North America (Geographic Keyword)
3,501-3,525 (3,610 Records)
While Utah is not known for its mining heritage, the Bingham Copper MIne located west of Salt Lake City is one of the few human manifestations visible from space. While the massive open-pit is a testament to human engineering, fortitude, and profit, the copper extracted from its stony core brought thousands of immigrants to Utah during the 19th and 20th centuries. These immigrants created places, communities, and a cohesive social identity. The same mines that created their community in the late...
What Is at Stake in Archaeological Knowledge Production (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent years have witnessed a sea change in anthropological discourse concerning how gender bias and a lack of diversity has affected the work that archaeologists produce, interest that dovetails with current concerns about equity and safety issues. More broadly, Black,...
What Is CRM’s Origin Story: How Did We Get to the System We Have Now and What Does It Say about Our Future? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Transformations in Professional Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How did the current regulatory archaeology system form? What lessons can we learn from how the system was set up? What do these past accounts say about the future of cultural resource management? As part of a historical review stemming from the SAA Government Affairs Committee's survey regarding the Secretary of the Interior's Standards and...
What Lies Beneath: An Analysis of Historic Ceramics Found at 23SC2101, a Multi-Component Historic Site. (2017)
23SC2101 is a multi-component site with French Colonial through 20th century domestic occupations. Multiple projects located ceramics from all time periods and all levels of excavation. The site is in an urban area and many of the upper levels have suffered from severe disturbance. Besides the normal analysis of socio-economic status and site function, the analysis of ceramic date ranges by level may help to determine how severe the disturbance has been. Information on disturbance is often...
What Lovely Teeth You Have: An Examination of Canid Dental Anomalies and Their Use in Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A survey of over 200 published sources on archaeological domestic dogs in the Americas reveals that dental anomalies, particularly the absence of the first mandibular premolar, are mentioned in Native American domestic dogs with some frequency. They have even been promoted as a means of...
What This Fort Stands For: conflicting memory at Bdote/Historic Fort Snelling (2016)
For Dakota people, there is no more painful and conflicted a site of memory in Minnesota than Historic Fort Snelling (HFS). Built on sacred grounds and used as a prison camp following the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, this historic property has until recently been represented in a highly selective fashion, suppressing Dakota and others' memory. In this paper I trace some of the specific processes of forgetting at HFS, and why those processes are now failing through rising historical pluralism. Yet...
What Transferware Can Tell Us: A Case Study Utilizing an At-Risk U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Collection from the Veterans Curation Program (2018)
The study of transferwares from historic sites in the United States can provide a window into the lives of the people who used these materials. However, there are many existing collections containing transferware that remain underutilized. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation Program has rehabilitated 231 at-risk collections, rendering them accessible for research and educational purposes. The Tombigbee Historic Townsites Project is one such collection. Completed in 1983, this project aimed to...
What Trash Tells Us: A Look at Fort Davis's 20th-Century Population (2017)
Following closure of the military post in 1891, the racially and socially diverse community that had grown around Fort Davis lost one of its main economic resources. In the decades after, the civilian population saw a shift of resources from predominately military issued goods to items brought in by rail through the neighboring communities of Alpine and Marfa. This paper analyzes a select assemblage of metal, ceramic, and faunal materials excavated from an early twentieth-century domestic trash...
What We Knew Then and What We Know Now: How New Archival Research Has Changed Our Understanding of the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Cemetery Population (2017)
During the initial Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery investigation, the most significant documentary source was the Register of Burials at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery, believed to account for all burials between 1882 and 1974. Preliminary research based on the Register of Burials, Milwaukee County Death certificates, and the spatial analysis of grave goods recovered from excavations conducted in 1991 and 1992 resulted in the tentative identification of 190 individuals. We now...
What Would Larry Do: Archaeological Practice with, by, and for Native American Communities (2018)
The fight for inclusion of Native Americans in archaeology and anthropology hasn’t been an easy road; it has been divisive, contested, and sometimes violent. The need for allies and advocates for Native American inclusion in the field has become apparent through the tireless work of Larry Zimmerman. His scholarship has shaped generations of archaeologists and anthropologists in numerous ways. The ethical dimensions of his work are a testament to the need for change in the field and are a...
What's So Different About Public History? (2015)
When historical archaeologists discuss public archaeology, does their use of "public" imply the same things as intended by public historians? As more archaeology undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled in public history coursework (and public history students enrolled in archaeology courses), how is this relevant to their training? This paper will provide a brief review of public history’s development as a distinct field, noting current trends in civic engagement. It discusses the...
What’s for Dinner: An Intra-site Analysis of Faunal Remains from James Madison’s Montpelier (2018)
While much work at James Madison’s Montpelier looks at the differences in faunal remains between sites, the amount of intra-site analysis is lacking. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between previously analyzed faunal remains and their physical locations within the South Yard. The majority of domestic tasks at Montpelier centered around the South Yard, which included three dwellings for domestic slaves, two smokehouses for cured meats, and a kitchen where Nelly Madison had her meals...
What’s in the Cellar: the Archaeology of an 1885 Officers’ Quarters at Fort Walla Walla, Washington (2015)
This paper will provide insights into the daily lives of the families that lived on Fort Walla Walla, one of the Pacific Northwest’s earliest communities, from its early use as a military base and into its transition to a veteran’s facility. Established in 1858, Fort Walla Walla was built along the Oregon Trail by the U.S. Army to defend settlers moving into the territory and played a major military role into the early 1900s. After the Fort closed in 1910, it was converted into a veteran’s...
