North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,051-2,075 (3,610 Records)
For much of its early history, underground coal mining involved material conditions which encouraged the solidarity and control of its independent skilled workers. Coal operations in the Anthracite region of Northeast Pennsylvania were among the first, however, to mechanize labor processes with steam shovels, waste processing, and other technical means to extract additional surplus profit from their investments. It also served to break the resistance of organized skilled workers. This technical...
Macho and Moral: An Archaeological Investigation of Masculine Behaviors on Apple Island, Michigan. (2016)
It is not remarkable to say that the separation between city and country has become a normalized binary. For years, scholars have discussed how capitalism has framed urban and rural spaces, including desires to leave urban areas for some approximation of a sentimental bucolic paradise. However, investigating the rural and urban separation and "back to the land" movements within capitalism reveals other interesting social phenomena. Archaeological investigations of a vacation retreat owned by...
Made in America? Sourcing the Coarse Earthenwares of Chesapeake Plantations (2015)
Unlike many other goods at the time, which were wholly imported from Great Britain or elsewhere abroad, utilitarian coarse earthenwares were also produced locally within the colonies. In the Chesapeake, it has been suggested that these local wares were reserved for those unable to trade directly with England. This paper presents the results of elemental analysis via laser ablation ICP-MS in order to identify the sources of utilitarian earthenwares used by plantation households. Employing a...
"Made Radical By My Own": Acknowledging the Debt Owed to Larry Zimmerman in Radicalizing Me (2018)
All archaeology is ultimately autobiographical; our interests and intentions are intimately shaped by both people and circumstances, which sometimes are not recognized until later. An unexpected change in my own career path in the 1990s brought me into Larry Zimmerman’s orbit. His work with and for marginalized peoples, his activism, and his strong ethical stance have grounded me ever since. In this presentation I take a personal approach to discussing Larry’s influence on Archaeology in general...
Maggie Ross emerges from the Sands of Russian Gulch, California (2018)
On June 7, 2017, a diver from the U.C. Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory found a bow section of the Maggie Ross, a steam schooner that wrecked off the coast of Russian Gulch in August, 1892. The schooner was headed north from San Francisco when it struck a submerged rock near the former Russian outpost of Fort Ross. The captain was able to beach the foundering vessel at the nearest "doghole" port. This event was only the last of what was a tumultuous career for the ship. This paper will examine the...
Magnetic Models: Creating an Interpretive Model of Civil War Case Shot (2017)
3D modeling has been successfully incorporated into the realm of public outreach and interpretation. The ability to virtually access and manipulate artifacts and monuments allows people to interact with the object where they are incapable of doing so. Creating replicas also provides a hands-on experience by permitting onsite visitors to examine and hold certain objects, including the more delicate cross-mended materials. This project utilizes magnets in an attempt to connect the plastic replicas...
A Mahiole, a Revolutionary War Major, and a Cosmopolitan City; A Case for Southern Urban Places (2018)
Perched in a display case in the depths of the Charleston Museum in Charleston, SC is a seemingly out-of-place grass helmet, an artifact from Hawaii donated in 1798. At first, it may be unclear how this object has much to contribute to a museum with a mission focused on the history of Charleston and the broader lowcountry of South Carolina. However, the presence of this object in and of itself, and its itinerary that eventually brought it to America’s first museum (c. 1773) tells us a great deal...
Mahogany and Iron: Archaeological Investigations of the Late 17th-Century Frigate Nuestra Señora del Rosario y Santiago Apostal (2013)
Constructed prior to 1696 near Veracruz, Mexico, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario y Santiago Apostal was a powerful warship of the Spanish Armada de Barlovento. The ship served primarily as an escort vessel during its nine years at sea. In addition to its primary duties Rosario led anti piracy patrols and fought in campaigns against other European powers in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. The ship's career came to an end in September of 1705 during a powerful hurricane in Pensacola Bay,...
