North America (Geographic Keyword)
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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...
Robert L. Schuyler and the Emergence of an Archaeology of Ethnicity: "A topic of interest to both the profession and the public" (2017)
Robert Schuyler has been at the forefront, not only of historical archaeology, but also the archaeology of ethnicity. Although historical archaeology had examined intercultural settings (the very stuff of ethnicity) from its inception, these themes were under-articulated in its early years. One of the earliest steps towards a research agenda was Schuyler’s edited volume Archaeological Perspectives on Ethnicity in America. This paper examines the themes of his contributions to that...
Robert L. Schuyler and the History of Historical Archaeology (2017)
As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Society for Historical Archaeology, it seems appropriate to reflect on the history of historical archaeology at large. Although scholarly works on the history of the field are few, Robert L. Schuyler has been a steady advocate for and contributor to such work throughout his career. Over the last fifty years, he has consistently called for the need to document and preserve the history of the field. Equally important, he made...
Robert Schuyler as a Model of Making Space for Diversity of Thought (2017)
As one of the first historical archaeologists to publish on issues of race and ethnicity, Robert Schuyler’s legacy on such topics has been carried forward by many of his students. My research centers on a free black American enclave who settled on the island of Hispaniola, enslaved laborers on plantations in the Caribbean, and an African American brothel owner and the women who worked for her in Fargo, ND. While all of these projects are united through a focus on race, identity, and power...
Rock Art in Northern Sonora between Stones and Pigments: Preliminary Archaeometric Analysis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sonora has a great concentration of rock art in North America. In order to advance in the analysis and documentation of the rock art groups, the project “Cave Documentation and Patina Study in Northern Sonora” was proposed, focused on Cucurpe (Sierra Madre Occidental) and Caborca (Sonoran Desert). The...
Rockly Bay Research Project: Archaeology of a Naval Battle 2012 Field Season (2013)
In 1677, a French squadron attempted to wrestle control of Tobago from the Dutch West Indies Company. The crucial battle of Rockly Bay was one of the largest fought in the Caribbean in the 1600s. In the 1990s, Mr. Wes Hall of Mid-Atlantic Technologies, LLC, located shipwrecks tentatively associated with that battle. Based on archival data and the known positions of the ships in the battle line, it is likely that these are some of the Dutch ships. The University of Connecticut and the Institute...
The Role of Isometric Scaling on Stone Projectile Point Durability: An Experimental Assessment (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The experimental study of stone projectile points created via flintknapping has shed light on issues of culture, penetration, durability, aerodynamics, resharpening, among several other topics. Here, we present an experiment that systematically assesses the role that isometric scaling, i.e., size, plays in stone point durability. Thirty obsidian projectile...
The Role of Landscape in Power Dynamics of the Past: An Example from Eighteenth-Century Piedmont Virginia (2013)
The neighborhood surrounding historic Indian Camp plantation located in Virginia’s eastern piedmont helps provide an interpretation about past identity formation and power dynamics. Using public records and ArcGIS, I locate this historical community to explore networks in which these individuals were involved. Historic land patents surrounding the Indian Camp property were given a spatial quality, and based on resulting maps, research has identified a dynamic community. Through the 1720s and...
The Role of Systematic Metal Detection in Phase III Data Recovery: Investigation of a Nineteenth Century Slave and Freedmen Occupation at Colonel’s Island Plantation (2018)
In 2015, Brockington conducted Phase III Data Recovery at a nineteenth century slave and freedmen settlement within the larger Colonel’s Island Plantation in Glynn County, Georgia. Prior to block excavations, we utilized heavy machinery to clear intersecting lanes along cardinal directions on a 10-meter grid across the site. We conducted systematic metal detection along these lanes and recorded all finds and anomalies, such as nail clouds, with a sub-meter accuracy Trimble and plotted our finds...
The Role of Time in Plantation Management at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (2017)
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Southern plantation owners sought to incorporate time consciousness into their production methods in a bid to enter the emerging industrial capitalist economy of the United States. However, mechanical time, regulated by the clock instead of nature, was at odds not only with the natural cycles of the sun, but also with the very institution running the plantation economy: slavery. History documents that plantation managers attempted to use clocks,...
