North America - Northeast (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (219 Records)
Accumulating evidence point toward hunter-gatherer communities as the first inventors of ceramic containers in many parts of the world, but the incentives behind this technological innovation remain elusive. In this presentation, archaeological information and biomolecular data from organic residues analyses are combined to support a scenario in which pre-agricultural communities in Northeastern North America used early pottery as a fat rendering device, whether the fat came from fish oil or...
Emergency Response PTSD, Climate Change Denial, and Resiliency: The New World Disorder (2017)
Curators and conservators have been wading through water for decades to rescue museum collections after natural and man-made disasters. The urge to "fix" things that have broken seems to be rooted in our DNA. Since 2003, I have had the opportunity not only to be a part of the emergency response community, but to witness the impact of these events on responders and collections. At the same time, there has been the development of an entire museum emergency response profession, a dramatic uptick in...
Empirical Imperialism and the Development of Indigenous Archaeologies (2015)
One way of situating the empirical research that often accompanied European colonialism is to view it as an instrument of imperialism. This legacy stands a major impediment to the kind of collaboration that is an essential part of the growth of indigenous archaeologies. Yet empirical research remains an important part of archaeology. Used in a collaborative framework it can provide powerful evidence that can augment and refine indigenous histories, especially those being disputed by...
Evaluating Archaic Period Settlement and Subsistence Patterns in Relation to Ecosystem Dynamics in New England (2015)
This paper summarizes preliminary data and interpretations of Archaic Period land use patterns in relation to environmental dynamics within Massachusetts. This analysis is a component of a larger NSF-funded research project intended to analyze the drivers of and responses to ecosystem dynamics in the New England region. This project aims to better understand the dialectical relationship among human activity (fire, land clearance, horticulture), vegetational dynamics, and climate. The following...
Extended Relations in the Great Lakes Region (2017)
Archaeological evidence from the Great Lakes region reflects fluctuating periods of long distance contacts over the past millennia. The mechanisms behind and meaning of these networks is considered in light of site-specific and regional distribution patterns of "exotic" goods.
A Fashionable Neighborhood: Archaic Settlement in Eastern Connecticut (2017)
Regional studies of eastern Connecticut suggest seasonal movements between valley lowlands and uplands along the Connecticut River Valley, and year-round occupation of the Northeastern Highlands by mobile groups during the Archaic. The Public Archaeology Laboratory recently excavated a complex of sites in the Susquetonscut Brook drainage, a minor tributary located in a transitional zone between river valley lowlands and highlands. This site complex contains a wide range of occupation types, and...
"First Fruits" Household Foodways at the ca. 1638 Waterman Site House, Marshfield, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts (2017)
In "New England's First Fruits" published in 1643 in London, an anonymous author addressed various questions and misconceptions prospective colonists often had related to life in the colonies. The author assured readers there was an abundance of food that was "farre more faire pleasant and wholsome than here." While early chroniclers provide clues to the hardships of the early years of Plymouth Colony, very little detail about First Period foodways is known from documentary data and...
Food and Identity In the Urban Landscape (2015)
Landscapes and foodways are intrinsically connected. Food practices act as a frame of reference to impose social, historical, and cultural meanings on places and vice-versa; their materiality provides a sense of stability in shifting demographic settings. Culinary activities can help structure the experience of place and through repetition become involved in the creation and transmission of collective memory. However, memory is far from stagnant, it continues to be challenged and reworked in...
Forensic Archaeology Recovery Case Studies, Finding the Unfound (2015)
Forensic archaeology can be a useful tool when searching for "unfound" missing persons. Forensic Archaeology Recovery (FAR, non-profit) has worked on a number of missing persons cases in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Three case studies are presented that highlight FAR’s involvement and assistance in generating new knowledge. The first case study is the search for Maura Murray, a University of Massachusetts student who went missing in 2004. The second case is Melanie Melanson, a fourteen year...
