North America (Geographic Keyword)
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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...
The Ruins of a Plantation-Era Landscape: Using LiDAR and Pedestrian Survey to Locate Montserrat’s 17th-19th Century Colonial Past. (2016)
The Caribbean island of Montserrat’s historic and prehistoric cultural history is threatened by volcanic activity, modern development, and the natural processes accompanying mountainous, tropical environments. Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat (SLAM) aims to document the nature and location of archaeological sites to inform our understanding of the island’s colonial landscape. Because many areas are not easily accessible, SLAM conducted a hybrid survey process utilizing LiDAR...
"The Rules of Good Breeding Must be Punctiliously Observed": Constructing Space at Mid-Nineteenth Century Fort Vancouver, Washington (2015)
The U.S. Army’s Fort Vancouver in southwest Washington was headquarters for Pacific Northwest military exploration and campaigns in the mid-19th century. Between 1849 and the mid-1880s, members of the military community operated within a rigid social climate with firm cultural expectations and rules of behavior that were explicitly codified and articulated within the larger Victorian societal culture of gentility. Drawing upon datasets derived from the archaeological record and documentary...
Russian Colonial-Influenced Architecture in an Alaska Creole Village, Afognak, Alaska (2015)
In 2012, at the request of the Native Village of Afognak, a multi-agency team documented Afognak Village, an Alutiiq Creole settlement abandoned following the 1964 Alaska earthquake and tsunami. Village features included pre-contact and historical period archaeological sites, cemeteries, garden plots, fencelines, trails, remnants of a Russian Orthodox church, and numerous residences and outbuildings. Nearly all the buildings had at least partially collapsed and many were in advanced states of...
Russian Occupation of St. Matthew and Hall Islands, Bering Sea Wildlife Refuge, Alaska (2015)
St. Matthew and Hall islands are located in the Bering Sea, far from the Alaskan mainland. First discovered by the Russians between 1764 and 1766, little attempt was made to occupy or utilize these islands until 1809 when a fur hunting expedition was sent to St. Matthew to over-winter. In 2012, the USF&WS sent an archaeologist to attempt to locate the site of this earlier Russian hunting camp with archaeological investigations focused on the testing of an earlier identified cabin site on St....
Ruthann Knudson: Colleague, Friend, Mentor, and Much More (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ruthann Knudson's career in archaeology began with work on midwestern ceramics in 1963 at the University of Minnesota and spanned nearly six decades. During that remarkable time, she taught at academic institutions, engaged in contract archaeology, much research focused on Paleoindians and lithics, surveyed,...
Ruthann Knudson: Legacy of Public Education and Outreach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ruthann Knudson was always a proponent of archaeology education and public outreach. As her student at the University of Idaho, I got to see Ruthann in action early in my career. Ruthann’s dedication to involving the public stuck with me and everywhere I went for school and employment, I volunteered to go to schools...
Ruthann's Rivers: Archaeology and Archaeopolitics on the Middle Fork and Dolores Projects (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Paleo Lithics to Legacy Management: Ruthann Knudson—Inawa’sioskitsipaki" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two projects with both substantive archaeological and archaeopolitical aspects are discussed. Frist, Ruthann's role in leading a survey of Forest Service campgrounds on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in central Idaho and her related work to obtain better representation of cultural resources in Wilderness Area...