North America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Franklin H Price.

Florida has the largest collection of prehistoric dugout canoes in the world. The state also has a large collection of historic dugouts, some of which pose interesting challenges in terms of identification. In particular, one mysterious and distinctive historic dugout canoe type is exhibited in three examples from south Florida, one from the Everglades, another from the Florida Keys, and the last reportedly found near Key Biscayne. These canoes are characterized by a robust hull, carved thwart...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Nash. John O'Shea. Ashley Lemke.

This is an abstract from the "Liquid Landscapes: Recent Developments in Submerged Landscape Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The South Gap site is at a depth of 105 feet beneath Lake Huron on a submerged landscape referred to as the Alpena Amberly Ridge (AAR). Once exposed as dry land between 11,000 and 8000 cal BP, the AAR provided a causeway for migrating animals, such as caribou, to cross the Lake Huron basin. The landform also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clinton M. M. McKenzie.

Report on archaeological investigations of two Spanish Colonial dams and associated irrigation canals (presas y acequias). The San Antonio de Valero begun in 1719 and the Labores de Arriba (or Upper Labor) begun in 1776. The Valero system supported irrigation for the eponymous Mission Pueblo. The Upper Labor system was for settlers in the Villa de San Fernando. Both systems have their headworks in the upper reach of the San Antonio River within the current Brackenridge Park. The Valero system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mitch W Marken.

This paper discusses the purpose and meaning of markings found impressed into pottery vessels, beeswax blocks, or carved into silver bars and possibly other trade goods shipped aboard Spanish galleons between 1500-and 1800. The paper will discuss examples recoverd from shipwrecks from the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific trade, archival evidence and modern correlations. 

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Hertfelder.

This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Covering an area of nearly 10 km2, La Playa (SON F:10:3) is one of the most important archaeological sites in northwest Mexico. Significantly, La Playa has one of the most extensive Early Agricultural period deposits in the Southwest United States/Northwest Mexico. It is also being impacted by severe sheet erosion that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David J. Breitkreutz.

The colonial settlement of Hanna’s Town is a vital connection to Pennsylvania’s frontier history. The significance of the Hanna’s Town site to regional heritage is represented by the effort expended by the Westmoreland County Historical Society on archaeological and geophysical projects that have taken place at the site since 1969. However, after numerous investigations, questions remain about layout of the Hanna’s Town settlement. This proposal suggests a model for the investigation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David J. Breitkreutz.

The colonial settlement of Hanna’s Town is a vital connection to Pennsylvania’s frontier history. The significance of the Hanna’s Town site to regional heritage is represented by the effort expended by the Westmoreland County Historical Society on archaeological and geophysical projects that have taken place at the site since 1969. However, after numerous investigations, not much is known about layout of the Hanna’s Town settlement. This paper will potentially demonstrate that specialized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Allaun D'Lopez. Ismael Sánchez-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paleoindian presence south of the modern geo-political US-Mexico border is relatively poorly understood when compared to that of the rest of North America. A notable exception to this gap in knowledge surrounds the work at Fin del Mundo in Sonora, Mexico. This northern Mexican site is the subject of extensive survey and excavation, revealing the only known...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chenoweth.

Forming a different kind of plantation community, a unique group of African people who were never enslaved existed in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) in the 1830s to 1850s.  Captured for slavery in Africa after the British ended the slave trade in 1807, and after much loss and time, these people were given a plantation on Tortola where they lived—surrounded at first by enslaved people—in a settlement known as Kingstown.  An 1831 map of their settlement exists, providing insight primarily into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kiley A. Gilbert.

Between 1850 and 1880, the First Election District of Anne Arundel County, Maryland hosted a variety of farm types and farm sizes. K-means cluster analysis of agricultural census data identified farm types over this forty-year period. The findings serve as a basis for understanding the archaeology of two farms on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center campus and assessing the effects of late 19th-century land management strategies on local ecosystems.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Perrotti. D. Shane Miller. Morgan F. Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research into the timing and process of human migration to North America at the end of the Pleistocene relies heavily on accurate paleoenvironmental reconstruction to understand habitable locations at the time. However, Pleistocene-aged archaeological sites in North America are rare, and specific paleoenvironmental information for these sites is often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn E Sampeck.

A variant of symbolic and structural violence can be termed "spatial violence".  Colonial reordering of space, expressed as civilizing, moral order, created iniquities in power that physically prevented access to resources and segregated people into controllable spaces for achieving imperial schemes. This process treated land as one thing and its residents as something separate, objectified, commodified, and thus removable. Spatial violence in the case of many Native Americans was extreme, not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Norton. Kimberly Kasper. Corena Hasselle.

