North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,126-2,150 (3,610 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Leaky Pipelines: Exploring Gender Inequalities in Archaeological Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many studies of women in the field of archaeology focus on academic institutions; however, more archaeologists are employed by the public and private sectors. In this paper, we examine the place of women holding positions in cultural resource management. By examining first-hand experiences of women in the...
Mastodon Butchery By North American Paleo-Indians (1984)
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The Material and Symbolic Production of Insanity at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1813-1900 (2017)
The Royal Edinburgh Asylum was one of the leading institutions in psychiatric research and treatment in 19th-century Scotland and one of the first to institute programs of moral management. While derived from French and English models, the implementation of moral management followed a distinct trajectory at the REA and other Scottish asylums, reflecting their particular cultural and political context. My paper will examine how the material practices of 19th-century institutions emerged from...
Material Boundaries of Citizenship: Central American Clandestine Migration through Mexico (2015)
Each year, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central American migrants transit through Mexico by hopping freight trains. Migrants navigate organized crime networks and government officials that seek to extort and detain them. They also receive assistance from sympathetic Mexican citizens and a network of humanitarian shelters that have developed along common migrant routes. Throughout this process, migrants seek to both highlight their presence as non-citizens and blend in with the citizen...
Material Culture And The Archaeology of Western Identities (2015)
While the popular perception of the American west is one of material hardship and deprivation, the reality of life in the west was frequently quite different. Excavations at several locations in Idaho have indentified a material world where people were enthusiastically striving for Victorian ideals of gentility. In one sense this is to be expected as aspirational consumption in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was clearly an integral part of American society as a whole. However,...
The Material Culture of Folk Religion in French North America, 1600-1763 (2018)
By law, permanent residents of French settlements were Catholic. Systematic Catholicizing of French North America was nominally successful, but lay religion retained unorthodox elements, including belief in powerful supernatural beings and the effectiveness of magic in daily life. This study briefly surveys folklore and ethnohistory from New France and Louisiana to shed light on such folk religious beliefs and practices, then moves to consideration of diverse forms of material culture associated...
"Material Culture Studies as an Alternative Mitigation: an Example from the US Route 301 Project" by Rachael E. Fowler and Kenneth J. Basalik, Ph.D. (2016)
Abstract: Additional archaeological fieldwork is not always the most cost effective means of mitigating project impacts to archaeological sites. DELDOT in conjunction with the Delaware SHPO has recently developed a series of alternative mitigations for projects on the US Route 301 Project. One of these alternative mitigations involves material culture studies. The material culture studies are unusual in that they address the material culture from numerous historic archaeological sites...
Material Culture Studies in a Transatlantic Perspective: How to Define an Adequate Theoretical Framework? (2015)
Since the beginnings of the discipline, the French archaeologists have superposed descriptive, analytical and interpretative stages to study the artifacts. The objects were first defined in a typo-chronological perspective, as dating element reflecting spatio-temporal evolutions. The processual perspective introduced by André Leroi-Gourhan had few impact on French historical archaeology, due to political and academic contexts. However, it allowed to see the artifacts in a consummation point of...
Material Elements of the Social Landscape at Fort Vancouver’s Village (2015)
Fort Vancouver contains the archaeological vestiges of houses, activity areas, and other landscape features of the British and American Colonial Period, AD 1827 to 1860. Data from this site are used to explore the lives of its inhabitants who worked in the fur trade and other economic activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Most of the material culture recovered from Fort Vancouver is imported European articles, tied closely to the marketing and sales of trade goods to its employees and family...
Material Expressions of Rank: Non-Verbal Communication Amongst Commissioned Officers at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856-1866 (2017)
The 19th century U.S. Army was a hierarchically ranked subculture characterized by a caste-like system of institutional inequality. Individual officers were commissioned into hierarchically ranked military classes, known as ranks, that were both authoritatively and socially distinct and within which each officer behaved in accordance with military discipline and a strict set of non-militaristic social norms. This paper examines how commissioned officers at two mid-19th century U.S. Army posts...
Material Interaction Between the Wampanoag and English in the Plymouth Colony Settlement: An Assessment from Excavations on Burial Hill (2018)
Recent archaeological excavation has recovered the first intact features related to the early-17th-century Plymouth Colony settlement in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts. This paper presents an overview of these investigations with a particular focus on the representation of Native Wampanoag lithics and pottery across the English features. These data are critically examined to assess whether this represents inclusion of Native materials from an underlying site or the use of Native technology...
The Material Legacy of Late Colonialism in South Africa (2013)
This paper explores the legacy of late colonial mineral extraction in South Africa through its architectural and archaeological remains. Key sites of the late 19th century diamond fields, particularly the labor compounds, do not figure into portrayals of the history of the diamond rush at the De Beers corporate diamond museum. The aim of this paper is to examine how material sites and archaeological remains can tell the story of the tightly interlocked corporate-colonial project in Southern...
Material Masculinities: Archaeology of a World War II Italian Prisoner of War Camp (2016)
Camp Monticello, a World War II prisoner of war camp located in rural Arkansas, housed 3,000 Italian enlisted men, officers, and generals. As a military institution and a homosocial space, Camp Monticello provides a lens into the social construction of masculinity and the intersections of class, gender, and cultural difference in the 1940s. This paper will deconstruct heteronormative white maleness and explore the ways that gendered and cultural identities were both maintained and performed...
