North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,351-2,375 (3,602 Records)
In 2008 commercial divers discovered an 18th century anchor in 40 feet of water in Admiralty Bay, Puget Sound. The anchor was recovered under permit in June 2014. The anchor was set in the bay bottom with one arm embedded in the seafloor, and 165-feet of stud-link anchor chain attached to the shank. An iron grapnel was hooked to the middle of the chain. The extension of the chain and the presence of the grapnel indicate the anchor was lost when the cable broke after the anchor was set, and...
"Old Al's Going To Get It," At Least For A While: Recent Riverine Archaeology in Arkansas (2015)
To understand Arkansas history, it is constructive to study the use of the extensive network of navigable waterways in and near the State. In the last 30 years, archaeologists have documented recovered Native American canoes, as well as researched vessels employed from the Trail of Tears in the 1830s to the end of the Wooden Age in the 1930s. A major step was at West Memphis on the Mississippi in 1988, when record low water permitted professionals and amateurs to use dry-land field techniques to...
"Old Fortunes, New Fortunes, Lost Fortunes" Utilizing a Forgotten Assemblage to Help Reconstruct Betty Washington and Fielding Lewis’s Dining Room (and So Much More) (2015)
Decades worth of artifacts excavated from Kenmore, the house of Betty Washington Lewis (George’s sister) and her husband Fielding Lewis, have recently been reanalyzed by George Washington Foundation archaeologists with the intent of shedding light upon what equipage would have graced the Lewis’s dining room table. Re-examination of this collection proved both informative and surprising, yielding clues as to what life was like for this family during and immediately following the Revolution, as...
Old Mobile: The Internal Structure of An Early 18th-Century French Colonial Town (2018)
Twenty-nine years of archaeological investigations at the townsite known as Old Mobile, capital of the French colony of Louisiane from 1702 to 1711, has revealed ten structures in considerable detail, as well as information on the distribution of other structures throughout the town. Recent new overlays of the two extant historical maps of the settlement permit an evaluation of those two cartographic sources, as well as interpretations of the occupants of the excavated structures. The map...
Old Pots on New Plates: Understanding Ancient Vases on 19th Century Transfer-Printed Ceramics (2013)
The discovery of sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum in the early 18th century fueled an international mania for classical antiquities, especially ancient vases. Through a process of translation in multiple media, these ancient pots soon became featured on transfer-printed ceramics mass-produced at the Staffordshire potteries. These ceramics were then exported globally, transporting classical visions to consumers of multiple socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Using an assemblage of...
Old Questions, New Direction: Research at Ash Lawn-Highland (2016)
As part of Ash Lawn-Highland’s strategic direction, the historic site has undertaken a new phase of research to address lingering mysteries about the standing house and its story as a portion of James Monroe’s 1799 main residence. Addressing the questions involves a multi-disciplinary team and opens the door to the creation of revised public narratives. This paper discusses the points at which uncertainty entered the site’s established narratives, the range of research efforts in the current...
Old Records and New Tools: Using Historic Land Records to Structure Archaeological Survey and Historic Site Management on the Siuslaw National Forest (2015)
Over 3,900 land records are housed at the Siuslaw National Forest (SNF) headquarters offering valuable information on early 20th Century homesteading in Oregon’s Coast Range. Current SNF program direction aims to summarize this information to support archaeological site identification and the development of a historic context that will lead to a more effective management strategy for homestead sites. Initial work to meet this goal is underway through this author’s research, which will focus on...
Old World View of New World Prehistory (1961)
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"Old" Collections, New Narrative: Rethinking the Native Past through Archaeological Collections from Eastern Long Island. (2016)
This paper highlights the value of existing museum and contract archaeology collections to new directions in archaeological research. Renewed attention to "old" data sets serves to decolonize archaeology and to challenge existing narratives with new questions. The collections discussed in this paper all come from eastern Long Island, New York. I draw attention to how narratives of Native American cultural loss and disappearance are constructed locally through archaeological heritage, and I...
