North America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Borrero. Flor Trejo. Roberto Junco.

From the arrival of Cortes in 1519 until the 20th century, Veracruz was one of the most important ports in the Americas. In addition to its role in transatlantic trade, it also played an essential role in maritime relations between Mexico, the Antilles and the northern Gulf of Mexico. In the 80´s, late 90´s and 2010 diving surveys carried out at Bajo Hornos reef by the Underwater Archeology team (SAS) of the Mexican National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH), yielded a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeneva Wright.

During the American Civil War, Wilmington, North Carolina served as an important blockade-running center for the Confederacy. The Cape Fear region’s high traffic and dangerous shoals resulted in the largest concentration of Civil War shipwrecks in the world. The interpretation of these wrecks for public outreach constitutes a valuable opportunity to educate members of the public using a material culture assemblage connected with the historical framework of the Wilmington blockade. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rissetto. Kelli Bacon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the public increases its influence over how the discipline of archaeology defines its scientific and educational value, state-sponsored archaeological institutions, such as the State Historic Preservation Office, must continue to adapt to satisfy their professional and public audiences. In 2017, the Nebraska State Historic Preservation Office (NeSHPO)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erik R Farrell.

Among the artifacts from the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR), the artillery represents a particularly evocative and informative subset. Conserving a cannon protects the object, reveals archaeological information, and allows for impressive museum displays for public education. However, the conservation of an individual cannon represents one of the largest single-object expenditures of time and materials of any subset of QAR artifacts. These expenditures must be prioritized within the ongoing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Galke.

Powerful messages concerning ideal gender roles are significant, yet latent features of presidential biographies. Most contemporary authors suggest that Washington succeeded despite the efforts of his mother, Mary Ball Washington. Biographers tend to be most offended by Mother Washington when she exercised agency. Archaeological investigations at Washington’s childhood home in Stafford County, Virginia underscore the dissonance between the material culture of his youth and popular narratives...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chuck T Meide.

The Storm Wreck, one of sixteen Loyalist refugee ships from Charleston lost on the St. Augustine Bar on 31 December 1782, has been excavated for six seasons, 2010-2015. In December 2010, a pile of four 4-pdr cannons and two 9-pdr carronades was encountered on the wreck site, where they were seemingly jettisoned in an attempt to refloat the ship after it grounded. Two of these guns were raised in 2011 for conservation and display. The carronade, whose serial number has been found in Carron...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew R Beaupre.

Nearly two meters beneath the modern ground surface, the remains of a birch bark construction rest in a state of near perfect preservation for over two hundred years.  In the summer of 2012, a team of archaeologists from Université Laval and the College of William and Mary uncovered this unique artifact.   The site of this artifact’s recovery lies in the contested waterway of the Lake Champlain-Richelieu River Corridor. During the 18th century this ‘Valley of Forts’ saw the swing of borders,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie Clark.

This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The sourcing of lithic raw material often challenges preconceived notions of the relationships between people, places, and objects for time periods prior to written records. But what of historic obsidian? What can sourcing reveal about the more recent past? This paper presents the case study of a most amazing historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Moyer.

Black history at historic plantations concerns more than slavery and freedom; it also tells the story of why blacks in the past are omitted at places with so much of their history to tell. Historic plantations offer rich laboratories in which to examine the ways that racism changes and stays the same through the circumstances that enable black history to be revealed or hidden.  By studying the interpretation--or lack thereof--of black history at places like Mount Clare, we can learn from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lila Rakoczy.

In Archaeology journals across the UK, the medieval castle is still being fought over. This war of interpretations, still largely centered on the military vs. non-military nature of castles, has been one cause among many for the current stagnation of castle studies. This paper will argue that retreading old research ground (and rehashing old arguments) is ultimately unproductive, and that far more interesting questions deserve to be asked of these ‘medieval’ buildings. A case will be made for a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph C Hoyt.

When WWII came to the United States, the east coast became part of a massive naval battlefield. Few other areas better represent this activity than the waters off North Carolina. Monitor National Marine Sanctuary has been studying sites in the region associated with the Battle of the Atlantic for nearly ten years.  When convoy KS-520 was attacked by a German u-boat escort vessels sunk U-576 in a counterstrike. As a result, a stricken freighter and the u-boat that sunk it were lost. In 2014 the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bert S. Ho. Kelly Gleason Keogh.

In May of 2017, the NPS' Submerged Resources Center and NOAA's Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument conducted an exploratory survey for sunken aircraft from WWII's Battle of Midway in June of 1942. What was found spanned the centuries of maritime activity at the Atoll including the battle. It also displayed on the seafloor all aspects of the military's long use of the island as a base, and their lasting impact on the island landscape. Today multiple federal agencies manage Midway as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William R. Chadwell.

The waters off the Outer Banks of North Carolina were the scene of some of the most intense activity on the US East Coast by German submarines in World War II, particularly during 1942.  Today evidence of that struggle remains in the form of the wrecks of roughly 100 ships and submarines.  The Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group is a 501(c)3 educational nonprofit corporation made up nearly exclusively of avocational archaeologists and historians all of whom are recreational or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Jones.

