North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,151-2,175 (3,610 Records)
Archaeologists have studied bone, shell, and glass beads for several decades, in search of their meaning among Native American cultures. The significance of these small artifacts among the Cherokee is evident in their mythology, personal adornment, and rituals. Thus, they represent an integral part of Cherokee cultural identity. Previous archaeological research at 40GN9, linked to the sixteenth-century Cherokee town of Canasoga located in Tennessee, demonstrated the predominantly shell beads...
Meat Economies of the Chinese-American West (2016)
Cuisine and diet are topics of particular interest to scholars of Chinese communities in the Nineteenth-century American West. Many zooarchaeological analyses have identified beef and pork among the main provisions for miners and townsfolk, and this paper will synthesize archaeological and historical evidence for food access and supply while exploring contexts of socioeconomics and cuisine which likely structured food choices. By focusing on both urban and rural sites to compare access and food...
Mechanical Scanning Sonar: 21st Century Documentation of 19th Century Shipwrecks (2016)
The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum (LCMM) has been exploring the use of mechanical scanning sonar systems for the documentation of the shipwrecks found within its waters. These technologies allow for fairly rapid recordation of 3D structures in limited visibility environments. The LCMM has deployed this technology on two canal boat wrecks to determine its effectiveness in comparison with traditional documentation techniques. This presentation will review the results of those studies as well...
Medical Practices and Teaching Specimens: A Review of Skeletal Modifications Associated with Medical Intervention and the Educational Use of Human Remains, with Application to Subadult Individuals from the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (2017)
From life to death and beyond the grave, the bodies of the individuals buried at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery have been vulnerable to the actions and authority of medical professionals. Medical procedures and the implementation of human remains for training purposes are two forms of culturally-sanctioned skeletal modifications detected among the juvenile remains recovered from the 1991-1992 Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery excavations. This paper presents the results of a...
The Medieval Shipwrecks of Novy Svet: A Reassesment (2015)
Since 1997, Dr. Sergey Zelenko of the Centre for Underwater Archaeology (CUA) at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev has been conducting survey and excavation near the resort town of Novy Svet on the southern coast of the Crimean peninsula. CUA researchers have discovered the remains of three medieval shipwrecks spanning the 10th to the late 13th centuries, illuminating much about Black Sea seafaring. Recently, multi-national CUA teams discovered hull timbers, anchors and vessel...
Mediterranean Vistas, Local Experiences: An Historical Archaeology and Social History of Everyday Life on a Greek Island: Andros 16th-19th Centuries (2015)
This paper examines the historical archaeology of everyday life using the results of KASHAP. This multidisciplinary/indterdiciplinary project tracks the human and environmental histories of two Greek islands. One main theme is how being integrated as peripheries into major premodern empires, the Venetian Empire and the Ottoman Empires, shaped everyday life and how the transition to nation-state, which transformed the islands into a border zones, impacted society and economy. Focusing on the...
Megafauna 101 for Archaeologists (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Pleistocene... basically a no-man's land that is trapped between the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology when it comes to the animals that inhabited that period. For American archaeologists, these animals are sometimes too old to be considered as having archaeological connotations. For Paleontologists, these are not fossils and, by some...
"A melancholy scene of abandonment, desolation, and ruin:"The Archaeological Record of the Upper Ashley River Region of South Carolina (2016)
The Upper Ashley River region of South Carolina is characterized by cypress swamps that form a relatively straight, narrow river that flows unimpeded to Charleston. This landscape provided the ideal location for early estates of the planter elite in the eighteenth century. These Carolinians developed the rice and indigo plantation culture of the Lowcountry. The region became the crossroads of many historical events including the development of rice cultivation, Native American trade and...
