North America (Geographic Keyword)
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In 2010 and 2011, the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA), the Underwater Archaeology Branch (UAB) of the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), and the Maryland Historical Trust (MHT) investigated a War of 1812 shipwreck (site 18PR226) in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The wreck, a relatively intact fully-decked vessel, is believed to have served in the Chesapeake Flotilla, a small fleet of gunboats and support craft commanded by Commodore Joshua Barney during the defense of...
Scrannying for Spidge amongst the Shipwrecks; Interviewing the Pirates of Plymouth, England. (2015)
Over the past 2 years the SHIPS Project has set out to conduct several dozen oral histories concerning divers’ recollections from the early days of scuba diving in Plymouth, UK. These oral histories were undertaken for several reasons, to better understand the layout of virgin shipwrecks when first located, to record the items recovered, which are affectionately known as ‘spidge’, and to document the human interest and lust for ‘scrannying’. What has been explored and expanded upon within the...
Scraping Our Way To The Past: A Methodological Approach For Chinese Rural Work Camps (2015)
Recovering meaningful information from ephemeral, short-term work camps in the west is challenging, given the brief occupation time, absence of shelters other than tents or portable structures, and informal layout and design. One methodological approach that has proved effective for research at camps with shallow or no subsurface deposits focuses on exposing and investigating the horizontal deposits across the sites. Archaeological studies of Chinese occupied camps related to mining, railroad...
Scratching the Surface: New Discoveries Within Old Archeological Collections (2016)
Here in the NMSC archeology lab, we are privileged to work with archeological collections from national parks across the Northeast. Many of these collections were excavated before 1987, and in many cases, sat untouched and unutilized in storage until they were eligible for cataloging funds. We have seen firsthand the incredible research potential – unknown and untapped for decades – that these collections offer. One memorable collection from Petersburg National Battlefield was excavated in...
Scratching the Surface: Using GIS to Understand Richmond Archaeology (2016)
Richmond, Virginia’s first official archaeological site record dates to 1963. In the intervening half century, the archaeological landscape has changed in physical and metaphorical ways. One important yardstick of these changes is the 1985 Richmond Metropolitan Area Archeological Survey (RMAAS), a large regional planning project conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University Archaeological Research Center. This paper explores Richmond’s archaeological landscape through a Geographical Information...
Scylla or Charybdis? Prioritizing the Investigation of Sites Endangered by Natural Hazards (2018)
Maryland has 8,000 miles of tidal shoreline associated with the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and more than 12-percent of its surface area in floodplains. These high risk areas for flooding and coastal erosion contain about 40-percent of Maryland’s archeological sites and presumably many more that have yet to be discovered. It is not feasible or prudent to excavate every endangered site, thus choices about which sites to investigate must be made strategically. This paper lays out a reasoned...
Seadogs and Their Parrots: The Reality of Pretty Polly (2015)
Public imagination was long ago ensnared by images of swashbuckling pirates and their winged sidekicks. Exotic plumes illustrated by Howard Pyle and famous parrots such as Captain Flint have led to many misconceptions about the reality of avian pets on ships and their greater role in the seafaring community. The transportation of parrots from exotic locales into western culture provides a unique opportunity to study the seamen involved in this exchange and lends insight into how...
Seafaring Women in Confined Quarters: Living Conditions aboard Ships in 19th Century (2018)
Wives, sisters, daughters and nieces of captains lived at sea on merchant and whaling ships that sailed from New England during the 19th century. Their outer world may have expanded while voyaging to distant ports around the globe, but their physical world contracted severely. Spatial analysis of the rooms women lived in reveals the amount of space they inhabited within a ship. In 1856, Henrietta Deblois noted that she could not go forward to the fo’c’sle where the crew bunked. Seafaring women...
Search for a Seamless Narrative: Thoughts on Engaging the General Public Through Writing and Other Means (2016)
Diana diZerega Wall has a distinguished career in Archaeology working as a pioneer in large-scale urban excavations, as a museum curator, and as a university professor. In each of these endeavors, she has made it a priority to bring the major implications of her scholarship, and that of archaeology itself, to a wide array of general audiences. Much of this has been done by analyzing, with a contemporary eye, huge amounts of archaeological and historical data, collected for various reasons and...
The Search for the Lost French Fleet of 1565: Results of the 2014 Survey (2015)
In July of 2014 the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program (LAMP), in partnership with the National Park Service, the Center for Historical Archaeology, and the Institute for Maritime History, and with funding from the State of Florida and the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration, launched an expedition to search for the lost colonization vessels of Jean Ribault. These ships had been intended to supply the nascent French colony at Fort Caroline in present-day Jacksonville, Florida. Instead they...
The Search for the Primary Source of Kings Canyon/La Poudre Pass Obsidian in Colorado (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During field survey in 2011, archaeologists for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest discovered obsidian nodules contained in ancient alluvial gravels of the Miocene North Park formation in Jackson County, Colorado. The Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, analyzed this obsidian using ED-XRF and determined that it was...
The Search for Yarrow Mamout in Georgetown: A Preliminary Assessment (2016)
What happens when a concerned citizen notifies the D.C. City Archaeologist that a possible historic human burial is threated with disturbance on privately owned property? This paper outlines the archaeological survey conducted between June and August 2015 to answer this question. The possible human burial is that of Yarrow Mamout, a Muslim slave who purchased property at what is now 3324 Dent Place, NW, in Upper Georgetown in 1800 and lived there until his death in 1823. Mamout became famous...