Following the early success of Operation Drumbeat off the American East Coast, German Naval Vice Admiral Karl Dönitz turned his periscopes towards similarly wide-open hunting grounds in the Gulf of Mexico. For a brief but intense period beginning in the spring of 1942 U-boat attacks claimed over 50 Allied Merchant Marine casualties in the Gulf, and crippled many more.  Over the last decade many of these wrecks have been located during federally-regulated oil and gas surveys, and subsequently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Genevieve Mielke.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn cost the U.S. army 268 men, which accounted for just over one percent of its entirety. Many of the men were killed during battle by Native American firearms and bow and arrows (Scott et. al, 2002, pg. 12). It is possible that some men perished by their own hand or by friendly fire. Through osteological data provided by the State Historic Preservation Office of Montana as well as historical documentation, this presentation will provide an analysis of gunshot wound...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Thompson.

Ball State University’s Department of Anthropology has completed five years of archaeological and historical research at the battlefield of the Battle of the Wabash (1791) and the Battle of Fort Recovery (1794), two significant Northwest Indian War battles that took place in present day Fort Recovery, Ohio.  This research was funded by multiple National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program grants and additional university funding. This poster will present the results of this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Thompson. Kevin Nolan.

Ball State University’s Department of Anthropology has completed six years of archaeological and historical research at the battlefield of the Battle of the Wabash (1791) and the Battle of Fort Recovery (1794), two significant Northwest Indian War battles that took place in present day Fort Recovery, Ohio. Research was funded by multiple National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program grants. We present the public interpretation results of this research, specifically the use of: 1)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Drexler.

Archaeology has a long history with the tourism industry. Thanatourism focuses on sites associated with death and violence, such as battlefields, and conflict archaeology can be a powerful means to connect with the public and aid in the development of war-related sites as tourist draws. For American Civil War sites, thanatourism is a potential boon to depressed rural southern economies and a means to improve preservation and interpretation of archeological sites. Archaeologists can have a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Scott.

As conflict archaeologists have developed techniques for documenting where and how battles took place, battlefield research has moved from documentation and description of past warfare to behavioral and experience assessment of those who were involved. To understand the actions of combatants, archaeologists need conceptual tools that can explain the physical record of conflict. Battlespace is a conceptual tool that has the potential to aid in that explanation. As presented in modern military...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Borrelli.

South Africa’s connection with the sea is most prevalent in its founding harbor, Cape Town. Until the opening of the Suez Canal, the passage by the Cape of Good Hope represented the most important oceanic route to the East. The passage, however, quickly became known for unpredictable storms that devastated shipping in locations such as Table Bay. This paper examines the way the nineteenth century British government managed the risks associated with using Table Bay as a harbor of refuge and how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher P. Morris. Kinney Clark.

In the battle to preserve vulnerable historic maritime resources, recovery efforts after the unprecedented devastation of Superstorm Sandy highlighted a desperate need to locate, identify, and catalog the submerged resources of New Jersey. Today, resiliency undertakings, new development projects, plans to address rising sea levels and severe storms, have all encountered maritime archaeological resources. With over 1,600 known historic shipwrecks crowding only 150 miles of Atlantic coastline, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Panich. Rebecca Allen.

Recent excavations at Mission San José (ca. 1797-1840s) in central California unearthed over 3,000 glass beads. Such items are commonly recovered from Spanish colonial missions and contemporaneous sites on the Pacific Coast of North America, yet they have proven difficult to interpret beyond their assumed role as trade beads. We believe there is great potential for the humble glass bead to serve as the reference point against which to understand the complex social relationships that constituted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth A. McCague. Liza Gijanto.

The Gambia River was a frontline of Atlantic trade among European merchants in the Atlantic world, particularly in regards to the exchange of glass beads established to promote commercial interactions with the local population. Though the 19th century marks the decline of the era on the Gambia River, the trends seen in the bead trade highlight the lasting implications of colonial involvements. This paper will address bead assemblages from Juffure, Berefet, and the colonial capital of Banjul...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Davidson.

African Diaspora Archaeology has its roots in Plantation Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s.    One artifact initially associated with enslaved contexts was the simple blue-glass bead (though other colors were recovered), recognized by some as signifying African-derived culture and beliefs, and by others as a controversial and potentially erroneous stereotype.  Simultaneously emerging in the 1970s was the field of historical mortuary archaeology, where graves of African-Americans as well as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Burnett.

Currently encompassing over 1,300,000 acres, Bears Ears is notable for abundant cultural resources and is in a renewed spotlight following the 2017 recommendation by the Interior Secretary to reduce its acreage. Archaeological probability models were recently developed for lands within the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, Monticello Field Office, which encompasses the Bears Ears National Monument. Regardless of the outcomes of that process, these models were developed to help land...