North America (Geographic Keyword)
3,001-3,025 (3,602 Records)
From Lexington and Concord to Yorktown, fighting for the newfound independence of the American colonies occupied soldiers for only a fraction of the eight years spent engaged in conflict. The archaeology of the American Revolution goes well beyond the battlefield locations that dot the American landscape. With soldiers spending up to six months of the year in encampments, places like Valley Forge offer researchers the opportunity to understand the time spent outside the fighting season. This...
Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed To Early Man in North America (1907)
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.
Skeletal Remains Suggesting or Attributed To Early Man in North America (1907)
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.
Skeletons in the Closet: Ethical, Moral, Pedagogical, and Intellectual Issues in Managing Unprovenanced Osteological Legacy Collections (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Legacy collections of human remains at teaching institutions present a unique set of ethical issues. They frequently are the result of decades of unknown sourcing. Even when purchased from medical supply companies, ethical standards over time shift, raising new issues. Hidden away, many institutions know that they hold these collections, yet they may not...
Slave Foodways at James Madison’s Montpelier A.D. 1810- 1830 (2015)
Based primarily on similarities in occupation, the enslaved population at Montpelier formed distinct enclaves within the plantation, both spatially and within the hierarchy of the operation of the plantation. While food rations at Montpelier were nominally the same for each of these groups, position within the plantation hierarchy created differing opportunity to supplement those rations through access to both the Madison’s themselves and to the means to acquire wild game. Zooarchaeological...
Slave Quarters, Stand, or Trash Dump? Determining Site Function at the Food Plot Site. (2013)
The Food Plot Site is located on the Tombigbee National Forest in Mississippi. It was discovered in a 2006 survey. Initially, only whiteware and amethyst glass were found at the site and it was determined to be ineligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The site was revisited in 2008, shortly after it had been plowed. During this visit hundreds of early English ceramics were discovered. In fact, these were some of the earliest ceramics ever found on the Tombigbee...
Slave Ships and Mutiny, The Cahuita National Park Shipwreck Survey in Costa Rica (2013)
Tourism brochures advertise two shipwrecks in the Cahuita National Park in Costa Rica. The sites are restricted to snorkeling only and the use of SCUBA equipment is not permitted. Local guides, whose families have specialized in free diving for generations, are employed to offer snorkeling tours and are required to be used in the confines of the park. Little is currently known about the identity of these shipwrecks. Historical and archaeological investigations suggest several possible candidates...
Slave Ships: Identifying Them in the Archaeological Record and Understanding Their Unique Characteristics (2015)
This paper briefly examines the structure and construction of the slave ships in the United States and England and looks at how slave ships are different in structure and function from other merchant vessels. By examining them as special purpose ships, trends in structure and construction become apparent and prove to be unique to slave ships. The material culture found in the archaeological record that could identify a ship as having participated in the slave trade will also be examined. The...
The Slave Trade in the Gulf of Mexico: The Potential for Furthering Research through the Archaeology of Shipwrecked Slave Ships (2016)
For more than 300 years, the slave trade transported human cargo to slave markets along the American Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and throughout the Caribbean. In 1808, Congress banned the slave trade throughout the U.S., although smuggling, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, continued for another half-century. While thousands of slave ship voyages have been documented, only a few slave ships have ever been investigated archaeologically worldwide. In the Gulf of Mexico, an untold number of vessels...
Slave village organization in the French West Indies. (2013)
Over the last ten years, archaeological investigations of plantation slave villages in the French West Indies have begun to reveal insights into plantation village organization and structure. Prior to this work, what little was known about French West Indian slave villages was derived either from standing remains on plantation sites, or more frequently, from a small range of historical documents including images and accounts. These sources were far from representative. Archaeological work by...
The Slave Wrecks Project in National Park Units of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands (2016)
Since 2010 the National Park Service (NPS) has worked with the Smithsonian Institution and George Washington University to foster greater understanding of how the African slave trade shaped global history. This endeavor—the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP)—represents a long-term, multi-national effort to locate, document, protect, and analyze maritime sites pertaining to the slave trade, following the entire process including capture, transportation, sale, enslavement, resistance, and freedom. The...
The Slave Wrecks Project: An Agenda, An Approach for the Maritime Archaeology of the Slave Trade (2016)
This presentation draws upon our research worldwide—and the Sao Jose investigation in particular--to discuss the Slave Wrecks Project’s emerging signature approach to the maritime archaeology of the slave trade. Slaver shipwrecks serve as points of entrée for broader multi-disciplinary, multi-country, collaborative investigations of African-sourced slave trades and enslavement experiences – aiming to incorporate archaeological, archival, and ethno-historical investigation of related...
Slavery and Freedom on the Periphery: Faunal Analysis of Four Ante- and Post-bellum Maryland Sites (2015)
Vertebrate faunal remains recovered from four Maryland cultural resource management projects provide a unique opportunity to explore the dietary patterns of formerly enslaved and free African Americans in the late-18th to early-20th centuries. Maryland straddled the border between a slave based, plantation economy and a free labor economy, allowing its African American communities more opportunities to gain their freedom and earn a living. Faunal assemblages were analyzed and compared to assess...
Slavery and memory in France’s former colony: designing the commemoration of memory at the Loyola cemetery while respecting sensibilities of history (2013)
Our paper reflects on the development of a commemoration concept which takes into account the sensibilities of descendants from the slave trade period in French Guiana. Memory of the trade period is a sensitive issue among most Caribbean Islands; our 16-year experience of research at one site presents various questions with which we are confronted in order for the local population to appropriate the spirit of place. Under Jesuit rule the Loyola Plantation comprised an area making slightly over...
