North America (Geographic Keyword)
1,901-1,925 (3,610 Records)
In 1901, archaeologists excavating the 1617 Jamestown church uncovered a large black ledger stone engraved with the silhouette of knight in armor. The stone held evidence for once having monumental brasses inscribed with the deceased’s identity, coat of arms, and death date, yet these have never been recovered. Now, over a century after its discovery, recent archaeological investigations and research have revealed new clues confirming the identity of this interred individual. This paper outlines...
La Belle: Lessons Learned and Applied in Order to Restructure the Use of Watercraft Data (2017)
Although the archaeological team excavating La Belle performed an extraordinary job at timber recording, all 1:1 drawings were traced by hand on Mylar and then digitized into AutoCAD. That data was later assembled into lines drawings, profile and plan-view scale drawings. In advance of freeze-drying individual components of La Belle, there was an immediate need for precision measurements from drawings that were already two generations removed from the original source. The pain-staking process...
La Belle: The Archaeology of a Seventeenth-Century Ship of New World Colonization (2016)
La Belle was a ship used by the seventeenth-century French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in his effort to establish a French colony along the northern Gulf of Mexico. Ultimately La Belle wrecked along today’s Texas Gulf Coast in 1686. The wreck was discovered in 1995 and resulted in a multi-year year program of excavation, conservation, interpretation, reporting, and exhibition. This paper will present the results of all these phases of analysis and reporting by summarizing the...
La Concorde and Queen Anne’s Revenge: A Global Voyage Continues, 1717 to 2037 (2018)
March 1717, a slave ship, La Concorde, departs Nantes, France, for the New World via Africa. November 1717, its voyage ends off Martinique, when pirates capture it. As a pirate ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, its voyage continues through the Caribbean, via Charleston, South Carolina, to Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, where it runs aground in June 1718, and is discovered November 1996. Since then, much of the historical and archaeological research, and stories told, for state shipwreck site...
La Faïencerie De La Nouvelle Orleans: French Colonial Faience Production In New Orleans, Louisiana (2018)
Archaeologists invariably blame the French for all of the ceramics laying about South Louisiana colonial period sites, even those dating to the Spanish colonial period. But were the ceramics actually made in France? Could they have been manufactured locally? One Spanish period redware kiln has already been examined archaeologically in St. James Parish. Indeed, not only did potiers, or makers of redware, work in the French colony of La Louisiane, so too did faïenciers. This paper presents...
Labor Heritage at the Homestead Waterfront (2016)
This paper explores the memory of the Battle of Homestead at the Waterfront shopping center and other related sites throughout Pittsburgh. Through interviews, site visits, and guided tours, I compare the approaches to this memory by various involved groups, such as developers, artists and community organizations. My analysis employs an archaeology of supermodernity to consider the authorized heritage discourse surrounding the Battle of Homestead as it relates to sites of labor struggle in the...
Labor Relations and Landscape: Slave Built Agricultural Retaining Walls on the Quill, St. Eustatius. (2015)
In 1732, at the height of the slave trade on St. Eustatius in the Caribbean, the Dutch shipped more than 2,700 people from Africa, making the island integral to the Second West India Trading Company’s influence in the Caribbean. This site consists of a series of 10 dry built stonewalls that run down a large valley on the side of the Quill (602m in height) which is a dormant volcano located within a National Park of the same name. The walls were built either to assist in the minimization of...
Laboring along the Rio Grande: Contextualizing Labor of the Spanish Early Colonial Period of New Mexico. (2018)
Labor was a core component of the early period (1598-1680) of Spanish colonization of New Mexico. After failing to uncover mineral wealth in their new colony, the Spaniards kept their colony afloat by focusing on another exploitable resource: Indigenous labor. Historical archaeologists (e.g Silliman 2001, 2004; Voss 2008) have recently been reconsidering colonialism from a framework grounded in labor relationships. We know that Pueblo Indians and enslaved Plains people were forced to work on...
Laboring on the Edge: The Loma Prieta Mill and the Timber Industry in Nineteenth Century California (2018)
From 1870 until 1920 the Loma Prieta timber mill ranked as one of California’s largest and most productive in terms of board-feet cut. Beginning operations a few years after the gold rush, workers were immigrants from many lands with aspirations for a better life than the one they left behind. The company clear-cut through ancient redwood forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains, providing timber for regional railroads, housing, and building of San Francisco. Following deforestation the region was...
Labrador: Inuit and Europeans, more than just a trade (2016)
Labrador, an important crossroad for cultural and material goods in America, has known many social changes during the 18th century. The inhabitants of this vast and cold territory have changed their way of living during this period by transforming their winter houses, by adopting new objects and by changing their social organization. European and Inuits have lived side by side at this time, trading together. All these exchanges have created more than just a trade network. New objects and new...
The Lager Vaults of Schnaederbeck's Brewery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2017)
Four adjoining, massive stone and brick lager vaults were discovered fourteen feet below grade in the heart of Williamsburg's former lager brewing district. Unlike other beers, lager yeast ferments at the bottom of the vat and the brew must age at low temperatures. Before refrigeration, this was accomplished in subterranean vaults. Introduced in the U.S. ca. 1840, lager took off in the 1850s when a major influx of thirsty German immigrants arrived in Williamsburg where the water was good and...
Lake Champlain Steamboat Archaeology: A 15-minute Primer. (2016)
A 120-mile-long ribbon of fresh water between Vermont, New York, and Quebec, Lake Champlain has long served as a convenient pathway for trade and communication through the interior of northeastern North America. The lake was at the forefront of the 19th century’s steam navigation revolution, starting with the launching of Vermont in 1809 and ending with the retirement of Ticonderoga in the early 1950s. This paper will briefly examine historical highlights of Champlain’s steamboat era and...
