North America (Geographic Keyword)
3,076-3,100 (3,610 Records)
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...
The Sporting Life: Archaeological Evidence of Pensacola’s Red Light District Customers (2015)
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...
Squeaky Clean: An Experiment to Test the Usefulness of Cleaning Agents on Silicon Dental Impression Molds (2019)
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...
The SS James Eagan Layne; The Liberty 70 Project, a Catalyst for Conversation in Submerged Cultural Heritage (2015)
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...
THE ST. DAVID’S ISLAND PROJECT: ETHNOGENESIS IN REAL TIME (2015)
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...
St. Patrick’s Day and Sugar Plantations: Articulating Landscape Archaeology with Conceptions of Montserrat’s Historical Narratives and Cultural Geography (2013)
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...
St. Thomas / St. Anne Parish Heritage Trail: Collaboration and Partnerships In the Caribbean (2016)
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.
Stable Isotopes and Historic Period Diets at the Spanish Mission of San Juan Capistrano, Bexar County, San Antonio, Texas (2015)
San Juan Capistrano was one of several missions established in Texas in the early 1700s. Stable isotopic data from burials at this Mission suggests that mission populations consumed a C4/CAM diet with enriched nitrogen. While some of these isotopic results are consistent with historic accounts of Mission diet, the dependence on C4 based animals with high nitrogen values led to suggestions that isotopic values reflected a pre-mission signature, possibly from the Texas Coast (Cargill 1996). We...
The Stadt Huys Block Site Collection, Past, Present and Future (2016)
The Stadt Huys Block Site in lower Manhattan was the first large-scale excavation in New York City (1979-80), serving as a test case to mandate subsequent excavations in the city. We found intact deposits from the 17th through 19th centuries. The collection was first housed at Columbia University’s Strong Museum and is now at the NYC Archaeological Repository. Artifacts from the collection have been used in domestic and international exhibits, and in several research projects. Some have analyzed...
Staging Tourism: Leisure and Consumption in Florida's Early Twentieth-Century Resorts (2018)
This project investigates the ways in which tourism destinations, namely resorts and hotels, structure the leisure experiences of their guests. Through an exploration of aspects of consumer patterns within tourism contexts, I integrate documentary and archival materials with archaeological data recovered from dense trash deposits excavated from two early-twentieth century resorts in Florida: the Fort George Club at Kingsley Plantation and the Oakland Hotel in west Orange County. The findings...
The Stagville Plantation Stores: Shopping in the Shadow of the Big House (2016)
The Bennehan-Cameron family fortune started with a single store in the 18th-century North Carolina Piedmont. Over several generations, their wealth expanded to include the ownership of up to 900 individuals, scattered across many farms in several states. This paper examines the intersection between these two spheres: an emergent consumer society and the institution of slavery. People owned by the Bennehans, Camerons, and their neighbors are among the purchasers enumerated in daybooks and...
Stagville within, beyond, and through the Digital Archaeological Archive for Comparative Slavery: Comparison -> Transition / Juxtaposition (2015)
The "Slave Cabin" at Stagville, excavated in 1979, was a component of the home farm quarter on one of the largest plantations in North Carolina. The small structure has several qualities that prompted its inclusion in the Digital Archaeological Archive for Comparative Slavery. As the first site from the state in the database, it will allow researchers to isolate and identify patterns associated with local conditions, including topography, settlement history, and regional economy. Stagville as...
Standards for Crime Scene Investigation: An OSAC Update (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Forensic Archaeology: Research & Practice" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) is a federal effort coordinated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards of best practice for all disciplines within forensic science. In 2015, NIST created an OSAC subcommittee to address the lack of standards within crime scene investigation. ...
Standing at the Crossroads: Toward an Intersectional Archaeology of the African Diaspora (2013)
In the 1970s a group of radical Black Feminists, known as the Combahee River Collective, met and put forth a concept they called the "simultaneity of oppression." In 1989, legal studies scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" to describe the interlocking matrix of oppression (meaning race, gender and class) experienced by women of African descent within the U.S. legal system. For African Diaspora archaeology, the framework of intersectionality has become a useful method...
Stark Variation: New Insights into Dire Wolves and their Interactions with Humans (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Human Interactions with Extinct Fauna" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dire wolves are an iconic extinct Pleistocene species in the Americas and their interactions with humans at Paleoindian sites has been largely unknown. Here we explore potential interactions between dire wolves and Paleoindians at sites in the San Pedro Valley, Arizona. We also present new radiocarbon dates and the results of our ancient DNA...
