which participated and the foreign companies which made an effort in underwater archaeological excavation on the Cuban shelf. However, this paper underlines the controversial role played by Carisub, a company in charge of underwater archaeological research until 2004, and its role in granting permits for commercial...
Underwater Archaeology Skills, Training, and Opportunities in U.S. Colleges: The 2017 ACUA University Benchmarking Survey (2018)
The Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology developed a series of three Benchmarking Surveys to understand how students, professors, and employers perceive and prioritize "basic" underwater archaeological skills. The ACUA surveys are intended to guide students, faculty, and employers as new generations of archaeologists enter the profession. The second survey, completed in 2017, was directed to university faculty in the United States, and received fourteen responses from eight universities....
Underwater Cultural Heritage Law: Looking Back, Looking Forward (2016)
The law protecting and managing underwater cultural heritage (UCH) is relatively new and has largely been developed over the past 50 years. This presentation will look back at the threats to UCH from treasure hunting and provide an overview of the laws that have been applied and developed to address that threat as well as from other activities that may inadvertently effect or harm UCH, such as fishing, the laying of submarine cables and energy development. Special attention will be given to...
Underwater Historic Preservation for Sport Divers: Florida’s Training Courses for Divers and Diving Leadership (2015)
Public efforts to support preservation of Florida’s historic shipwrecks began in earnest in the late 1980s with the development of the state’s Underwater Archaeological Preserve system. As part of the process, local sport divers received training to assist with recording and monitoring these historic wrecks. The success of this program led to the development of the Submerged Sites Education & Archaeological Stewardship (SSEAS) program targeted to sport divers, and the Heritage Awareness Diving...