Lake Champlain’s Steamboat Phoenix II: Mixing New and Traditional Underwater Archaeological Methods for Reconstruction (2017)
Built in 1820, the passenger sidewheel steamboat Phoenix II ran the length of Lake Champlain for 17 years until the worn-out hull was retired in Shelburne Shipyard. With no known existing ship plans, the sole method of reconstructing the hull is through accurate measurements and documentation of the wreck itself. Since June 2014, archaeological divers from Texas A&M University used traditional recording tools including tape measures, rulers and digital levels to measure the submerged ship’s...
The Lake Oneida Durham Boat (2015)
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries Durham boats were an important means to carry goods along the inland rivers of New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Prior to the construction of canals these boats were one of the few ways to move substantial cargoes and they figured prominently in the economic development of the region. Despite this importance no archaeological examples have been recorded. However, preliminary analysis of a shipwreck in Oneida Lake suggests that it is the remains...
Lake Tahoe Maritime Heritage Trail (2016)
Lake Tahoe is the third deepest lake in North America. On its southwest shore is Emerald Bay, a fjord embayment that has long been recognized for its spectacular natural beauty and as one of the most photographed places on earth. Just offshore of the historic site of Emerald Bay Resort are the remains of the "Mini-fleet." These ten small craft, representing a variety of vessel form and function, operated on Emerald Bay from 1890-1940 for recreation. The Mini-fleet represents 90 percent of the...
Land and the Social Consequences of Land Loss: Navajo Oral History, Ethnoarchaeology, and Spatial Analysis at Wupatki National Monument, Arizona. (2018)
There is a contentious history between Navajo families living in the Wupatki Basin, ranchers, and the National Park Service. The creation of the monument in 1924 gradually displaced indigenous residents from ancestral homelands, leading to loss of territory and connection to family. Here I focus on change in Euroamerican demands for land and federal management policies, as well as Navajo kinship, family dynamics, and oral history as told by descendants of the first Navajo settlers in the...
Land, Labor, and Memory: Plantation Landscapes in Martinique (2016)
Landscapes are shaped by the experiences of people over time, serve to establish and reinforce social relations, and are spaces within which individuals actively construct their experiences with each other and with their environment. This paper focuses on plantation landscapes on the island of Martinique, where the significant role of the French sugar industry - made possible by slave labor - in the globalizing Atlantic world is still clearly visible. Plantation sites that have not been lost to...
Land, Lumber and Labor (2016)
Coalwood, a cordwood camp in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, provides an ideal setting to talk about internally related aspects of capitalist production from the vantage points of land, lumber, and labor. The cordwood produced at Coalwood from 1900-1912 was used to fuel pig iron furnaces owned by the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. Comparison of company reports, censuses, and local historical information suggest a dramatic change in the organization of production at Coalwood that coincides with the...
Landmark Issues in Historical Archaeology (2015)
This poster outlines the general process for nominating archaeological sites as National Historic Landmarks and compares the NHL program with the better-known National Register program.
Landscape Archaeology at St. Elizabeths Hospital West Campus (2016)
St. Elizabeths Hospital was championed by Dorthea Dix as a model hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill. One of the tenants of the moral treatment philosophy, the guiding principle of the initial 40 years of hospital operations, was that access to calm, natural or park-like settings was essential to patients’ recovery. However, as a former plantation and as a working farm through the 1880s, a tension emerged between principles and practicalities. GIS-based modelling and 10 years of...
Landscape Archaeology at the Orillon Bastion, Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts (2018)
A landscape archaeology approach is used to examine the Orillon Bastion at the Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts (1690-1853). Archaeological and documentary evidence record how the British military altered the number and kinds of structures within the Bastion and how they reconfigured their arrangements as the fort was enlarged, troop levels increased and were stabilized, and the military’s local and global strategic needs shifted during the fort’s occupation. Initially used to house troops...
A Landscape Archaeology of Transjordan in the Mandate Period (1918-1946) (2013)
After World War I, the cultural and physical landscapes of the Southern Levant were transformed, as the region transitioned from Ottoman province to the British Mandates of Palestine and Transjordan. In Transjordan, the relationships between colonial policy, state building, and settlement patterns are reflected in the nascent field of Mandate Period Archaeology, and focus on the wide range of colonial experiences of bedu – from entanglement in global capitalism, to the Great Arab Revolt. In this...
Landscape Legacies of Sugarcane Monoculture at Betty’s Hope Plantation, Antigua, West Indies (2016)
The historic sugarcane industry transformed Caribbean societies, economies, and environments. This research explores the landscape legacies left by long-term sugarcane monoculture at Betty’s Hope Plantation on the eastern Caribbean island of Antigua, which was dedicated to sugarcane monoculture from the mid-1600s until independence in 1981. The study creates a simulation of crop yields using the USDA’s Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator, which is then evaluated using records of historical...
The Landscape of Death and Burials at the San Diego Presidio (2018)
A comparison of burial records from colonial Spanish era San Diego with the results of archaeological excavation at the San Diego Presidio offers a unique opportunity to document life and death on the colonial frontier. The written burial records list at least 209 persons buried at the presidio and the archaeological record provides information on 119 sets of remains. A synthesis of the archaeological data, forensic data, and historical information provides new and important information...
The Landscape of Fear on the Edge of the World: Small island life on Antigua 1667-1815 (2015)
This paper explores the concept of fear as a useful theoretical abstraction to help understand the social anxiety of life on the island of Antigua during the eighteenth century. Fear comes from a tripartite of internal stress caused by the large enslaved population on the island, external stress coming from the constant threat of invasion by other colonial powers in the Caribbean as well as the ever present danger of dying from the withering effects of the tropics—disease. Archaeologically,...