North America (Geographic Keyword)
2,901-2,925 (3,610 Records)
In planning research strategies that integrate environmental archaeology, comparative data sets are strongly encouraged. If analyses of faunal, floral or insect remains reveal details about past environments and economies, then the integration of other methods can only provide more data, improving our knowledge of past populations and their daily lives. A decade of environmental research and sampling on a single site in Quebec City, the Intendant’s Palace Site, has allowed the opportunity to...
Scanning at the Artifact Roadshow: 3D Imaging as an Outreach Tool in Community Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Capturing and Sharing Vermont’s Past: 3D Imaging as a Tool for Undergraduate Research and Community Engagement" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community outreach has played a major role in the Castleton Hidden History Project, which highlights a diverse and inclusive history of the Castleton, VT area from the end of the Ice Age through the present day. Since 2023, a significant part of outreach programming has...
A School for Williamsburg's Enslaved: The Bray School Archaeological Project (2013)
In 1760 the London-based philanthropy, the Associates of Dr. Bray, established a charity school for the religious education of free and enslaved African American children in Williamsburg, the eighteenth-century capitol of the Virginia colony. Known as the Bray School, the school was briefly housed in a rented dwelling adjacent to the campus of the College of William and Mary. The archaeological investigation of the suspected site of the Bray school in 2012 was a rare opportunity to materially...
The Schuyler Effect: From Brooklyn to Lowell, Utah, and Beyond (2017)
Over the past half century Robert Schulyer’s penetrating intellect and rigorous scholarship has had a deep and sustained impact on the development and maturation of the field of Historical Archaeology. His impact has been nowhere as profound as in his role as a mentor to generations of students. Not a few of those students share the common experience of having their professional career course sent careening, topsy-turvy, in unanticipated directions under the influence of Schulyer’s catholic...
Schuyler’s "Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions"—Then and Now (2017)
Robert Schuyler’s Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions was first published in 1978 and is now in its fifth printing. The Guide was the first work to gather together some of the most important founding documents of the relatively new field of historical archaeology and is still in use in undergraduate and graduate courses today. This paper will review the themes of that volume, as selected and edited by Dr. Schuyler, and will discuss how the ideas put forth...
Schwatka: The History and Engineering of a Late Nineteenth-Century Yukon River Steamboat (2015)
In the late 19th century the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon Territory created an unprecedented shipbuilding boom along the West Coast of North America. More than 131 riverboats were constructed in a single year, often with considerable design variation. This paper describes the history, unique characteristics and engineering of the well-preserved wooden hull of Schwatka, a stern wheel steamboat now lying in the terrestrial "boneyard" at West Dawson, Yukon, Canada.
Science, Circumstance, Dollars and Cents: Perspectives on the Public Benefit of Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology as a Public Good: Why Studying Archaeology Creates Good Careers and Good Citizens" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Opening with an introduction to a fictional (as of this writing) federal agency seeking to mine the public value of our nation’s archaeological legacy, this presentation pivots to a consideration of the origins of precontact versus historical archaeology and our subfield’s interactions with the...
Scorpion’s Last Sting: The Investigation of a War of 1812 Shipwreck in the Patuxent River, Maryland (2016)
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...