North America (Geographic Keyword)
3,276-3,300 (3,468 Records)
In terrestrial archaeology, creating a vertical stratigraphic profile of a site is crucial to fully understanding site formation processes and wider contexts. Vertical profiling in underwater archaeology however, is more challenging and time consuming. As a result, profile data is often not collected unless there is a distinct difference in stratigraphic layers or it is reserved for more crucial aspects of an excavation such as ship timbers. The purpose of this paper is to propose that...
Using Scientific Diving as a Tool to Tell the Story of Human History: Bringing the São José Paquete de Africa Into Memory. (2016)
Scientific diving is a powerful tool that can be used to tell the story of human history and cultural behavior. On December 3, 1794, the São José Paquete de Africa, a Portuguese ship transporting over 500 captured Africans, left Mozambique, on the east coast Africa, for what was to be a 7,000 mile voyage to Maranhao, Brazil, and the sugar plantations. The ship was scheduled to deliver the enslaved Africans in February, 1795, some four months later. However, the journey lasted only 24 days....
Using the City Simulator Tool to Aid in Preservation during Resiliency Planning (2018)
The SAA has held sessions on how climate change is affecting cultural resources for several years now. We began with characterizing the impacts and concerns on how to preserve or mitigate. We have discussed ongoing studies, and strategies to engage the public and local government in conservation and recordation initiatives. This year, Atkins will be presenting a newly developed tool to help planning organizations visualize physical impacts to built environment, traditional cultural properties,...
Using the Products of Yesterday's Stewardship to Tackle Today's Questions in Historical Archaeology: Insights from the River Basin Surveys Collections (2016)
Many current practices in American archaeology arose from the mid-20th century River Basin Surveys (RBS). These surveys were part of the Inter-Agency Salvage Program, an unprecedentedly large effort to investigate archaeological sites threatened by extensive dam-building projects. RBS researchers studied mostly prehistoric sites, but the work was also a turning point for historical archaeology, especially of the Great Plains and the American West in general. The research priorities of the RBS...
Utopia Excavated: Preliminary Results from the Amana Colonies (2013)
The seven Amana villages of east-central Iowa were founded in the mid 19th century by German pietists seeking a removed location in which to practice their unique form of communal Christianity. In 1932 the community voted to separate the governing body of the church from the political and economic facets of community life for the first time, this event is remembered today as the "Great Change." In summer of 2012 a group of outhouses were excavated at the Amanas as part of a project to look at...
Validating British Bullet Strike Trajectory Associated with the British Retreat to Boston, April 19, 1775 through Live Fire Experimentation (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Archaeology of Arms: New Analytical Approaches", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The British Regulars retreat from Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 is legendary in American history. One home, the Jason Russell House, has at least twenty bullet holes are still evident in the walls and around doors and windows. Other bullet-struck objects and structures from that day exist that have been studied and...
Valle de Bonanza (Zacatecas, Mexico): Desert Varnish and Technology in a Surface Lithic Assemblage (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Valle de Bonanza (northeast of the Mexican state of Zacatecas) is a surface-only archaeological site located in a highly eroded desert landscape on the edges of a vast endorheic basin in Concepcion del Oro county. The site consists of a sand-and-dust surface affected by intensive deflation that caused the formation of a palimpsest of crudely made flaked stone...
Values in Maritime Archaeological Heritage: A Socio-Economic Study in Understanding the Public's Perceptions and Willingness to Pay for Preserving Shipwrecks in the Graveyard of Atlantic, North Carolina (2015)
Off the coast of North Carolina’s Outer Banks are the remains of ships spanning hundreds of years of history, architecture, technology, industry, and maritime culture. Potentially more than 2,000 ships have been lost in "The Graveyard of the Atlantic" due to a combination of natural and human factors. These shipwrecks are tangible artifacts to the past and constitute important archaeological resources. They also serve as dramatic links to North Carolina’s historic maritime heritage, helping...
Vanished Cultural Landscapes of the Qualla Boundary (2018)
Landscapes of tribal reservations vary across the regions of the United States, yet change to these landscapes remains a constant. On the constrained reservations of the east any change to the landscape can be of great significance. The Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina is one such reservation. Home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, this 57,000 acre section of trust land has changed significantly over the past century, but with the economic boon brought about by the casino, the...
The Vanishing Treasures Training Program- Closing the Skills Gap (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Vanishing Treasures Program: Celebrating 20 Years of National Park Service Historic Preservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vanishing Treasures (VT) began its training program in 2014 with five trainings and 90 trainees. Today, we have trained over one thousand people and hosted 90 trainings. Our growth has been guided by A Technical Preservation Needs Assessment and Training Strategy completed in...
Variability in the Cultural Assemblage During the Formative Period in the Upper Colorado River Drainage Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Formative period in the upper Colorado Drainage has been variously defined but broadly extends from 2000 B.P. to 400 B.P. Recent investigations indicate there was a high degree of variability in the cultural assemblage during this period. Specifically, habitation structures, maize storage facilities, and maize types show a great deal of variability. In...
