North America (Geographic Keyword)
1,676-1,700 (3,610 Records)
One hundred and fifty words precisely.
The I-95/Girard Avenue Improvement Project in Philadelphia: An Overview (2016)
The I-95 GIR Improvement Project is one of the largest transportation related undertakings in Pennsylvania, and the project area winds its way through some of the most historically significant neighborhoods along the city’s Delaware River waterfront. From an archaeological standpoint, the project area encompasses an extremely complex series of sub-surface environments and developmental contexts, within which an astonishing quantity and variety of cultural deposits and features continue to...
An Iberian Smuggler and His Ill-Fated Ship: 2013-2014 Field Surveys for the Navio of Pedro Díaz Carlos (2015)
In March of 1608, Captain Pedro Díaz Carlos and crew were returning to Spain from a round trip South American voyage. His small vessel was loaded with sugar and other goods when it was shipwrecked at the southernmost tip of Portugal while crewmembers attempted to unload contraband. Possibly a patacho or small caravela, Carlos’s ship represents a light class of vessels used for both trans-Atlantic voyaging and coastal work for which we have scant archaeological evidence. In addition to...
Iced Isolation: Opportunity and Desolation in America's Northern Frontier (2015)
Beginning 7,000 years ago, humans have engaged Lake Superior’s Southern Shore in different ways. Entrepreneurs, voyagers, immigrants, and society’s periphery have relished, and shattered, in Superior’s raw, unforgiving climate. The region has been a hotbed for cyclical social and economic change as different ethnic and demographic groups clashed in the ice and snow. This paper presents a unique piece of Lake Superior’s landscape, the Keweenaw Peninsula, as an "island of industry in a sea of...
Icelandic Agricultural Heritage and Environmental Adaptation: Osteometrical and Genetic Markers of Livestock Improvement (2016)
In the early settlement of Iceland, Scandinavian pioneers brought their social knowledge alongside herds of livestock to the untamed island and in turn initiated a millennium-long tradition of livestock husbandry and survivorship in a harsh and unpredictable environment. Decades of integrated historical ecological research across Iceland allows for an exploration of the complex human ecodynamics of this marginal European outpost in the North Atlantic. Comparative osteometrical data from multiple...
Icelandic Livestock Improvement on a Millennial Scale: Biometrical Analyses of Caprine Morphology (2015)
The increase in the size of domestic animals across Europe has often been characterized as a result of the Second Agricultural Revolution. However, zooarchaeology has been able to explore incremental improvements to livestock across Europe beginning in the late medieval period. Intellectually connected to Europe but isolated from significant trade routes, Iceland is a unique location from which to explore the various factors at work during the last millennium that lead to notable increases in...
The Ichnological Record of Footwear: Some Thoughts and Experiments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human footprints have been found throughout the world. At White Sands (New Mexico) they hint at early human presence in the Americas, and during the summer of 2022 a new footprint site was reported from Utah. These sites are linked by their geological setting, dried lake beds and ancient playas, a common feature of the Americas. One question often...
Idaho Gold: An Analysis of the Ophir Creek Brewery, a nineteenth century Chinese Community (2017)
In 1860 gold was found in Pierce, Idaho. By 1870, the population of the Boise Basin alone reached 3,834 individuals, 46 percent of whom were Chinese. Many immigrants settled in Placerville, Idaho. Between 2002-2003 archaeologists at the Boise National Forest conducted excavations at the Ophir Creek Brewery. This work discusses excavations at the Ophir Creek Brewery, a part of town occupied by many of the Chinese immigrants. Analysis of the archaeological materials recovered from the Ophir Creek...
Idaho's Lake Pend Oreille Story (2017)
Lake Pend Oreille is located 30 miles north of Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho and has many intriguing aspects including the diverse human occupancy and uses of the lake and its surrounding area. The Native American, early European, and WWII naval training station presence demonstrates a varied and long history. The primary focus of this presentation are the Farragut Naval Training Station and Pend Oreille City history and material culture, in addition to the Native American's interaction with...
Identification of Coarse Earthenware Potters on Production and Consumption Sites in Charlestown, Massachusetts Using Biometric Identification (2016)
Every so often, the fingerprints of potters are left in the wet clay of coarse earthenware vessels. Many of these evocative "signatures" have been observed on redware that was excavated from the 18th-century Parker-Harris Pottery Site and Three Cranes Tavern Site in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Using a short-range 3D laser scanner to capture this data, a small comparative data set was compiled to determine if these biometric identifiers (finger and hand prints) could be used to directly connect...
Identification of Earthen Construction Techniques in the Casas Grandes Region, Chihuahua, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study compares pre-Columbian earthen construction techniques in three archaeological sites of the Casas Grandes region: Paquimé, Arroyo Seco, and Cueva de la Olla. These sites are found in different geological and geomorphological setting, although they present similar architectural typology. Their construction techniques were examined by archaeometric...
The Identification Of Historical Glasses By Silicon Isotope Ratios (2015)
The identification of historical glasses is of broad interest in historical archaeology. Analysis by ICP spectrometry is commonly used for this purpose, but this is costly. An alternative is presented by the determination of silicon isotope ratios, which require milligram quantities of glass and can be carried out with gas chromatograph-mass spectrometers that are routine instruments in most modern chemical laboratories. The methodology is based on the conversion of the silicates in glass to...
Identification of the "Cape Hatteras Mystery Wreck" (2016)
Roughly a mile-and-a-half from Diamond Shoals Light Tower off North Carolina's Outer Banks lie the broken remains of an unidentified ship resting on the sand at a depth of 150 feet. For two years, members of the Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group have researched this vessel, both in the archives and in the water. Is it, as theorized, the wreck of the Panamanian tanker Olympic, possibly sunk in early 1942 by U-66 during the opening phase of Operation Drumbeat, the German...
