North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,501-2,525 (3,602 Records)
As part of phase two of the 2011 East Carolina Maritime Studies Fall Field School, students, PI, and CO-PI split into two groups to record historic split-log dugout vessels located at the Charleston Museum and Middleton Plantation, South Carolina. As in most of colonial, and later American economies, transportation by water persisted as the most effiencent mode of moving goods and people to market. Canoes and periaugers were among the most common vessels utilized in the agricultural economy in...
Plantation Site Context—taking a scalar approach to examining plantation landscapes (2018)
Plantations consist of multiple sites spread across the landscape with site contexts that are can be easily seen as discrete and separate entities. This paper argues for seeing these sites from more of a single site context using horizon markers on varying scales of inter-relation. These horizon markers can range from particular artifact types (sets of unique ceramics, agricultural implements), depositional contexts (rubble and fill deposits), and occupation period (generational/new owners)....
Planting a Seed and Watching It Grow: Planning an Open Textbook from Scratch (2018)
This paper outlines how this open textbook moved from an idea to a reality over the past year. As a non-traditional project in archaeology, the infrastructure for such a project had to largely be framed from scratch, including a social media and marketing campaign as well as a process for co-authoring and reviewing chapters. Although the textbook is not yet completed, lessons learned along the way will be offered with the hope that sharing our model will inspire more open textbooks in our field.
Plants, People, And Pottery: Looking At The Personal Agriculture Of The Enslaved In South Carolina. (2016)
The wealth of the Southern states was built upon the free labor of enslaved Africans toiling in the agricultural fields of their masters’ staple crops. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina the enslaved worked within the task system, which allotted them "free time" to then work to supplement the meager rations they were given. Research into the diets and spirituality of enslaved Africans can lend insight into the foods they purchased, grew, and foraged – personal agriculture in the face of...
Playgrounds as Domestic Reform (2013)
Playgrounds contributed to several domestic reform movements. Community mothering in playgrounds formed part of social settlements, the public cooperative housekeeping movement, and the municipal housekeeping movement. Playgrounds were also part of the public health reform movement and the Cult of Real Womanhood that promoted exercise to strengthen the working class and to address the perception of women’s sickliness in the Cult of Invalidism. In the City Beautiful movement playgrounds and...
Playing with Gender: Considerations of Intersecting Identities Expressed through Childhood Materials at Fort Davis, Texas (2016)
Too often, children are made invisible in the archaeological record. However, as a site of experimentation and play where multiple interrelated subjectivities are in constant negotiation, childhood is the foundation for identity construction. Using an assemblages of children’s toys and personal items from 19th and 20th century Fort Davis, Texas , we posit that childhood is a reflection of larger social dynamics. Employing the materials of daily life, we will focus on how children’s negotiations...
Plundering the Spanish Main: Henry Morgan’s Raid on Panama (2016)
Sorting through myth and popular perception in order arrive at truth and historical veracity is one of the most intriguing aspects of historical archaeology. Featured in a variety of media, and, of course, the iconic rum, Henry Morgan lives on in modern popular culture. Yet through the little historical documentation and archaeological evidence that exists, much can be learned about his exploits that led to the creation of his fame and legend. The Spanish Main, or the continental Spanish...
Plymouth Colony Archaeological Survey: Results of 2015 Excavations on Burial Hil (2016)
In 2015 the University of Massachusetts Boston’s undertook a second season of fieldwork along the eastern side of Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts. Excavations targeted a strip of land in the gap between a series of 19th-century buildings and historic burials within the cemetery. Two areas uncovered preserved early deposits. In one of these an intact Native American component of the site was identified, while in the other several colonial era features were discovered and documented. The...
Plymouth Memory Capsule: A 19th-Century Tale of Woe? (2017)
While searching for remnants of 17th-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts, a collection of organic materials and Victorian-era artifacts of personal adornment—all associated with a female—were uncovered in during excavations associated with Project 400 carried out by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. This unexpected cache provides a rare glimpse into the town of Plymouth’s rich history. This memory capsule filled with domestic items including a...
Poaching Pots and Making Places: Slavery and Ceramic Consumption in the Shenandoah Valley (2018)
The Shenandoah Valley, with its German / Scots-Irish heritage and its focus on small-scale mixed farming, formed a distinctive region within early 19th century Virginia. Here, unique ways of interacting with global markets emerged as residents profited off the sale of agricultural products while simultaneously choosing to purchase locally made earthenwares over imported wares, practices which reproduced local ethnic identities. However, many of the region’s White residents owed Black Virginians,...
Political Economy, Praxis, and Aesthetics: The Institutions of Slavery and Hacienda at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru (2016)
At the time of its expulsion from the Spanish Empire in 1767, the Society of Jesus was among the largest slaveholders in the Americas. The two Jesuit Nasca estates (San Joseph and San Xavier) were their largest and most profitable Peruvian vineyards, worked by nearly 600 slaves of sub-Saharan origin. Their haciendas and annex properties throughout the Nasca valleys established agroindustrial hegemony in the region. This paper explores the political and economic dynamics among enslaved subjects...
The Politics of Pots: Becoming New Communities in the Historic Northern Rio Grande (2018)
In contemporary New Mexico, the tripartite division of presumed "Anglo", "Indian", and "Hispano" ethnic communities is naturalized in scholarship and in everyday life, but projecting this division into the past elides diverse historical realities. Pueblo, Apache, and vecino notions of community and landscape stand in contrast to the American imaginaries that underpin some historical anthropology and archaeology in the Southwest. This paper considers the archaeological interpretation of...