Variations on a Theme: Expanding Site Stewardship (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site stewardship programs enlist volunteers to monitor for and report disturbances at archaeological sites. The majority of stewards are older, often retired, with flexible schedules that allow them to visit remote sites on a regular basis. In order to expand participation, and to...
Vecino Archaeology and the Politics of Play (2016)
Francis Swadesh identified an 18th century vecino cultural pattern, which after American occupation, retracted into the isolated hills and tributary valleys of the northern Rio Grande. This paper investigates the impacts of the American invasion on vecino culture through a consideration of children’s artifacts and fantasy play. As children were gradually excluded from the workforce and drawn into the home, they were simultaneously pulled into an expanding commercial market and public...
Vectors of Privilege: The Material Culture of White Flight (2016)
The achievement gap, "failing" schools, re-segregation and blight, while often seen as problems and signs of people of color in the US, are better understood as the results of modern efforts to enforce white privilege. Thus, as historical research on the building and renewal of American cities proceeds, we need to pay attention to how policies and practices supporting racial advantage were put in place and made material on the landscape. The urban and suburban northeast is an especially good...
Vegetation Maps for Eastern North America: 40,000 Years B.P. To the Present (1981)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Veterans Curation Program in the Time of Corona (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation Program (VCP) has been at the forefront of the effort to address the build-up of at-risk archaeological and archival collections in storage facilities around the United States. The VCP has the added mission of working with veterans to provide vital job skills and assist in the transition from military to civilian life. In...
The Veterans Curation Program: Unintended Public Archaeology (2018)
The Veterans Curation Program was created with the mission to rehabilitate U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) archaeological collections while providing temporary employment and vocational training to veterans. In the nine years that the VCP has been in operation, it has evolved into a dynamic public archaeology effort that engages non-archaeologists in the field of archaeology on a daily basis. This paper explores the varied approaches to public archaeology within the Program, as well as the...
Victorian Values: North American Archaeology at the British Museum during the Nineteenth Century (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The founding collection of the British Museum, given by Hans Sloane in 1752, contained several Archaic and Late Prehistoric stone points from North America, some of the first examples from the continent to be included within early museum collections. Over the following 150 years the collection expanded rapidly fulfilling a need for contemporary, analogous...
The View from Here: An Introduction to Nuevomexicano and Chicanx Theory for Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper is an introduction to an organized session on Chicanx Archaeology. It argues for the ethical and intellectual imperative of drawing Chicanx Studies scholarship in to archaeological method and theory. Archaeological frameworks for studying culture contact, ethnogenesis, and identity have tended to bypass theory that falls under the umbrella of Chicanx...
Village Life in the Barracks (2013)
Fort Wellington, in Prescott, Ontario, Canada was a major British post in the 19th century. The large blockhouse-type barracks in it was served by a separate wooden latrine building, built in 1838. Parks Canada archaeologists excavated the interior of the latrine, and discovered that it had been used for dumping refuse for most of its existence. Material culture researchers studied the artifacts, and found that life in the barracks was much different from what it had been thought to be. Working...
Villages on the Edge of the Edge: Reflections on the Changing Economics of Irish Coastal Communities (2016)
Island village communities are both physically detached from, and connected with, mainland urban and foreign economic communities. In the context of 19th to 20th century Irish fishing communities, landlords owned entire islands and ran them as economic enterprises. On the Connemara islands of Inishark, Inishbofin, and Inishturk, tenants often lived in close physical proximity to each other, in villages of a hundred or more people, paying rent to the landlord in exchange for use of stone...
Violence, Silence and Four Truths in American Historical Memory (2018)
Just days before I wrote this abstract, the city of New Orleans finished removing four monuments to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, inspiring other cities to consider the same. This example of people taking control of the narrative inscribed in their own landscape serves as backdrop to this session in which we reflect on the changing nature of place-based historical memory. I consider the changing nature of America and what it means to be a society that appears to be moving away from a...
Virtual Public Archaeology: Using 3D Imaging and Printing to Engage, Educate, and Enthrall the Public (2017)
Three-dimensional (3D) modeling and printing are cutting-edge applications at the frontiers of archaeological data collection and dissemination. Recent advances in 3D modeling, coupled with reduced costs, provides broad access to these technologies, making them increasingly viable tools for archaeologists to share information not only with each other, but also with the public. Two case studies representing this type of public archaeology can be found in the separate efforts currently undertaken...
Virtual Shipwrecks; Photogrammetry and User Interface Design in Archaeological Outreach (2017)
In the past decade, new software has made it easier and less expensive for archaeologists to use the tools of photographers and game designers to produce novel outreach tools with photogrammetry. Among these relatively new applications is the ability to create virtual worlds from photographic and video data. The public can now access a number of archaeological sites through game platforms, like Steam, using VR goggles and mobile devices to experience a site. This paper addresses means of...
Virtual Worlds: Underwater Archaeology and Indigenous Engagement (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Alpena-Amberley Ridge (AAR) is a landform that is now 100 feet underwater in the Great Lakes – but 10,000 years ago, it was a unique dry land environment. Research on the AAR has documented some of the world’s oldest hunting features including drive lanes and hunting blinds for targeting caribou. To better understand this submerged landform an...