On Cudjo’s Pipe: Smoking Dialogs in Diasporic Space (2015)
As a survivor of the last slaver to make the Atlantic crossing and a community leader in the Jim Crow-era American South of Mobile Alabama, Cudjo Lewis stands as an iconic diasporic figure. We know of Cudjo’s life on both sides of the Atlantic from extensive interviews by Zora Neale Hurston, local historians, and reporters from the New York Times. These reports describe a sullen patriarchal figure who spent the last years of his life morning the death of his children and the impossibility of...
On Dangerous Ground: Documenting the Undocumented Migration Project 2009-2014 (2015)
Started in 2009, the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) developed out of an attempt to couple archaeological data on what border crossers left in the Arizona desert with ethnographic data collected at migrant shelters in Northern Mexico. The initial goal was to understand the informal economy that structured human smuggling and the various technologies of survival and subterfuge that people employed while crossing the Sonoran Desert. Since 2009, the project’s scope has significantly expanded...
On Finding Smoke Town, a Late-eighteenth, to Mid-nineteenth Century, Rural Free Black Community Populated, in Circa 1791, by some of the 452 Manumitted Slaves of Robert Carter III. (2018)
The finding and excavation of a late eighteenth-century to mid-nineteenth century rural free black community cartographically known as Smoke Town or Leeds Town, on the Shenandoah River, Warren County, Virginia, populated by some of the 452 slaves manumitted (511 ultimately), by Robert Carter III by his Deed of Gift of 1791. Robert Carter III was an affluent grandson of Robert ‘King’ Carter. That Deed of Gift was the largest single manumission of slaves in America until the American Civil War –...
On Her Majesty's Service: Revisiting Ontario's Parliament Buildings (2016)
There have been many meeting places for Ontario's Parliament throughout the province’s history, including three purpose-built structures prior to the current Legislative building in Toronto known as Queen’s Park. This paper will address the archaeological investigations of these buildings since the Ontario Heritage Trust has recently acquired the archaeological collections. The Trust owns a portion of the First Parliament site and has interest in conserving in situ and interpreting the...
On Ideal and Real Ships: Shipbuilding Treatises c.1570 - 1620 C.E. and the Highbourne Cay Shipwreck (2018)
Archaeological hull remains are the only direct evidence of real shipbuilding practices, although treatises written by contemporaries detail various methods for controlling the construction of a ship. However, these technical documents were rarely written by shipwrights or experienced seamen, and at times the vessels and methods described in the text do not accurately describe each step in the shipbuilding process. Treatises written in the latter half of the 16th century and the beginning of...
On Making Waves and the Trickier Project of Surfing Them, Inside and Out of Academia (2015)
After finding me a free place to stay when I reported, homeless, to my first summer field school in 1996, Marley didn't give much indication that he thought me worth the effort. He was one tough customer, ever astute and incisive. But once I passed the gauntlet, he became my staunchest, most unfailingly generous mentor. Marley's influence cast its long shadow across my PhD Dissertation, which challenged standard historiography of Virginia’s ‘’tobacco’’ colony by placing craft production...
On Seattle’s Edge: A Native American Refuge on the Late Nineteenth Century Waterfront (2015)
In the nineteenth century, Seattle enterprises depended on Native Americans for labor but settlers increasingly displaced Natives and tensions led to sometimes hostile conflict. In response, a Seattle ordinance was passed in 1865 which limited Native American encampments within the city limits. Located at the peripheral margin of the city, Ballast Island became a crucial layover for Native Americans and also represents an important, but infrequently discussed, element of the historical narrative...
On the Banks Opposite of Matamoros: Using Modern Archeological Techniques to Understand and Manage the Opening Battles of the U.S.-Mexican War 1846-1848 (2016)
In the spring of 1846 General Zachary Taylor led half of the U.S. Army to the northern banks of the Rio Grande to occupy the territory claimed by both Mexico and the recently annexed state of Texas. This show of force was intended to pressure Mexico into peacefully releasing these lands to the United States. However, by early May Taylor’s troops would defeat the Mexican Army at the battles of Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and the Siege of Fort Brown and occupy Matamoros. These opening...