Room for All: A Pluralistic Approach to Privileged Spaces (2017)
During the 18th and 19th centuries, California Rancho adobe residences were the center of daily interactions between laborers, visitors, traders, owners, and overseers. Common interpretive recreations of the region’s adobe residences emphasize the land owners and residential uses of adobe structures. This is done to the exclusion of understanding the pluralistic nature of the adobe uses in space and time, and the diverse community of colonists and indigenous laborers who worked and lived within...
Roots in the Community: A Macrobotanical Analysis of Enslaved African-American Households at James Madison's Montpelier (2016)
In 2008, the archaeology department at James Madison’s Montpelier began a multi-year project that sought to understand the community dynamics between enslaved workers at the plantation in the early 19th century. This study excavated and analyzed four sites: South Yard, Stable Quarter, Field Quarter, and Tobacco Barn Quarter. Each of these sites represents a different community of enslaved workers, from those who worked in the mansion to field hands. This paper will compare the macrobotanical...
The Rose Room Workshop (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Global Submerged Paleolandscapes Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation reports the outcomes of a workshop held at the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, June 2019. The workshop identified stakeholders, collaborations, and synergistic relationships to establish and expand cooperative interdisciplinary and agency partnerships to encourage, advance, and...
Round Pegs and Square Holes: The Casks from Vasa. (2018)
The casks from Vasa exhibit features infrequently observed in other collections of archaeological cooperage, including distinctive square holes at their midsections, heads that are made of only two to four edge-joined pieces, and evenly spaced bands of hoops. In contrast, Iberian and French cooperage typically exhibits exclusively circular bungholes, heads made of five or six pieces reinforced with a bar, and hoops clustered at opposite ends of the cask. The square-holed Vasa casks were made of...
Routine Expedition: Using Intra-Agency Partnerships to Manage U.S. Navy Sunken Military Craft (2018)
Long-term management of underwater sites entails recurrent condition assessments that can be costly on a limited budget. Monitoring the vast collection of Navy sunken military craft in U.S. waters is a challenging task that has recently been supported through partnerships within DON utilizing the broad range of Navy’s expertise and resources. In a cooperative project, Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 2 has teamed up with Naval History and Heritage Command’s Underwater Archaeology Branch to fulfill...
ROV-Based 3D Modeling Efforts on a Submerged WWII Aircraft for Museum Display (2016)
In 1944, factory workers and community members from Tulsa, OK bought war bonds to finance the last B-24 Liberator built by the Tulsa Douglas Aircraft plant. They named her, wrote signatures and messages on her fuselage, and sent her to Europe with a part Tulsa crew. She went down off the coast of Croatia after a bombing mission but was never forgotten as a WWII community icon. Archaeologists are now in the process of preserving the cultural heritage and physical remains of the site, as well...
The Royal Treatment: Conservation of Archaeological Material from Revolutionary War Vessel Royal Savage (2018)
In 2015, the Naval History and Heritage Command Underwater Archaeology (UA) Branch received the remains of Royal Savage, a Revolutionary War vessel which sank in Lake Champlain in 1776 following service in the Battle of Valcour Island. These remains include more than 50 timbers and 1,300 associated artifacts, many in fragile condition following more than eight decades in uncontrolled environments and minimal preservation efforts. UA archaeologists and conservators are in the midst of a...
RT This: The Collaborative Public Archaeology Brand in Social Media (2013)
All archaeology on-line is a form of outreach, yet behind every site a brand of public archaeology is in practice. Using previously defined roles of public archaeologists, this paper will examine the application of those modes on-line. While all approaches accomplish an on-line presence, the community collaborative brand is more visible, sustainable, and efficient as measured through analytics. A look at the multiplatform social media strategy used by the Northeast Regional Center for FPAN...
Ruins of a Forgotten Highway: The impacts of improvements by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the St. Croix Riverway after 100 years. (2016)
A number of organizations within the National Park Service collaborated in the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway to document the extensive United States Army Corps of Engineers "improvements" along the lower river below St. Croix Falls. From 1879 to 1900 the Corps built 3.6 miles of wing dams, closing dams, jetties, revetments, and shoreline rip-rap to regulate the river and make it a predictable commercial highway for steamboats and log drives. Through discovery and documentation of the...