A Forgotten Town on a Forgotten Road: The Archaeology of Pine Barrens Heritage at the Storied Cedar Bridge Tavern (2015)
New Jersey’s Pinelands (aka the Pine Barrens) is the largest preserved natural space in the Boston-Washington megalopolis. Fabled as the home of the Jersey Devil, endless pine forests, lost ghost towns, cranberry bogs, and "Pineys," the region has long drawn the attention of writers, researchers, and folklorists. Many of these authors have emphasized the distinctive way of life present in the region. This paper brings the archaeological lens to bear on the Pinelands. Have the Pinelands long...
The Galick Site: Initial Investigations at a Precontact Site on the Vermont Shore of Lake Champlain (2017)
The Galick site, located at the southern terminus of Lake Champlain, has long been identified as a potentially critical context for examining the precontact occupation and ecology of the southern Lake Champlain basin. Both its position at the confluence of local and interregional transportation networks and its setting within an area of remarkable biological diversity highlight the Galick site's potential importance to foragers and early farmers operating along the southern shores of Lake...
Gender, Masculinity, and Professional-Avocational Heritage Collaborations (2016)
Relationships among professional and avocational archaeologists have changed in the last few decades with the increase in collaborative heritage projects worldwide. Professionals and avocationals often work side-by-side on archaeological sites, collaborate on research, and engage in mutual knowledge sharing. However, little attention has been paid to the gendered dimensions of these relationships. Feminist critiques of research and practices within professional archaeology, along with...
Grounding Futures in Pasts: Eastern Pequot Community Archaeology in Connecticut (2017)
Collaborations between archaeologists and Native communities have expanded significantly in the past 20 years. For most, this is recognized as an important and healthy development on methodological, theoretical, practical, and political grounds, especially when anchored deeply in the communities themselves and designed to address political as well as professional issues. We have worked together in different capacities for more than 13 years on the Eastern Pequot Archaeological Field School, a...
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: An Exploration of Lithic Tools and Sources at the Bull Brook Paleoindian Site, Ipswich, Massachusetts. (2017)
The Bull Brook Site in Ipswich, Massachusetts is one of the largest and seemingly most spatially organized Paleoindian sites in North America. The intra-site activity patterning of flaked stone tools helped us to distinguish the site as a large aggregation of inhabitants, as opposed to small occupations taking place over time. The strong pattern of interior and exterior activity differences, or concentric rings of activity, are difficult to explain except by an organized social event. Who then...
"He must die unless the whole country shall play crosse:" the Role of Gaming in Great Lakes Indigenous Societies (2015)
Lacrosse, Canada’s national sport, originated with the pre-contact racket and ball games of the Iroquoian and Anishinaabeg peoples of northeastern North America. Like many traditional Indigenous games, racket and snow snake events represented much more than sport, involving aspects of physical prowess, warfare, prestige, gambling, dreaming, curing, mourning and shamanism. Gambling, in particular, was an important cultural activity that according to seventeenth century accounts, resulted in...
Herring, Rattlesnakes and More: Recent Research on the Late Archaic in Southwestern New Hampshire (2015)
Sites in Swanzey and Hinsdale, New Hampshire illustrate the dynamism of the Late Archaic period in the Connecticut River drainage of southwestern New Hampshire. Longstanding economic patterns centered around the hunting of timber rattlesnakes at the Wantastiquet Mountain site and the harvesting of anadromous fish at the Swanzey Fish Dam begin during this period, establishing practices that continue throughout the Woodland and even survive the tumult of the early decades of European...
Hidden Histories: Using Archaeology to teach Slavery in the Secondary Classroom (2017)
There are many challenges that educators face when teaching slavery in middle and high school classrooms. Archaeology-centered activities offer unique ways to talk about and incorporate histories often left out of the historical record in a manner that can engage students in important and meaningful conversations on the subject. The authors will share their experiences and strategies in using archaeology as a lens to talk with students and teachers about this important period in American...