Searching for Clarity (and Lead) in Colorless Colonial Glass Tableware from Southern Maryland and Virginia's Northern Neck (2018)
In the late 17th century, most glass tableware used in England was imported soda-based glass until a domestically produced potash-lead based glass became available in the late 1670s. This English lead glass would go on to dominate glass tableware of the 18th century. When did colonists in Southern Maryland and the Northern Neck of Virginia begin importing and using this English lead glass? Determining when lead glass began appearing required diving into collections of glass at several collection...
Searching for Guerrero in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (2018)
Spurred by Guerrero’s tragic end and its cultural heritage value, researchers have searched for archaeological remains in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park that bring the story to life. Magnetic and diver surveys by the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, RPM Nautical Foundation, FKNMS Submerged Resource Inventory Team and Diving With a Purpose (DWP) investigated shallow reefs surrounding Turtle Harbor and located numerous shipwrecks and...
Searching for Proud Shoes: The Pauli Murray Project and the Place of Historical Archaeology within a Social Justice Organization (2017)
The authors organized an excavation on the site of the Pauli Murray Family Home in 2016. Murray was a fierce advocate for equal rights, especially on behalf of African Americans and women. In her autobiographies she traces her refusal to follow the scripts available to "Negro" "women" in the early 20th century to her upbringing among extended family in Durham, North Carolina. The session abstract urges contributors to consider how historical archaeology can inform contemporary strategies for...
Searching For Slavery In Saint Domingue. (2017)
Saint Domingue was the most important European colony of the Caribbean region, producing vast amounts of wealth through the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. It was also the setting of the only large scale slave revolt that succeeded in overturning the slavery system. In spite of this importance to Atlantic studies, African Diaspora studies, and historical archaeology, very little substantive research has been conducted on sites associated with the dwelling places of the...
Searching for the Lewis and Clark Expedition at Ft. Kaskaskia, Illinois (2018)
Lewis and Clark recruited 11 soldiers from the small US Army outpost of Ft. Kaskaskia (1802-1807), Illinois, in 1803 to join their expedition to explore the American west. This event traditionally has been identified as having occurred at a 1750s French fort of the same name. 2017 SIU summer field school investigations within the fort walls successfully located the remains of the French occupation but found no evidence of use by the US Army. Archaeological investigation of a nearby hilltop,...
Searching for the Plaza Vieja: historical archaeology, ground-penetrating radar, and community outreach in Belen, New Mexico (2015)
This poster describes a collaborative project between archaeologists, historians, and community members to identify the location of the original plaza and associated structures in Belen, New Mexico. Established in 1741, Belen's initial Spanish settlement was near the Rio Grande, but as the city grew, development shifted to the west. By the late 19th century, the original plaza, or Plaza Vieja, and associated Catholic church were abandoned. Although the Plaza Vieja was occasionally referenced in...
Seas of Connection: The Irish-Italian Comparison In Understanding The Marginal State (2018)
This paper focuses on the similarities of marginal development and population movement between 19th and early 20th century communities in Western Ireland and Southern Italy. Focusing specifically on the local development of historically marginalized communities in South-West Co. Mayo, Ireland against that of the San Pasquale Valley in Calabria, Italy, this paper investigates narratives of state-sponsored marginalization in these two disparate locations, and traces the entanglements between...
A Second Life for the Alt-Right: Uses of Conservative Material Culture in Online Spaces (2018)
The use of social media as an organizing space for the alt-right has received considerable attention since the election of Donald Trump. The alt-right refers to those loosely-affiliated groups that share a far-right ideology intersecting white nationalism. This paper examines how these groups use other forms of new media. The alt-right has long used online worlds such as Second Life to promote their nationalist ideology. Employing a netnographic approach, the author explores the continued rise...
Secrets Stashed in Dental Impacta: Best Practices (2017)
Material from the root canal of a teen male from Jamestown was removed for study including microscopic analysis. Examination of the material, transported on sealed slides to PaleoResearch Institute, yielded starches, fungal hyphae, pollen, and fibers. Options for safe transport and transfer of materials to working microscope slides are discussed. Principals of microscopy, including having no air in the working light path between the microscope slide and the coverslip, are important to...
Section 106 Contributions to Urban Archaeology: What Was Lost is Now Found (2016)
When improvements were proposed for the Whitehurst Freeway in Washington, DC, existing conditions would not have recommended this heavily urbanized project area for a research-oriented archaeological investigation. The area was traversed by elevated freeway ramps and major roadways. As well, it had been the site of a 20th century school and 19th and 20th century industrial use. Yet, because of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, archaeological investigations led to the...
Sediment Identification Challenges: Is That Really Ancient Bilge Mud? (2013)
Excavations of shipwrecks at Tantura Lagoon in Israel between 1995 and 1997 resulted in a rich collection of sediment specimens which have been catalogued as ‘bilge mud’ – the residue that collects in the bottom of a ship’s hold. Some of these samples have been analyzed for the presence of pollen, seeds, insects and other organic materials, but the body of the sediment itself also holds important clues to the past travels of the vessels. Using techniques more common to oceanography and...
Sedimentary and Taphonomic Contexts of Quaternary Vertebrate Fossils in the Northern Rocky Mountains (2018)
Quaternary vertebrate assemblages from the northern Rocky Mountains can be used to understand the biogeographic consequences of climate change. Some localities contain strata from before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), while others consist mostly of Late Glacial and Holocene deposits. The Merrell Local Fauna is from a stratigraphic sequence in Centennial Valley. Radiocarbon dates range from >52,000 to 19,000 BP and fossils are in lacustrine deposits, fluvial sediments, and a debris flow. The...
Seeds, Weeds, and Feed: Macrobotanical Analysis of Enslaved African-American Plant Use and Foodways at a James Madison's Montpelier (2015)
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. In this paper, I discuss and compare the...