(What’s) Left of the Commodity: Archaeology and the Creative Resuscitation of Spent Goods (2018)
Hobo jungles and other transient laborer and homelessness related sites present a sustained material critique of Capitalism. These kinds of sites provide insight into the creative strategies people employ to circumvent commodity markets when capital is not available. Whether residual evidence of an intentional statement against an oppressive system, or of a means to persist in the most desperate of situations, the assemblages left behind by people who reside on the fringes of...
When All You Have are Artifacts: Reassessing Intrinsic Issues in Assigning Cultural Identity to Artifact Assemblages in Colonial South Carolina (2016)
Just several years after the 1670 founding of Charles Towne, occupants of Barbados, England, and France seized opportunities for land and prosperity. By the 1680s, English settlers from Barbados began to settle the area along the Wando River, encroaching on land designated for the remaining indigenous population. Researchers and investigators examining archaeological sites do so with the aim to reconstruct the history about past landscapes. Inherently, archaeologists assign cultural identity to...
"When it’s steamboat time, you steam:" The Influence of 19th Century Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico (2016)
Driven by technological advances of the industrial revolution and the introduction of the steamboat in the Gulf of Mexico, the economy of the southern United States flourished. When Charles Morgan brought his first steamboat to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the stage was set for a commercial venture that helped transform the region. By the mid-19th century steamships served as the primary vehicle to transport agricultural products from the Mississippi River Valley to markets along the east...
When Survey Is Not an Option: Comprehensive Archeological Monitoring Standards in Texas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological monitoring is generally considered a secondary investigative methodology, to be used when necessary after proactive archeological work has already occurred. However, monitoring is increasingly relied upon as a primary form of investigation within archaeological compliance, particularly in highly urban settings where proactive work is...
When the Conflict Ends: Building Reuse on the Wyoming Frontier (2018)
Considering Conflict Event Theory as a paradigm for cuture change, we are then left to consider what happens to sites after the conflict ends, and what that change says about the nature of conflict and its temporal importance to the continuation of culture change. Several archaeological sites are examined within thisparadigm, including Ft Briger and Ft Fetterman. Parallels are also made between Wyoming sites and sites in Texas.
When the Gales of November Come Howlin’: 2016 Archaeological Investigation of the Adriatic (47DR0208) (2018)
Proposed improvements to Berth 1 at the Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding Yard in Sturgeon Bay will require removal of the remains of the self-unloading, wooden schooner barge Adriatic. Built by master shipbuilder James Davidson as a three-masted schooner-barge, the 202-foot long, wooden-hulled Adriatic was launched in 1889 and later converted into a self-unloading barge, one of the earliest examples of what would become an iconic vessel type on the Great Lakes. The vessel spent its final seventeen...
‘When the King breaks a town, he builds another’: Space, Politics, and Gerrymandered Identities in Precolonial Dahomey (2015)
Scholars have long argued that sub-Saharan Africa in the era of the slave trade was dominated by ethnically distinct communities whose members underwent the process of creolization after being displaced to the New World. Archaeological research across West Africa, however, is challenging this notion, revealing how West African cultural identity transformed in response to intersecting economic, political, and cultural forces unleashed by trans-Atlantic commerce. This paper examines the political...
When the Light Goes Out: The Importance of Women’s Labor in the Household Economy (2016)
Archaeologists have contributed important insights into gender, particularly in relation to the impact of differences in class, race, and ethnicity. Studies have challenged the relevance of 19th century gender ideals for those outside the middle class and have explored the ways middle class women’s lives defied these ideals. The picture that has emerged is one that emphasizes the importance of women’s productive labor and the complexities of real lived experience. The story of one household...
When Window Mesh is Worth It: Assessing the Potential of Microrefuse in Spatial Analysis of Hunter-Gatherer Sites (2018)
The smallest pieces of chipped stone flaking debris are often overlooked in the analysis of hunter-gatherer camps. Several factors account for this, including recovery methods, research focus, and time and cost allotted for a project. At shallowly-buried sites where features have been obliterated, concentrations of microrefuse have the potential to reveal in situ activity areas or secondary deposits formed by batch dumping. This paper presents a case study of the Mountaineer Folsom site near...
Where are the Dinosaurs? The Children’s Museum’s Role in Archaeological Education (2018)
Public outreach and involvement is an increasingly important part of the field of archaeology. Yet for many people outside of the discipline, archaeology education comes solely from misleading television documentaries and fictional movies. The average visitor to The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is no exception to this, with many unaware of the difference between archaeology and paleontology, let alone the difference between archaeology and looting or treasure hunting. In fact, many of the...
Where did Gloucestertown go? Reconstructing the Disappearance of a Colonial Town (2018)
Despite more than 40 years of historical and archaeological research on Gloucester Point, the placement of the colonial town grid on the modern landscape is still unclear. The piecemeal nature of projects resulted in untestable hypotheses based on individual buildings and modern landscape features, rather than stitching together archaeological data from projects from across this area. While the construction of a comprehensive GIS is underway, and discussed next, an alternative track was...
"Where Did That Come From?" Accessioning Methods utilized on the excavation of the CSS Georgia. (2016)
Accessioning artifacts from the excavation of the CSS Georgia present unique circumstances in that the requirements placed by the methods of excavation combined with the sheer scale and size of material necessitate specialized strategies in place to quickly and efficiently. Due to the changing archaeological phases as part of the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project, necessitating a complete excavation of the site, a progression from small artifact recovery to mechanized recovery a plan was put in...