Slavery and Resistance in Maryland: Findings From the L'Hermitage Slave Village Excavations (2016)
From 2010 to 2012, National Park Service archeologists, students, and volunteers conducted archeological investigations of the L’Hermitage plantation at Monocacy National Battlefield. The plantation was established in 1794 by the Vincendieres, French Catholic planters who came to Maryland to escape the Saint-Domingue slave revolution. They brought 12 enslaved laborers with them. By 1800 they owned 90 enslaved people. Traditional field methods, historical research, and genealogical studies were...
Slavery to Freedom on the Web: A Community Engagement Experiment for Online Exhibits (2013)
Historic St. Mary's City is a living history and archaeology park dedicated primarily to the recreation and preservation of the 17th century landscape of Maryland's first capital city. However, the landscape has undergone significant change since the city's abandonment in 1700, including a significant period as a slave and tenant plantation. Because this period of the past no longer exists on the landscape, HSMC has pursued funding to build an online digital exhibit to tell the story of the...
Slavery, Race, and the Making of a University in the Capital of the Confederacy (2016)
In 1994, comingled human remains were accidentally discovered during construction at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) campus of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). The association of these remains with MCV should not have been unexpected. Found in an abandoned well and dating to the first half of the 19th century, these human remains from people of African descent bear grim witness to the desecration of interred individuals in a bid to advance medical knowledge—knowledge that largely...
Slaves as Individuals: Variability in Status and Identity Among the Field Slave Houses at Colonels Island Plantation, Georgia (2018)
Most archaeological studies of slave communities analyze structural remains and household debris to interpret lifeways of the enslaved occupants as a group, and perhaps how this group may have changed over time or how it differed from the lives of the overseer, the planter, or slaves in other communities. The assumption has been that most slaves within a community exhibit similar status and acquisition of goods. Our excavations of five dwellings within a nineteenth century field slave settlement...
Slipped, Salted and Glazed: An Overview of North Carolina’s Pottery from 1750-1850 (2016)
Not long ago, Pennsylvania potter, Jack Troy declared "if North America has a ‘pottery state’ it must be North Carolina, as there is probably no other state with such a highly developed pottery consciousness," – and he is right! North Carolina’s pottery heritage is unique in many ways: it is the most southern state with a well-developed earthenware tradition (ca. 1750s); it is the most northern state with an alkaline-glazed stoneware tradition, in addition to its salt-glaze; its early...
Slipware Philadelphia Style: Case Study from Recent Excavations at the Museum of the American Revolution Site (2016)
Slipware ceramics have been unearthed in large quantities at archaeological sites around Philadelphia, most recently, at the site of the future Museum of the American Revolution at the corner of 3rd and Chesnut Streets in Old City. What is known as the Philadelphia style was a mixing of two European traditions of slip decoration brought across the Atlantic with the earliest settlers: first English and then German. While many of the slip trailed designs appear similar, they vary in simple ways...
"Sloops of 30 Tuns are Carried Overland in This Place": Cart Roads, Trade, and Settlement in the Northern Delmarva Peninsula, C. 1670-1800. (2013)
Since 2008 numerous previously unknown early colonial homestead sites have been discovered in association with a network of cart roads established from the 1670’s to connect the Upper Chesapeake Bay with the lower Delaware River. The research, commissioned by the Delaware Department of Transportation as part of the U.S. Route 301 highway project, is drastically revising models of settlement in the region. The cart roads were used for both legal commerce and an extensive illicit trade, the...
Small Chinese Settlements in the southwest Pacific: a brief look at Chinese Bakeries and Households in the Southwest Pacific 1890-1930 (2013)
In addition to the spread of Chinese populations around the Pacific Rim in the nineteenth century, Chinese manufactured goods also were sold throughout the South Pacific. Fijian’s, Tongans, and Maoris purchased Chinese Ceramics and iron implements. The Chinese immigrants who lived on islands in the region also provided needed services. Bakeries and grocery stores and retail stores ran by Chinese owners carried goods manufactured in China. The end result was an archaeological signature that...
Small Waists and Tiny Feet: The Influence of Fashion on Deformed Skeletal Remains, Even in a Girl from the Wild West (2017)
Fashion depicts many aspects of a person's life; from socioeconomic status to personal taste. Emmie Baker Scott followed the trends of fashionable dress from childhood to her death in 1885. Her skeletal remains and clothing reveal her family's emphasis on emulating the upper class and the presentation of an ideal Victorian era female figure. Born to a doctor, his occupation would have brought wealth and social standing to the family. Emmie might have been scrutinized with increased pressure...
Smoke and Spirit: Exploring Bodily and Sensual Concerns at Early Harvard College (2018)
Identity, a central concept in contemporary historical archaeology theory, has been enlivened by recent scholarship that is mindful of bodily experience. Some scholars emphasize embodiment, others explore further sensory dimensions of historical identities embodied in human and material interactions, including emotion, memory, sensuality, and nostalgia, to explore the sensing body in the material world through sound, smell, touch, sexuality, and emotion. The intent in focusing on sensual...
Smoke is in the Air: Tobacco and Traditional Plant Use in 19th Century Plantation Life (2018)
At Ames Plantation in Western TN, excavations on the Fanny Dickins Slave House Site (1841-1853) have yielded a plethora of information about the everyday lives of the enslaved population. However, little is known about the smoking habits of these dynamic individuals. More can be revealed through employing multiple lines of evidence to generate nuanced understandings of choices surrounding the use of specific pipes and the varieties of plants smoked, such as tobacco and jimson weed. Conducting...