Identifying "Missing" Slave Cabins On Low Country Georgia Plantations (2016)
Historical archaeologists are familiar with the tensions that exist between documentary, oral history, and archaeological data. On many coastal Georgia plantations, a clear expression of such tension is seen in the documented presence of large slave populations that lived and worked on plantations and the typically miniscule number of cabins in which the slaves presumably resided, as indicated by historic maps or from in situ structural remains. Typically this dramatic discrepancy is simply...
Identifying an Aircraft Wreck From 370m Above (2018)
American B-29 Superfortress aircraft flew missions against Japan from air bases in the Marianas Islands near the end of WWII. Combat damage or technical failures forced many B-29s into the ocean surrounding Saipan and Tinian, but no losses in deep water were discovered until 2016, when a NOAA exploration cruise investigated sonar targets in the Saipan Channel. Disarticulated wreckage from a B-29 was located at 370m over a large area. Telepresence enabled exploration from NOAA’s ship Okeanos...
Identifying and Interpreting Nineteenth Century Agricultural and Natural Resources Sites within the Cultural Landscape of the Waganakising Odawa of Northern Lower Michigan (2018)
This paper endeavors to identify the characteristic of Native American farmsteads and agricultural practices during the nineteenth century in the northwest part of the lower peninsula of Michigan. This period was witness to influences from Europeans upon the pre-contact Odawa agricultural system. There are many such sites that still exist and have been studied by the Tribal Historic Preservation Program of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. Archaeological, archival, and oral...
Identifying Historic Ceramics: Applications of X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry in Archaeology (2018)
While ceramics are prevalent among many historical archaeological excavations, it is often difficult to properly identify ware type, particularly to the archaeologist untrained in ceramic studies. Even with such training some sherds may still remain unidentifiable. The purpose of this research is to investigate the feasibility of using a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to accurately categorize ceramic sherds by ware type based on the elemental composition of their glaze. By analyzing...
Identifying Japanese Ceramic Forms and their Use in the American West (2016)
Japanese ceramics from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been recovered from a variety of archaeological contexts throughout Western North America, but large collections or in-depth analyses of these materials are relatively rare. As a result, standardized formal, temporal, and functional typologies are only just emerging and site comparisons are often difficult. This paper presents the preliminary results of a synthesis of ceramic data from several large collections of...
Identifying Landscape Modifications at the South End Plantation (1849-1861), Ossabaw Island, Georgia (2018)
The South End Plantation is located on the southern end on Ossabaw Island, Georgia. This tract of land had two separate plantations. The first dates to the late 1700s-early 1800s, but very little is known about plantation period activities during this time. In contrast, there are numerous documents that provide information about the later plantation occupation and the owner George Jones Kollock who operated a cotton plantation at the site from 1849-1861. During this time, the land was...
Identifying Status and Identity Through Material Remains: A Preliminary Report from the Hollister Site (2018)
This paper presents a preliminary analysis of the material remains and use of space at a seventeenth century fortified Euro-American domestic site located in present-day Glastonbury, CT. At this site, questions related to status, material consumption, and trade are addressed through the analysis of glass, metallic, and European ceramic assemblages. In addition to providing a preliminary overview of the types of European products recovered and their reuse patterns, this paper shall also explore...
Identifying the South Yard: Interrogating Landscapes of Home and Work Yards Enslaved African Americans at Montpelier (2018)
Landscape analysis of slave plantations typically approaches the plantation scale, analyzing the distribution of the built environment across the plantation itself. This paper will focus on the analysis of the domestic slave quarter of James Madison's Montpelier, and how the yards, structures, and features were organized and used by the Madisons and enslaved community. Over the course of multiple field seasons , archaeologists have conducted extensive field excavations uncovering three...
Identifying The Visible: A Look at How Economic Class and Ethnicity Influence Women's Visibility Within a Household (2015)
Archaeology has allowed for underrepresented, often invisible, groups of people within history to become visible and have their stories told. Despite archaeologists’ best efforts in identifying these underrepresented groups; there is still much work yet to be conducted. There is a lack of information from the eighteenth-century, and even less work done on the way ethnicity and class impact women’s visibility within the archaeological record. This paper utilizes seven site reports, from...
Identifying Transient Sites in the Archaeological Record (2018)
A central problem in constructing an archaeology of transient populations is identifying the archaeological signatures of these populations. For example. transient sites look very much like refuse deposits and usually lack a firm historical association. In this paper, I focus on rural transients in California, and, using a sample of previous recorded sites, present preliminary research on distinguishing potential transient sites from other rural deposits. This research does not offer any silver...
Identifying with the Help: an Examination of Class, Ethnicity and Gender in a Post-Colonial German Houselot (2015)
The German presence within the Mississippi River valley, has received little attention through archaeological investigation. German outbuildings (as well as those living and/or working within outbuildings) have received even less reflection and deserves to be addressed to better understand what life was like within the American interior for "the help" during the country’s formative years. Bought in 1833 by a German family, the Janis-Ziegler property quickly moved from one centered in French...
Identities in Flux at an American Frontier Fort: A Study of 19th Century Army Laundresses at Fort Davis, Texas (2016)
As spaces of translation, frontiers and boundaries are the ideal location to study personhood and identity as inhabitants of these landscapes constantly experience and actively negotiate between the multiple live realities that are shaped by often conflicting ideologies. I propose the use of third-space as a framework for understanding the fragmentation and fluidity of experience in the American frontier during the 19th century. Using materials related daily life at a multi-ethnoracial, western...