North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,826-2,850 (3,602 Records)
The Providence Cove Lands Archaeological District (RI 935) is located at the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers near the State House in Providence, Rhode Island. Between 1981-2, De Leuw, Cather/Parsons (DCP) completed archaeological and environmental surveys of the District, focused primarily on two sites—Carpenter’s Point (RI 935A) and North Shore (RI 935B). Based on DCP’s findings, the Keeper of the National Register determined that the District is eligible for listing on...
Revisiting Root Cellars at The Hermitage, Davidson County, Tennessee. (2018)
The Hermitage, a plantation owned by Andrew Jackson near Nashville, Tennessee, has been the site of archaeological investigations since the 1970s. Much of this work has focused on the large enslaved community living at the site, with the study of the remnants of their dwellings a key element of this research. Sub-floor storage pits, generally referred to as root cellars, have been found at nine Hermitage slave dwelling locations. These features are present in all three of the separate quartering...
Revisiting Snowtown: A 21st Century Analysis of the North Shore Site in Providence, Rhode Island (2018)
In the early 1980s, archaeologists from De Leuw Cather/Parsons conducted a large-scale data recovery project in downtown Providence within the Providence Cove Lands Archeological District. In 2013, The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) began a multi-year project to assess, analyze, catalog, and re-curate the Cove Lands Collection. In total, PAL’s effort re-cataloged and re-curated an assemblage of approximately 150,000 artifacts dating from the Middle Archaic period through the...
Revisiting the Highbourne Cay Shipwreck Site: Research Potential, Conservation in situ, and the future of Bahamian Material Culture (2015)
The Highbourne Cay Shipwreck, found in the Exumas, Bahamas, is the most intact example of a ‘Ship of Discovery’ in the world. The identity and purpose are still unknown, yet a recent, non-intrusive visit to the site recorded no obvious signs of damage to the ballast mound. Because the site has been disturbed and re-covered on two documented occasions, valuable reflexive questions can be asked decades later regarding the effectiveness of conservation in situ. Soon, the Bahamas will be lifting...
Reviving Collections “At Rest”: Examining Recent Efforts to Promote Collections Research at CFAR (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The struggle to manage collections generated through the process of archeological activity is ongoing despite decades of attempts to resolve the “curation crisis.” Artifacts collected in the field and their associated records are most often shelved in curatorial facilities and storage closets prone to disassociation and decay. In the best circumstances,...
Revolutionary Households: Archaeology at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla (2013)
With the signing of the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821, Spain formerly recognized Mexico as an independent nation. As identity shifted from colony to country, processes of modernization accelerated and rural households were transformed. These transformations led to increased attacks on the traditional structures of home life, family, and community, attacks that ultimately erupted in the rural uprisings associated with the Central Mexican experience of the Mexican Revolution. Drawing on...
The Rhode Island Archaeological and Historical Geographic Information System (GIS) Development Project (2018)
In 2017 the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission teamed up with the University of Rhode Island’s Applied History Laboratory to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) incorporating the state’s complex assortment of archaeological and historical sites. With support from the National Park Service, their objective is to collect and share the stories of Rhode Island through an effective and sustainable geospatial database of known archaeological sites and properties in...
Rhyolite, Charcoal and Whiskey: The Archaeology of Catoctin Mountain Park (2016)
Catoctin Mountain has always been a challenging landscape, but one that rewards perseverance. Native Americans negotiated its rocky slopes in search of rhyolite for stone tools, and hunted and camped along the freshwater streams and springs. Workers from the nearby Catoctin Iron Furnace burned its ample timber for charcoal to fuel the ironworks. Innovative farmers and homebuilders created flat terraces for their houses and gardens on the mountainside. During the Prohibition era, some of the...
The rise and fall of culture history (1997)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The Rise of Global Markets in Gold Rush San Francisco (2015)
When the discovery of gold in California was announced to the world, San Francisco almost instantly became the focal point of global activity. A steady flow of ships sailed to the fledgling city, carrying immigrants from ports as far-flung as Hong Kong, Valparaiso, London, and virtually every major entrepot on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Flooding into the city with these new arrivals was a vast assortment of commercial goods. Raw materials such as hardware and building supplies,...
The Rise of Slavery in the Valley of Virginia and its Enduring Presence on the Landscape of Lexington and Rockbridge County (2018)
Settled in the 1730s by Scotch-Irish immigrants who initially eschewed the institution of slavery, Rockbridge County, Virginia eventually became home to a society reliant on the enslavement of African Americans. After the Revolution, an elite class of newly minted American citizens established its identity through economic, social, and symbolic associations with Chesapeake plantation society. William Alexander (1738-1797) and his son Andrew (1768-1844) exemplified this transition, with Andrew...
The Rise of the Cedars: 2014-2015 Investigations at the Cox Farm in Georgetown (2016)
In 2014 the District Public Schools began extensive construction and renovation of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, the former Western High School. Portions of the building date to the last decade of the 19th century, the former location of The Cedars residence, the home of the Cox family. The few photographs and descriptions of The Cedars were thought to be all that remained due to the construction of the school. Stantec and EHT Traceries undertook archaeological and archival...
"Rises in the Rice Fields", Aerial LiDAR applications on South Carolina Inland Rice Plantations (2013)
The use of remote sensing technology, such as aerial LiDAR (light detection and ranging), provides archaeologists with a significant tool to aid in research as well as digitally record sites. Inland and coastal rice plantation contexts are extremely well suited for the application of aerial LiDAR in locating potential new sites as well as providing accurate maps of the overall landscape and topography. LiDAR scans produce a more accurate map than traditional topographic maps which enables...
