North America (Geographic Keyword)
3,576-3,600 (3,602 Records)
For over two centuries galleons carried treasure and commodities between Asia and Mexico, crossing the Pacific along established routes that took advantage of currents and winds. The voyage was difficult and the hardships endured were extreme. At least four are known to have been lost along the Pacific coast between Washington and Baja California, although none have been recovered archaeologically. In California, just north of the San Francisco Bay, the galleon San Agustin was wrecked at Pt....
The Wreck of the Quedagh Merchant: Identification and Affiliation of Captain Kidd’s Lost Ship (2016)
The shipwreck of the Quedagh Merchant is an archaeological site that brings to life one of the most romanticized activities in modern popular culture: piracy. Little specific evidence of pirates and their actions exists in the archaeological record and, oftentimes, it is difficult to distinguish the identification and function of certain artifacts and features from being piratical or simply commonplace. In fact, finding a site and making the connection to piracy can often be a difficult...
The Wreck of the Slave Ship Peter Mowell: History, Archaeology, & Genealogy (2018)
In 1860, the New Orleans-based slaving schooner Peter Mowell wrecked along the shore of Lynyard Cay in The Bahamas, while attempting to carry 400 captive African people to Cuba. Bahamian wreckers rescued the survivors and took them to Nassau: the crew was jailed and released, and the Africans were made indentured servants. After completing their indentures, the shipwrecked Africans blended into Bahamian society but maintained distinctive traditions from their homelands. In 2012, a Bahamian/US...
The Wreck of the Warwick: History and final analysis of an early 17th-century Virginia Company ship. (2015)
The Warwick which carried the new governor, settlers, their possession, tools, and provisions across the Atlantic to the nascent Bermuda colony in 1619 sank during a hurricane while at anchorage in Castle Harbour. Over the course of four field seasons, a team of archaeologists, students, and volunteers excavated and recorded the Warwick’s hull. The remains of the Warwick are one of the largest and most articulated fragments of an early 17th century English ship. Notwithstanding the historical...
Wrecked! An Interactive Exhibition on a Revolutionary War Shipwreck in St. Augustine, Florida (2016)
The upcoming exhibition of the Storm Wreck, a Revolutionary War shipwreck in St. Augustine, Florida, is two-fold. As with traditional archaeology exhibits, it will share how historical documents and artifacts from the shipwreck tell the story of British Loyalists who, after evacuating Charleston, South Carolina and leaving behind all they knew and taking with them only what they treasured and needed most, arrived in St. Augustine only to run aground and have many of their precious few items...
Writing the Archaeology of America's Modern Cities (2013)
Over the last few decades, archaeologists have contributed a great deal to our understanding of contemporary American cities. We have just finished writing a book about the work these colleagues have done, based on material they have provided from all over the country, mostly from the grey literature. Their archaeological investigations are informative at two scales of analysis. Some studies, on the macro scale, have encompassed the whole city, and reveal patterns of urban development, ...
Writing, Sewing, Eating: Faunal Analysis of a post-Emancipation School for Girls in Montserrat, West Indies (2018)
Potato Hill is located on the western side of Montserrat, which is a small volcanic island in the West Indies. Initial surveys conducted at this site during the 2010-2014 field seasons identified three historic structures. They were subsequently excavated in 2015-2016, and ranged from the 17th century through the 19th century. Of these, the 19th-century structure Feature 16 became of particular interest due to the artifacts related to writing (slate, pencils), sewing (thimbles, buttons, and...
WWI Concrete Shipwrecks in Texas (2018)
During World War I, raw material supply shortages in the United States caused many manufacturing innovations to be made, including the use of concrete for the hulls of merchant ships. Concrete ships were manufactured by both the US government and private companies, but few were ready in time to contribute to the war effort. These ships were unique in their design, sailing capabilities, and working lifespan. There are four recorded archeological examples of concrete oil tankers in Texas, wrecked...