Melvina Massey: Fargo's Most Famous Madam (2016)
In my work as a professor and public historian, research material often unfolds from teaching. In my Spring 2013 Introduction to Museum Studies class at North Dakota State University, students conducting primary source research on early Fargo discovered a will and probate records for Melvina Massey. The records show that she was an African American and ran a brothel in Fargo for more than 20 years. The course concluded with an exhibit, "Taboo: Fargo-Moorhead, An Unmentioned History," and one of...
Memories of the Past and Its Impact in the Present: Conceptions and Misconception of the Irish Immigrant Experience in the United States (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alienating immigrant groups is not something unique to this generation. Immigrants to the United States, long before labeling human beings legal or illegal was commonplace, have been deemed either desirable or undesirable, moral or immoral, valued or value-less. Such categorizations have had a debilitating impact on the daily lives...
Memories that Haunt: Reconciling with the ghosts of the American Indian School System (2018)
During the nineteenth century, the United States had an "Indian Problem". The problem was that Indians continued to exist despite rigorous efforts to erase them from the landscape through disease, violence, and segregation. To solve this conundrum, the U.S. government staffed and funded the Indian School System; a system comprised of residential and non-residential schools in which savage Indians were transformed into obedient citizens. Over the past several decades, archaeologists and...
Memory and Engagement with Sacred Ground: the many publics of Mount Vernon's African-American Cemetery (2018)
In 2013, Mount Vernon's archaeology department began a long term research project to locate the graves of enslaved and emancipated individuals interred within the African-American cemetery on the home quarter of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. Four years deep, dozens of graves have been reclaimed from new growth forest and the cemetery has taken on new life as a touchstone of memory and an interpretive vehicle for a diverse array of descendants, scholars, and visitors to the historic...
Memory and Heritage Before and After 1991: A Case Study from the Solovetsky Islands (2015)
As recent battles over the fate and meaning of the gulag site in Perm have shown, gulag heritage in Russia remains highly dissonant. Questions of how to manage and interpret former gulags have become increasingly politically charged in the last few years, following a brief thaw during the perestroika and glasnost periods. The island site of the infamous Solvetsky Gulag offers an illuminating case study of the struggles of stakeholders – monks, other island residents, tourism...
Memory and Materiality at Mary’s City of David (2018)
Mary’s City of David is a millenarian commune in Michigan, founded in 1903 and re-organized in 1930. As with all intentional communities, material culture (i.e., architecture, clothing, landscapes) serves as an active medium to both reflect and reinforce social ideals, and community members are keenly aware of the symbolic meanings represented. At their peak, the Benton Harbor colony sent out preachers to spread the word, bands to spread the music, and baseball teams to spread the game. These...
Men of Good Timber: An Archaeological Investigation of Labor in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2015)
Questions of labor and everyday life have been commonplace in archaeology. At Coalwood, a cordwood camp that operated from 1901-1912 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, these issues become especially important since labor experienced a dramatic transformation when the camp shifted from housing a large number of male laborers to being organized by individual households. In this paper I use archaeological evidence to examine the social relations these laborers were engaged in that produced and...
Mentoring a Versatile PhD: From Archaeology to an AltAc Career (2018)
The training and mentoring received by Bill’s students reflects his dedication to four-field anthropology, as well as a recognition that students may work outside academia. This paper reflects on lessons learned from Bill’s seminars, his mentorship, and a four-field anthropological approach to graduate training in the evolution of one student’s career from archaeologist to organizational anthropologist and evaluator.
Mercy in a Town Without: Catholic Nurses and their Medical Care in a Frontier Town (2018)
From Ireland to Fort Smith, the Sisters of Mercy parish was established by Bishop Andrew Byrne, along with five devout female recruits, to support the Church of Immaculate Conception which would be the first Catholic place of worship in what was considered the "wild" westernmost portion of the United States.The Sisters of Mercy site, (3SB1083) was occupied from its establishment in 1853 up to present day, where it hosts several schools, outbuildings, and a cathedral and acts still today as a...