Politics of Repatriation, Formalizing Indigenous Cultural Property Rights (2018)
This theoretically-oriented project engages discussions of historical arguments for the repatriation of indigenous cultural property that ultimately led to the creation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. I will investigate how institutions and cultural values mediated changes in repatriation policy both nationally and internationally. By examining ownership paradigms and institutional power structures, it is possible to understand the ramifications of...
Politics, The Public, And Archaeology In Texas (2017)
This study examines organizations performing CRM archaeology in the state of Texas and the federal laws that dictate their projects (e.g. Section 106 and its implementing regulations at 36 CFR 800.2 [c]). Specifically this research focuses on the legal requirements to "consult the public" or implement a "public outreach" program. However, who constitutes the public and what constitutes outreach and consultation is not specified in the regulations. Consequently, the standards do not necessarily...
The Polk Brothers Livestock Stockyards of Fort Worth (2017)
Brothers James Hilliard Polk and Lucius Junius Polk banded together to form the Polk Brothers Livestock stockyards of Fort Worth. Established in 1885 they were the first stockyard in Fort Worth. They were located south of the present Fort Worth Union stockyards and situated conveniently at the intersection of two rail lines. One notable contract they received was to supply the British Army with horses and mules during the Boer Wars in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Around...
"Poor White" Economic (In)Activity and the Politics of Work in Barbados (2015)
Situated on the fringes of the plantation landscape, the "poor whites" of Barbados occupied unique spaces within local and global capitalist networks during and after the period of slavery. Historically and contemporarily portrayed as being irrelevant within broader economic systems of production, a discourse of marginalization coupled with stereotypes of idleness has severed them from broader Barbadian and global socioeconomics. This paper addresses the power dynamics inherent in identifying,...
Popular Plates, Personal Traits: The Biry House and a Ceramic Analysis from Castroville, Texas (2016)
The 1840’s witnessed an influx of immigrants flocking into the United States in search of economic opportunity and stability. The Biry family, along with several other Alsatian families, followed suit in 1844. They established the town of Castroville, Texas and continue to celebrate their Alsatian heritage today. While they did find opportunities within Texas, they were also forced to engage in negotiations of national, ethnic, and class identities. This paper reflects on these negotiations by...
Population Reconstructions for Humans and Megafauna Suggest Mixed Causes for North American Pleistocene Extinctions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dozens of large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and horse (i.e., "megafauna") disappeared in North America at the end of the Pleistocene with climate change and "overkill" the most widely-argued causes. However, the population dynamics of humans and megafauna preceding extinctions have received little attention, even though such information may...
Population, Sex, and Diet (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Socioecological Dynamics of Holocene Foragers and Farmers" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents comparative data on human bone chemistry to infer sex differences in prehistoric diets. We collected a global sample of human bone isotope data. Next, we joined these data with the global radiocarbon data set developed by the People 3000 Research Network, as well as paleoclimate models and data. Finally,...
Port of Badagary, a Point of No Return: Investigation of Maritime Slave Trade in Nigeria (2016)
Two Danish ships that wrecked at Cahuita Point in Costa Rica carried many slaves of Yoruba ethnicity from a geographic locale in the vicinity modern day Nigeria in Africa. Danish Company records reveal that in addition, to human cargoes of around 400 slaves each, one ship included 4,000 pounds and the other 7, 311 pounds of ivory. Founded in 1425 A.D., the port city of Badagry played a strategic role in both the transatlantic slave and ivory trade. Maritime Cultural Landscape Theory is a useful...
Portrait of a Port: Industry and Ideology in El Salvador (1805-1900) (2018)
The impact of the Industrial Revolution affected El Salvador far more slowly in the pre-independence period due to the Spanish trade monopoly. Yet Atlantic World demand for commodities such as balsam, cacao, coffee, indigo, and sugar steadily increased through the early Republican period of independence, encouraging entrepreneurs to invest in the technologies of the nineteenth century. Technologies like the steamship and railroad inextricably connected El Salvador to global markets, resulting in...
The Portrait of Professional Qualification Standards: Where Archaeologists Stand Regarding the Secretary of the Interior Standards (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In August 2023, the SAA Government Affairs Committee sponsored the organization of a survey of archaeologists on the Secretary of the Interior Standards and Guidelines for Archaeology and Historic Preservation (SOIS). This was done in response to a post by the US Department of the Interior announcing their intent to review and update the SOIS....
Portuguese East Indiamen Shipwrecks Of 1503. Al-Hallaniya Island, Oman. The Land Archaeology Survey And Excavations (2018)
In the spring of 2013 and 2014 I participated in the "Portuguese East Indiamen Shipwrecks of 1503" project conducted by Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture and Blue Water Recoveries Ltd. (Midhurst, UK). The focus was upon identifying the shipwrecks associated with the 1503 Portuguese East India expedition. The work described here was an archaeological survey and excavation on Al-Hallaniyah Island in areas where potential Portuguese burials might have occurred. Initial results identified 60+...
Post Emancipation Material Culture and Housing on St. Kitts, West Indies (2018)
The post emancipation period in the British Caribbean (post-1834) represented a drastic change for the formerly enslaved Africans on St. Kitts’ sugar plantations as they faced new challenges in their freedom. This paper presents ceramic and housing data from two structures occupied from the late seventeenth century until the 1850s. Focusing on the period 1800 to 1850, ceramic types and frequencies indicate changes in the acquisition of European ceramics from the era of slavery to the post...
Post-1800 Mining Camps, Redux: A Reappraisal at Age 50 (2016)
Mining camps are certainly a minor one of the kinds of historic sites with which we are occasionally concerned. So began Franklin Fenenga’s prospectus for an archaeology of mining that appeared in the inaugural issue of our journal in 1967. Fenenga went on to identify areas where archaeology stood to make notable contributions and topics where archaeological attention promised only limited yields. Investigations of the mining industry had been sporadic at the time of Fenenga’s article, but...