On the Beaten Path: Modeling Logistics During the Second Seminole War (2018)
Conflict archaeology is growing and expanding as a discipline, however, the focus has been battle-centric. There are many other crucial landscape features that have remained in the background of these discussions. This project proposes to use the Fort King Road as a test case for modeling conflict. This project will develop a GIS model of how the road functioned as a critical piece of the battle landscape during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842) and seeks to understand how the road shaped the...
On the Offensive: The Small Arms and Artillery of Monterrey Shipwreck A (2015)
Sailing on the open seas could often be treacherous and the Gulf of Mexico was a theater for such activities with its history of privateering and naval actions. Vessels at that time could be armed both offensively and defensively, but could also be transporting such military cargoes to aid in the many conflicts abounding during the formative early decades of the 19th century. ROV investigations of Monterrey A discovered two collections of small arms and six cannon within the hull remains. Video...
On the Periphery of the New World: The Beeswax Wreck Project (2015)
This paper reviews the search for the suspected wreck of a Spanish Manila galleon off the Oregon Coast that sank near the end of the seventeenth century. Included are summaries of the 2006-2009 terrestrial surveys and the 2013-2014 diving operations. The sometimes-conflicting historical record is summarized and compared to the results of four terrestrial and two underwater field seasons. The result is an informed estimate of the wreck’s location.
On The Rim Of The Southern Cause: Quaker Potters In The Confederate Capital (2015)
In Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, northerners, free blacks, and Quakers operating on the periphery of the Southern cause challenged its basic foundations. Here, overlooking the James River and its busy docks at ‘Rocketts,’ stood the stoneware pottery of the Quaker Parr family. Already prominent potters in Baltimore, the Parrs came to Richmond a decade earlier and now partnered with a local auctioneer of Quaker extraction. In trying to keep their operation afloat, the Parrs came up against...
On the Verge: A Pocket Watch from Queen Anne’s Revenge (2018)
Beginning with the development of the verge escapement in the 13th century, there was a trend in mechanical timepieces to make them both more accurate and more portable. The most accurate timepiece of the 18th century, the marine chronometer, could be used to determine longitude at sea, while up to this point pocket watches were used as displays of wealth and for tasks such as keeping track of watch shifts. Pocket watches were not uncommon on board ships during the 17th and 18th centuries, but...
On the Waterfront: Archaeological Investigations along the Delaware River in Philadelphia (2016)
Since the late 1960s multiple archaeological investigations have been conducted along the city’s Delaware River waterfront – the area that forms the heart of Philadelphia’s historical social and economic center. These excavations have succeeded in documenting sites associated with the growth and development of the city’s port facilities, the foundation of the early ship building industry, 19th and 20th century industrial expansion, as well as the working class people and families who made the...
"The Once Great Plantation is Now a Wilderness" Investigations at the Josiah Henson SIte, Montgomery County, Maryland (2015)
In 2006, Montgomery Parks purchased a house and one acre of land in suburban Maryland, beginning historical and archaeological investigations into the site and its association with Josiah Henson, a Reverend, Underground Railroad conductor, and escaped slave. Known to local residents for its relationship to Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the 19th century abolitionist novel, the site was the subject of much myth about the existing structures and their link to Henson, who was enslaved...
One Artifact, Multiple Interpretations: Postcolonial Archaeology and the Analysis of Chinese Coins (2015)
This paper examines how a focus on "culturally bounded" groups restricts historical archaeology’s exploration of oppressive social practices such as slavery, racism, and inequality. Competing interpretations of a single class of material culture – in this case, Chinese coins – illuminates how bias enters archaeological interpretations in subtle ways. Chinese coins, also known as wen have been recovered from historic sites on nearly every continent. The author focuses on the interpretation of...