Message in a Breech Block: A Fragmentary Printed Text Recovered from Queen Anne’s Revenge (2018)
The collection of artefacts recovered from the 1718 wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) contains a broad array of items typical of shipboard life on a pirate vessel, as well as tantalizing, unique finds. While unloading and conserving the breech chamber for a breechloading swivel gun, conservators recovered 16 small fragments of paper, some bearing legible printed text. These fragments of text have been uncovered after nearly 300 years inside a cannon chamber on the sea floor, and conservators...
Message(s) in a Jar: Mason Jars, Archaeological Narratives, and Contemporary Fascinations (2015)
Mason jars, as workhorses of home food preservation beginning in the late nineteenth-century, have functioned both as indicators of social and economic status within archaeological contexts and currently as objects of fascination in the DIY marketplace. This paper parses out the various discourses within which mason jars have been placed historically and contemporarily by their users, promoters, and archaeologists, and seeks to understand how gender, race, class, and nostalgia continue to inform...
Metal Detecting as a Preliminary Survey Tool in Archaeology (2015)
Smithsonian citizen scientists have surveyed several 18th and 19th century sites using conventional archaeological methods along with a metal detector as a non-invasive way to explore site structure. Metal detecting is a cost-effective, preliminary method of survey and can be used to aid in identifying and delineating site locations. This paper will discuss our survey findings in relation to a 17th century site, where subsequent magnetometer survey and excavations confirmed our initial...
Metal Detecting on the Baja California Galleon Wreck (2017)
This paper discusses the use of metal detectors in the investigation of a late sixteenth-century Manila galleon shipwreck in Baja California, Mexico. The use of metal detectors has successfully identified artifacts and structural remains from the ship, and has aided in the delineation of the boundaries of the terrestrial portion of the wreck site. This paper discusses the types of metal targets expected on the wreck, metal detecting methodologies developed over many field seasons, examples of...
Metal Detecting Survey at Beech Grove Confederate Encampment (2018)
One methodology used during the Beech Grove investigations was metal detecting, conducted by professional archaeologists and metal detector hobbyists working together. The detecting resulted in the recovery of numerous artifacts, clustered in four main concentrations (A-D). The artifacts recovered included machine cut nails/nail fragments, cast iron kettle/dutch oven fragments, horseshoe nails, horse/mule shoes, chain fragments, ammunition, melted lead, kitchen/table utensils, wire, strap...
Metal Detector Investigations on the Fall 1863 Bivouacs of the 2nd Corps, 3rd Division, 2nd Brigade, Culpepper County, Virginia (2016)
After the Federal Army aborted the Mine Run Campaign, the 2nd Corps, 3rd Division, 2nd Brigade was ordered to return to their campgrounds near Brandy Station, Virginia. These camps were front-line short-term bivouacs of troops on active campaign. The material culture these soldiers possessed differs from troops in permanent camps, rear-echelon camps, and winter quarters. The artifact assemblage found in a front-line camp reflects one activity: warfare. In such situations, ammunition, weapons,...
Method over Madness: A Practical Approach to Colonial-Period Archaeology in Urban St. Louis (2018)
The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) has been conducting archaeological excavations in the City of St. Louis almost continuously since 2004. Up until 2012, this work concentrated on properties dating from the mid-nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries. MoDOT’s field methodologies drew largely on previous work in Oakland, Boston, New York, and other urban centers, with minor alterations to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of the modern St. Louis landscape. Since 2013, however,...
Methodological Convergence: Historical Sources and Authenticity Relating to the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade, 1565-1820, and Specifically to the "Beeswax Wreck" of Manzanita-Nehalem Bay, Oregon (2017)
This presentation defines and underlines the importance of a systematic "Convergent Methodological Approach" to studies of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade from 1565 to 1820, combining archaeological, geomorphological, and historiographic methods in investigations relating specifically to the "Beeswax Wreck" of Manzanita-Nehalem Bay, Oregon, which are now progressing rapidly, and thereby demonstrating the value of this integrative approach to the study of the galleon trade and to American...