Rising from the Dark Marshes: Investigations of an Elite Homestead on Mulberry Island, Virginia (2017)
Mulberry Island, a peninsula on Virginia’s James River and home to Joint Base Langley-Eustis’ Fort Eustis, is a trove of cultural resources. Among its more than 230 archaeological sites are dozens of indentured, enslaved, and tenant laborers’ ephemeral homesteads. Relatively few sites associated with its economically advantaged minority have been discovered on Mulberry Island, leaving a gap in the archaeological record compounded by the loss of antebellum public records during the Civil War....
Risk Assessment of Archaeological Sites Using Lidar: Sea level Rise Modeling at Jamestown Island, VA (2017)
Jamestown Island contains low-lying terrain with archaeological sites, known and unknown, threatened by sea level rise. Using data acquired from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was created using a Light Detection and Ranging Remote Sensing technique (LIDAR) to identify cultural sites and assist in planning for cultural remediation. Four scenarios of sea level rise modeling were created based on historic trends and projected environmental events...
Ritual and Resistance at Trents Cave, Barbados (2018)
An overview of religious practice and resistance reflected in the material record of Trents Cave, Barbados. The cave site is located at the bottom of a gully located between the enslaved laborer settlement and the planter’s residence at Trents Plantation. The findings suggest recurrent use of the site by persons of African descent (circa 1750s through the 1850s) for ritual, or specialized purposes, associated with iron and steel. The distinctive pattern of deposition of key artifacts...
The River Basin Surveys: Studying Twentieth Century Archaeological Investigations and their Nineteenth Century Subjects (2017)
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase included most of the present-day states of North and South Dakota. I study the US colonization of this area, particularly the Upper Missouri Basin. During the mid-twentieth century the Smithsonian’s River Basin Surveys (RBS) program investigated several nineteenth century historic sites associated with the earliest US presence in the area including fur trade posts, US military and government establishments, and sites associated with US settlement. I study RBS...
The River Overlook Fortifications on Bemus Heights at Saratoga NHP (2016)
The fortification of Bemus Heights at Saratoga by the Americans during the Revolutionary War was engineered by Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish military engineer who had taken up the American cause at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Kosciusko designed the fortifications on Bemus Heights at the River Overlook to oppose the British plan to advance to Albany along the River Road. In 2009, a geophysical study was conducted on one of the River Fortification elements in Kosciusko’s defense...
The River Street Digital History Project (2015)
Race relations remains a central issue in American politics, economics, and culture. Interactions between African Americans and Euroamericans has been a focal point of historical archaeology for the last 30 years. The River Street Digital History Project is centered on the River Street Neighborhood in Boise, Idaho, which was the historical home for most of the town’s non-white population. This research asks: what role did race play in the lives of River Street Neighborhood residents; how did the...
Riverine Site Formation Process of Steamboat Wreck Sites in the Western United States (2013)
Museum exhibits for both the artifact collections of both the steamboats Arabia and Bertrand liken the steamboat wrecks as time capsules, preserving moments frozen in time. For an archaeologist, it oversimplifies the nature of shipwrecks to regard them as a moments frozen in time. This study examines the dynamic riverine site formation process of steamboat wreck sites in the western United States, considering the cultural and environmental factors that impact such sites. The cultural and...
The Road From Big Rock Candy Mountain: Boomsurfer Strategies in the American West (2015)
People living across the broader West struggled for over a century to deal with both economic and ecological instability and unpredictability. Developing industrial capitalism fluctuated radically in this period, especially in a region where its large-scale extractive industries voraciously exploited environments that were often already fragile and marginal for large-scale settlement. For at least some sector of the population, responses to these challenges tended to emphasize stability and...
The Road to Wealth: How the EP & NE Railroad Changed New Mexico (2017)
The EP & NE rail system in New Mexico was built between1898 and 1903. This railroad system immediately became a critical economic force, opening an uninhabited frontier of deserts and mountain forests to exploitation. The EP & NE system also comprised an immense sociopolitical machine that controlled vast lands, timber and mineral resources, water rights, and towns. This talk discusses the historical context for the railroad, and its impact on the settlement of eastern New Mexico. Archeological...
Roads and Landscape Dynamics on Monticello's Mountaintop (2015)
Between 1770 and his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson expended vast resources building and altering Monticello mansion and the surrounding landscape. Roads and paths were integral parts of the resulting system, which was engineered to manage the movement of family members, elite visitors, and free and enslaved workers. This paper offers new insights from archaeological research into the shifting configuration of elite and service access routes to the house and the artificial landscape that they...
Roadside America in the West: History along the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail (2015)
The highways and byways of the Colorado/New Mexico borderlands are dotted with publicly funded roadside interpretive signs providing a short history of the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail. The goal of these signs is commemoration and education of the traveling public, yet the facts are questionable and nuances are flattened. Must accuracy be sacrificed to achieve brevity and accessibility? The time has come to challenge the roadside nationalist narrative in favor of one that people who...
Robert J. Walker Shipwreck Mapping Project (2016)
The Robert J Walker a paddlewheel steamshipin the service US Coast Survey, and predecessor to NOAA Office of Coast Survey, before it was lost after a collision at sea in 1860. The wreck, identified in 2013 by NOAA was placed on the US National Parks Service, National Register of Historic Places. To document and protect the site, NOAA requested that a consortium of groups undertake the archaeological site work as a cooperative operation between governmental, non-governmental and academic...