Starting Over After Being Taken Away: Enslaved Women, Forced Relocation, and Sexual Relationships in Antebellum Virginia (2017)
Despite decades of archaeological research on enslaved communities, few studies have directly addressed the impact of the forced movement of Black women and men between sites of slavery. Such relocations could dramatically alter the lives of enslaved individuals by removing them from their existing social networks and inserting them into a new community where such connections would have to be created anew. While ongoing excavations at Belle Grove Plantation (Fredrick County, Virginia) are...
The State of State Archaeological Site Files (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The North Carolina Office of State Archaeology (NCOSA) has spent several years digitizing its archive of reports and site records to improve access for cultural resource managers and researchers. As we work towards making those files available for professional archaeologists to search remotely, we have compiled data on how other states make...
The State of the Art in Stating Risk: Assessment of Climate Vulnerability Assessments for National Park Service Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Resources (2018)
Across America, the National Park Service has conducted an array of vulnerability assessments for climate change impacts for cultural heritage resources, including archaeology, historic structures, cultural landscapes, and others. A project is currently underway to analyze these assessments. This process is designed to improve the practice of vulnerability assessments as well as scientific understanding of cultural resources vulnerability to climate change. In this paper we share preliminary...
State of the Art: Reconstructing paleolandscapes for maritime CRM projects (2018)
Advancements in sound underwater remote sensing have resulted in effective ways to study the ocean bottom, reconstruct paleolandscape settings, and find pre-contact archaeological sites. The inventory of submerged sites known to date ranges from 3 to 13 kya. These sites are located in, and theorized to exist from nearshore to mid-shelf settings, but the potential for pre-contact sites goes all the way out to the continental shelf break, a fact confirmed by recent findings of several pre-Clovis...
Status Quo: Military Landscapes (2017)
When considering cultural landscapes, military installations are unique due to their development through continued use for defense-related purposes. As a result of this active use, military cultural landscapes continue to evolve, changing yet staying the same in terms of function. As a military base, Camp Clark has been in operation for over one hundred years and boasts the oldest National Guard rifle range in the state of Missouri. Camp Clark was established on April 28th, 1908, as a result of...
The Steamer Columbia - A New Discovery in the Blackwater (2017)
As the University of West Florida continues to survey Pensacola waterways, many new anomalies have been discovered. One of the most significant is a 105’ long sidewheel steamer, which was located in the Blackwater River using side-scan sonar. The shipwreck’s three distinct sections – the bow, boiler, and propulsion-related machinery in the stern – remain mostly intact. The most indicative of the artifacts examined are bricks associated with the boiler that have the name "KILLIAN" impressed on...
Steering through North American Archaeology: Reflections on the Effectiveness of an Open Textbook Steering Committee (2018)
As an open educational resource, this textbook has been designed to incorporate the perspectives and expertise of a variety of different scholars and stakeholders from across North America. Early in the process, a ‘steering committee’ was established to try and ensure balanced coverage, maintain a relatively consistent voice, and iron out any difficulties that may arise. The steering committee has also been responsible for some of the small but important details like hunting down copyrights,...
A Step Toward Exhibition: Digital Reconstruction of Monitor Spaces (2018)
210 tons of USS Monitor, including the majority of the engine room and the iconic turret, were recovered between 1998 and 2002 and are currently being conserved at The Mariners’ Museum and Park. While object treatments are ongoing, staff estimate that there are approximately 20 years of work left to finish the project. Even though the completion of conservation is two decades out, planning for the display of all the artifacts in the museum’s exhibition space is already underway. To assist in the...
Stephen Potter's Vision for Potomac Valley Archaeology (2016)
Between 1999 and 2011 the Louis Berger Group carried out a series of archaeological investigations in the Potomac Valley for the National Capital Region of the NPS. These investigations were planned by Dr. Potter as a connected series of studies, working westward up the river. The work included four years in the Prince William Forest Park, followed by four years in Rock Creek Park and then three years for each of three sections of the C&O Canal National Historic Park, culminating at Oldtown,...
Stephen Williams and The Vacant Quarter Phenomenon (2018)
Stephen Williams proposed the idea of a Vacant Quarter based on the abandonment of numerous Mississippian polities throughout much of the Midsouth and Midwest. The unprecedented, large-scale depopulation of an approximately 130,000 square kilometer area has been linked with population movements as well as interpolity conflict. By taking a dendroclimatological approach we evaluate the role of climate change in this process, while also being cognizant of social processes. We postulate a staggered...