High School Students, Archaeology, and Public Outreach (2015)
Since 2009, an archaeological field program for high school students has conducted excavations at the Mary M.B. Wakefield Estate in Milton Massachusetts. Co-Directed by two graduate students in Boston University’s Department of Archaeology, this program has taught professional level excavation methods to dozens of local and non-local students for two two-week sessions each July. These students work alongside graduate volunteers as they learn to excavate small to large units, draw plan views and...
Historic Native American Impacts on a Temperate Forested Ecosystem, Northeastern U.S.A. (2016)
We quantified the nature and extent of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) disturbance on the forests of the Finger Lakes region, west-central New York, U.S.A., through multivariate statistical analysis of witness trees and survey line vegetation descriptions derived from original late 18th century CE land survey records and historical documentation in conjunction with archaeological site distributions analyzed in a geographic information system (GIS). Detrended correspondence analysis (DCA) ordinated the...
Historic Use of Native Avifauna during the Hotel Era (1847-1914) on the Isles of Shoals, Maine (2015)
Interactions between traditional European culinary practices and North American fauna have been the focus of several archaeological studies during the past few decades, but have not been explicitly examined in northern New England, especially during later colonial occupation (ca. 1800-1900). The Laighton hotel on Smuttynose Island (Isles of Shoals, ME), site of nineteenth- and twentieth-century activity, reveals how domestic practices were changed during the later hotel era (1847-1914)....
The History and Future of Ceremonial Stone Landscapes of Southern New England (2016)
Indigenous people have lived on and moved throughout the landscape of southeastern New England for thousands of years. Today, representatives from several Tribal Historic Preservation Offices are interested in identifying and protecting ceremonial stone groupings that are significant elements of ceremonial landscape sites, ties to which were in many cases severed by colonial law. These sites are important loci of Indigenous history, inter-Tribal ceremony, and collective memory. This presentation...
Hitchhiking to the New World: Archaeoentomology and the Study of Introduced Insect and Ectoparasite Species. (2017)
This paper presents an overview of North American archaeoentomology, focussing on the study of introduced species. Seminal works on the introduction of plant and animal species during colonization suggested multiple parameters allowing for the colonization of the Americas by Old World species (Lindroth 1957) and introduced the term "European biological imperialism" (sensu Crosby 1972) to our vocabularies in environmental archaeology. Research in archaeoentomology, focussing primarily on beetles...
"The horrors of a wilderness with the beauties of a fertile nature are blended in our prospects at this place": Seneca Ecologies and Colonial Military Expeditions in 17th and 18th Century New York (2017)
The shifting settlement pattern of Haudenosaunee groups in what is today central New York state was intertwined with the political order on which the League of the Haudenosaunee was based. These entangled political and ecological practices produced a landscape of significant places and a unique ecology, which impressed European missionaries, travelers, and soldiers exploring this frontier. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French and later American frontier military efforts were...
Hunter-Gatherer Watercraft During New Brunswick's Woodland Period: Social Implications (2016)
For many hunter-gatherers, watercraft are crucial technologies for the transportation of humans and things, and may have had great social import. In this paper, we discuss ways in which hunter-gatherer watercraft may have been a key way by which people constituted, and in turn were constituted by, their interactions with interior waterways in present-day New Brunswick. We suggest that watercraft in this region may be one way to approach the complex question of pre-European identity on the...
The Identification of Archaeological Bone through Non-Destructive ZooMS: The Example of Iroquoian Bone Projectile Points (2016)
ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) is a well-established technique for the identification of archaeological bone. In this study, we apply a refined ZooMS method to worked bone points in order to analyse them in a completely non-destructive fashion. The traditional ZooMS technique requires destructive analysis of a specimen, which is obviously problematic when dealing with intact rare artefacts. The bone points are part of large assemblages of bone tools and manufacturing debris...