Making a New World Together: The Atlantic World, Afrocentrism, and Negotiated Freedoms between Enslaver and Enslaved at Kingsley Plantation (Fort George Island, Florida), 1814-1839. (2013)
Zephaniah Kingsley, a British planter and slave trader living in Spanish Florida, was married to Anta Madgigine Jai, an African Senegambian woman, with whom he had four biracial children. Kingsley, in the context of his own time and given his personal history was decidedly Afrocentric in his later life, remorseful at the end of his life for his past actions as slave trader and owner, and certainly sympathetic to Africans, both enslaved and free, as individuals and to their collective...
Making an Alsatian Texas: World-Building, Materiality, and Storytelling in the Castro Colonies of Medina County (2017)
In many ways, Castroville, Texas is a world unto itself. As the "Little Alsace" of Texas, it has been built for over a century through work, struggle, and cooperation – with words and materials, memories and relationships. This world is continuously crafted today, through the restoration of historic Alsatian-style houses and the stories that are told about the town and its history. Though Castroville has been a nexus of Alsatian identity in Texas, other Alsatian colonies spread further into...
Making Archaeological Data Publicly Accessible through the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (2018)
Scientific research conducted during the process of environmental review has been publicly and openly criticized by governmental officials in recent months. Not only does this represent an official contestation of the value of this research in the public eye, it seeks to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of science as a discipline. The research in question is federally mandated, and in the case of Section 106/Title 54, exists to avoid unnecessary harm to historic properties. If we seek to...
Making Do Outside a Consumer Culture: Pragmatics and Creativity in a Great Depression-era Gold Mining Camp in Northern Nevada, USA (2013)
This paper takes re-used mundane objects from a gold mining camp occupied in the 1930s as an entry point for commentary on the so-called "creativity crisis" in contemporary American (and Western) society. Since the late nineteenth century, marketing and social conditioning have been used to teach people that particular consumer goods are intended for specific uses, and these mental categories structure people’s interactions with them. The ability to conceive of unfamiliar uses for...
Making Ends Meet in 19th Century New Mexico (2015)
In 19th century frontier New Mexico consumer relationships reflected important social networks that were essential to the survival of Hispanic settlements. These relationships played a vital role in the formation and maintenance of modern Hispanic identity during the Mexican and American Territorial Periods. Using close statistical analysis of technological styles in the New Mexican ceramic assemblages of two sites, this poster examines personal relationships Hispanos cultivated with neighboring...
Making Historical Archaeology Visible: Experiences in Digital (and Analog) Community Outreach in Arkansas (2013)
The Arkansas Archeological Survey’s mission is to conserve and research the state's heritage and communicate this information to the public. The AAS has always been known for its outreach and education efforts, but it has been slow to turn to digital engagement. This paper will talk about the author’s experience in doing digital (and analog) archaeological outreach and education in the predominately rural state of Arkansas for the past decade. It will examine how digital outreach has changed...
Making it Matter -- Public Archeology and Outreach to Diverse Communities in Baltimore (2016)
To celebrate the bicentennial of the War of 1812, Baltimore Heritage in 2014 undertook an archeology project to document the defensive works erected to repel the British invasion in what is today a well used public park, and to engage park users, school kids, and nearby residents about the history of the battlefield-turned-park. The neighborhoods surrounding the project site are dense and racially diverse: roughly a third each of African American, Hispanic, and Caucasion. The year-long...
Making Place in the Capitalocene: The Toxic Legacies of Mill Creek Ravine (2018)
Recent archaeological work has highlighted how the objects archaeologists study—far from being inert representations of the past—are lively, political, and potent in the present. This paper proposes that archaeological studies of the industrialized modern world must extend this reflexive turn to questions of ecological harm and pollution. Drawing from my excavations of an early twentieth-century industrial worker’s camp in Edmonton, Alberta I investigate how the rise of industrial-scale...