Throughout ten-years of excavation in western Tennessee, a more nuanced picture of 19th century everyday life in the antebellum South has emerged. With over twenty contiguous plantations on the 18,400-acre contemporary Ames land base, we compare specific characteristics of material culture from large (3,000+ acres) and small plantations (300-1000 acres). Our research focuses on Fanny Dickins, a woman with the financial means to purchase and run a small cotton plantation in Western Tennessee....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eric Jones. Martin Welker.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent genetic research (Lethlohair et al. 2018) showed that dogs were introduced into North America over as many as four migration events. The first two were by Native Americans and the third and fourth by Europeans. In light of these findings, our research seeks to describe and explain the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Leone.

Proletarian drug foods north of the Caribbean in the Chesapeake area include spirits. Spirits include bourbon. Spirits include those of the dead, as well as the Holy Ghost. This paper attempts to introduce the concept of altered states of consciousness produced by both kinds of spirits. Can these be called proletariat drug foods? The purpose of this paper is to ask whether spirits of either kind so dull the senses that an acute perception of reality escapes the exploited or merely produces the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Muhammad Fraser-Rahim.

This paper will examine the encounter between Africa, Islam and American history in the antebellum period of the U.S from first hand accounts of enslaved Africans. Yarrow Mamout was a Muslim Fulani enslaved in 1752, and manumitted in 1796. He purchased property in Georgetown in 1800, and there is currently an archaeological investigation on his former property. Using original Arabic documents, this research explores the spirituality, literacy and religious tolerance of enslaved African Muslims...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradford Botwick.

An archaeological and historical study of upper- and middle-class households in Mobile, Alabama provided an opportunity to examine how certain forms of material culture and the built environment served to demarcate social, racial, and economic differences in this city and how these compared with other cities.  The block under consideration and its neighborhood were generally homogenous, with residents being the families of professionals. Notably, most of the properties were rentals; land use,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlyn I Gorman. Genevieve C Cameron.

This paper examines the results of the chronological analysis of glass tops and bases from several sites along Main Street in St. Charles, Missouri.  Bottle fragments from both intact and disturbed contexts are used to help provide chronological context to these urban site locations.  Further comparison with diagnostic materials from the undisturbed levels, along with possible functional categories of the bottle fragments, will also be discussed relative to possible site functions.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dave Morgan. Stephen Lubkemann. Charles Lawson. David Conlin. Andres Diaz.

BISC-2 represents a type of site that is all too familiar to maritime archaeologists: one subject to extensive recent post-deposition disturbance as a result of different forms of destructive human intervention. Too often such sites are dismissed as too "spoiled" to provide reliable insight into the past. We suggest that while regrettable, such recent interventions should not lead us to dismiss such sites as archaeologically irrelevant. Instead they should be addressed through archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jackie L. Rodgers.

Archaeological studies have been conducted upon red light districts across the United States. While these studies have yielded great insight into the lives of prostitutes, relatively little has been recovered from their customers. Three collections from excavations conducted in 1975 and 2000 upon Pensacola, Florida’s red light district have also been studied, with a surprising number of artifacts associated with customers identified. This paper will provide an in-depth analysis of red light...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Williams. Miriam Belmaker. Danielle MacDonald.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As surface texture analysis has become more popular in archaeology, various materials were adapted to gather data left by use and dental-wear. Silicon-based dental impression materials, such as President® Jet by Coltène Whaledent, are used to make negative molds of wear patterns. These techniques have been applied to examining the dental microwear of teeth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike W. Williams. Mallory R. Haas.

The wreck of the SS James Eagan Layne (JEL) has been a diving site since 1954, due to her masts still visible above the water. She is known to be the most dived wreck in the UK and was subject to early salvaging from divers who thought it fair game. Which is a frame of thinking in British diving culture then and today. Plymouth, the location of the JEL is the birthplace of South West diving at Fort Bovisand, and as such the SHIPS Project, a non-governmental organization started the Liberty 70...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Bennett Gaieski. Theodore G. Schurr.

Conversations about history have a way of shaping historical narrative, often unintentionally and usually in unexpected ways.  Similarly, identity is an ongoing enterprise where individuals adapt, adopt, discard, and change in relation to the vagaries of a remembered past and to realities in the present.  This paper focuses on Bermuda’s St. David’s Islanders, and examines how this geographically isolated and culturally distinct community (re)created an American Indian identity more than three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krysta Ryzewski. John F. Cherry. Luke Pecoraro.

Montserrat’s nickname, "the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean", points to the island’s 17th-century Irish connection, sustained today by the annual national commemoration of a failed St. Patrick’s Day uprising by African slaves in 1768. Rooted in this event, the Anglo-Irish narrative is foregrounded in many historical studies of Montserrat’s plantations, slavery, geography, and heritage.  Despite the power of this narrative in shaping Montserratian cultural identity, the archaeological record offers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lillian Azevedo.

In July 2013, community members in Sandy Point village on St. Kitts in the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles, began collaborating with Brimstone Hill World Heritage Site to build a Heritage Trail along a 7.5-mile coastal route.  An assessment of the project’s progress two years later reveals critical challenges and innovative solutions- between Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, a non-profit company and individual community stakeholders of that island.