Materialities of Nationhood, Land, and Race in Early Republican El Salvador (2018)
The idea of "nation" in Latin America invoked discussions of ideal citizens. The colonial metamorphosis from social classification—the casta system--to racial thinking centered on defining places, social and geographic, for and by Afro-Latin Americans. In cases such as Cuba, political efforts aimed to end racism and build "raceless" nations, while others, such as Mexico, enthusiastically embraced indigenous heritage but at the same time elided or even rejected African descent, creating what...
The Materiality of Affluence and Taste in Trump Tower (2018)
This paper examines Donald Trump’s New York City apartment as a populist performance of affluence that simultaneously justifies ostentatious shows of wealth and defends idiosyncratic individual taste. Rather than reduce the grandiose penthouse simply to a transgression of "good taste," this paper examines a distinctive notion of material wealth that embraces pretentious and idiosyncratic expressions of style and affluence. In a conservative world that has often been characterized by stylistic...
Materiality on the Margins of Empire: 19th Century Networks of British Trade and Exchange in Rural Ireland and Scotland. (2018)
How did people’s geographic position impact their access to material goods and necessities through trade and distribution within the 19th and early 20th century British world system? Throughout the 19th century an increasing distinction emerged between urban capitalist elites, the urban working poor, and a rural peasantry across Britain and Europe. While rural Ireland and Scotland were well connected to the urban economic centers of the United Kingdom, both nations were considered economically...
Materializing the Past: Ghosting Slave Landscapes at James Madison’s Montpelier (2015)
Starting in 2010 the Montpelier Foundation, the organization that operates James Madison’s plantation in Orange County, Virginia, began a systematic process to reestablish elements of the ca. 1812 slave occupied landscape found adjacent to the Madisons’ house. These ghosted structures, which include slave dwellings, smoke houses and a kitchen, are based on archaeological and documentary evidence and were recreated using traditional framing techniques. More recently the Foundation finished a...
Matters of Steel: Examining the Deterioration of a World War II Merchant Shipwreck (2015)
Between May 24th and June 1st, 2014, NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary collaborated with the Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group to survey and map the merchant shipwreck Caribsea, a freighter sunk off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in 1942 by the German submarine U-158. The data acquired from this project was instrumental in a study designed to illustrate and interpret site formation processes affecting World War II ferrous-hulled merchant shipwrecks. This...
"May the Dragon never be my guide!" African American Catholicism at the Northampton Slave Quarters and Archaeological Park (2016)
During excavations conducted in the 1990s by The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a number of small religious objects (i.e. medals, rosary, cross) were uncovered at Northampton, a prominent Prince George’s County, Maryland, plantation. These artifacts were discovered within two slave quarters, a wood frame quarter dating to the late 1790s and a brick quarter dating to the second quarter of the 1800s. Both enslaved African Americans and African American tenant farmers lived...
Meadowcroft Rockshelter 2023: Revisit (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of initiation of excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in southwestern Pennsylvania. Meadowcroft was the first serious challenge to the Clovis-first peopling model that had dominated American archaeological thought for decades. Generations of students have passed through graduate schools since the early excavations...
The Meaning Of The Offshore: The Role Of Islands In The Maritime Cultural Landscape Of Peru (2015)
The authors will present their research about the relationship of the islands to the mainland in Peru, emphasizing the islands role as sacred places, economic spaces, and harbors for oceanic crossroads. This paper will present the close relationship between the islands and the Andean mainland over time, from prehispanic times to present day, including a panoramic view of the role and value societies place on the islands located in the Peruvian offshore. Using written sources such as ethno...
Meaning, Networks, and Commodity Exchange: A Geographic Information System (GIS) Inter-site Distribution and Network Analysis of Wampum Beads (2015)
This paper will examine the role of wampum in the globally-connected western Great Lakes fur trade, with a focus on Fort St. Joseph, in Niles, Michigan, and the fort's position on the periphery of trade activities in New France. To explore wampum's spatial and temporal boundaries, I sampled data from the archaeological findings of historic sites throughout the Northeast and Midwest regions. GIS spatial analysis provided an alternate method of processing archaeologically-recovered and historic...
Meaningful Choices: An Archaeology of Selective Engagement on the 19th Century Irish Coast (2016)
This research explores the nature of marginality on the periphery of the British Empire. The edges of empires are shifting, culturally-negotiated borders with the capacity to disclose important information about social networks and cultural change. Households in these places are subject to transnational processes and make choices which demonstrate the presence and connections with broader global networks of economic and social access. This project focuses on the ramifications of national...
The Meanings of "Litter" in Yosemite National Park (2015)
The concepts of "nature" and "culture" have been carefully critiqued by anthropologists over the last few decades, but they still remain in the forefront of the public debate over the environment and how best to preserve it. The question of how modern people see the natural and cultural realms is at the heart of this issue. This project explores the line between these ideas by analyzing the behavior of one segment of the modern public: visitors to Yosemite National Park. Employing the...
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: The Archaeology of Ranching in Arizona (2016)
One of the "Five Cs" on the Arizona State Seal, cattle ranching has contributed greatly to Arizona’s growth and prosperity since Father Francisco Kino first introduced cattle in the 17th century. Ranching continues to influence the economic and cultural heritage of Arizona today, with nearly 4,000 ranches spread across the state’s 15 counties. This session will briefly summarize the archaeology of Ranching in Arizona, with emphasis on the San Rafael Ranch. Formally established as a the San...