Making Race Women: Intellectual and Material Contributions to Understanding Black Lives in the Early Twentieth Century (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One powerful reason to integrate Black Studies and archaeology is to align archaeological analysis of sites occupied by Black people with the aims, imperatives, and perspectives that their descendants and other stakeholders might find relevant. This paper follows the lead of researchers like Brittney Cooper who encourage us to see...
Making the Case for the Parkin Site as Casqui: Hernando de Soto's 1541 Cross (2017)
Most archeologists agree that the Parkin site (3CS29) is the village of Casqui described in the chronicles of the Hernando de Soto expedition. When the Spaniards visited in 1541, one of the things they did was raise a cross atop the platform mound where the chief’s house stood. In 1966, archeologists found what they suggested was the base of this cross in a looter’s pit. Additional research in the early 1990s revealed that the post was made of bald cypress that was radiocarbon dated between 1515...
Making the Data Count: Analyzing Inequities and Challenging Epistemic Injustice in Archaeological Discourse (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Documenting Demographics in Archaeological Publications and Grants" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent resurgence of interest in diversity and equity issues in archaeological practice highlights persistent disparities in the demographic composition of practitioners in various aspects of the discipline. Drawing from a database that we generated on the gender and occupational affiliation of 5,010 authors of 2,445...
Making the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) a Usable Resource (2016)
Since its inception in 2000, the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) has been a digital resource undergoing iterative development and revision. A digital archive containing data on 2 million artifacts from 70 archaeological sites, DAACS opens infinite possibilities for a variety of audiences who want to use evidence-based approaches to learn about enslaved societies in the Atlantic world. Offering DAACS as a case study, this paper considers a major challenge...
Making the Dream Work: Overcoming Challenges to Respectful Return through Collaboration (2024)
This is an abstract from the "In Search of Solutions: Exploring Pathways to Repatriation for NAGPRA Practitioners (Part I)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant challenge to successful repatriation is an inability for federal agencies and museums to identify who has stewardship and compliance responsibility for collections. This occurs for various reasons: universities and CRM agencies may have conducted contract work for federal agencies,...
Making The Exotic Mundane: The Manila Galleon, The Flota, And Globalization (2017)
For two and one half centuries from 1565-1815 the Manila Galleons navigated the vast expanses of the Pacific laden with the highly desired exotica of Asia- spices, fine textiles, and glistening porcelains. Acapulco, while the terminal port for the eastward-bound vessels was in reality the starting point for the distribution of their cargoes to the Iberian motherland and to the farthest corners of their colonial New World empire. These commodities not only captivated the imagination of Spain’s...
Making the Frontier Home: Stories from the Steamboat Bertrand (2017)
"Making the FrontierHome"is a digital project comprised of both traditional research methodology and photogrammetric digital reconstructions interwoven to explore gender roles and identity on the frontier during the mid-nineteenth century. The project analyzes domestic artifacts excavated from the cargo of the Steamboat Bertrand, which sank in the Missouri River near DeSoto Bend, Iowa in 1865 on its way to the mining communities of Montana. The Bertrand serves as a case study to explore life...
Making the Inaccessible Accessible: Public Archaeology at a 19th-Century Bathhouse in Alexandria, Virginia (2016)
This paper examines Alexandria Archaeology’s foray into broadcasting archaeological excavations and findings through videos and social media. When excavations began at a well discovered by chance in the basement of a private residence, city archaeologists took a social media approach to reach and educatate the public about a site otherwise be inaccessible to them. Video updates of the excavation posted online allowed followers to witness the process of archaeological discovery and...
Making the Invisible Visible: Interpreting the Plantation Landscape at James Madison’s Montpelier (2015)
Montpelier was the lifelong home of James Madison, father of the Constitution, architect of the Bill of Rights, liberty-lover, and lifelong slave-owner. Just as importantly, Montpelier was home to a community of as many as six generations of enslaved Africans and African Americans who built the plantation, who generated the Madison family’s wealth, and who enabled James Madison to pursue a life of learning and public service. As archaeological excavations and documentary research allow us to...