WWII-Related Caves, Community Archaeology and Public Service Announcements: A Community Approach to Raising Awareness and Protecting Caves (2016)
A recent ABPP-funded project explored community consensus building for the protection of WWII-related caves on the island of Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The project utilized radio and television public service announcements for the purpose of sharing a local message of protection and preservation of caves with the island community. This paper outlines the process of community engagement and involvement, recording privately owned WWII cave sites, developing a...
WyoARCH: An Update on Digital Developments to Improve Professional and Public Interaction with Federal Repositories (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Both the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist (OWSA) and the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office are shifting towards digital-only submissions for professional archaeological projects through two new and interconnected database-and-web-interface systems going live in 2018/19. This talk will focus on the benefits and drawbacks to the various public...
Xenia, IN: A Comparison Study Based on the Carolina Artifact Pattern (2017)
During the early to mid-19th century, Xenia, Indiana was an occupied town in Carroll County. As the region grew, Xenia did not and the town was abandoned. During the summer of 2011, the University of Indianapolis performed a siteless survey of a 60+ acre agricultural field that included portions of the abandoned town. We used Stanley South’s Carolina Artifact Pattern to categorize data from the site. Additionally, we used South’s mean ceramic date formula to confirm the mean dates of...
Year One of New Excavations at the Paleo Crossing (33ME274) Clovis Site, Ohio: The 2017 Field Season (2018)
The Paleo Crossing (33ME274) Clovis site in Northeast Ohio was discovered in 1989, and excavated in the early 1990s. Analysis of the collections over the past 27 years has shed light on Clovis technology, mobility, raw material transport, and forager colonization behavior. Now, armed with several new questions involving the site's chronology, Clovis tool function, and the possible presence of a Clovis "structure", we re-opened excavations at the site during June 2017. While more excavations...
Yes! You Can Have Access to That! Increasing and Promoting the Accessibility of Maryland’s Archaeological Collections (2016)
Eighteen years ago, the State of Maryland’s archaeological collections were moved into the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab) at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum in Southern Maryland. This was an important step towards improving the storage conditions of the Maryland collections, but it did little to make the collections more accessible. Understanding the need for better access to archaeological collections, MAC Lab staff spent years rehousing, inventorying and...
Yes! You Can Still Dig, but, Please Plan Ahead. NAGPRA Section 3 New Discoveries in Land Management (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Collections: Federal Archaeology and "New Discoveries" under NAGPRA" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vast, but not vacant, the 256 million acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management offer are an incredible laboratory for archaeological research with 400+ academic and CRM permittees annually conducting thousands of surveys and hundreds of excavation projects. BLM manages these lands for...
"Yes, Sir. All Was in Arms:" An Account of the Small Arms Discovered on the Wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge (1718) (2018)
Until recently, weapons from Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge (31CR314) were primarily represented by large artillery: the ubiquitous twenty-nine cast iron cannon found on the wreck to date. The only trace of small firearms has consisted of isolated gunlocks, flints, and the occasional copper alloy fittings, such as side plates, trigger guards, and a lone musketoon barrel. X-radiography, however, has now revealed additional evidence. Five articulated small arms and additional disarticulated...
You Can't Keep a Workin' Man Down: Black Masculinity, Labor, and the Frontier (2016)
Historical archaeologists have long examined changing structures of labor in the context of modern global capitalism. This paper will focus on rural sites in the Midwest, challenging normative notions of labor structures. I will examine how, in the face of changing labor economies, Black men on the frontier deployed specific types of skilled labor to create social networks, familial bonds, and to subvert economic inequalities. I will examine shifts from agrarian economies to wage economies,...
You Can’t Tell a Book by its Hardware: An Examination of Book Hardware Recovered from James Fort (2017)
Book Hardware was utilized both to protect books and to keep them closed. Books typically do not survive in an archaeological context but the hardware does. This is the case at James Fort. After over twenty years of excavations, more than one hundred of these artifacts have been recovered. Book hardware consists of many materials, numerous designs, and varying sizes. But what can be gleaned from this hardware? First, where they were made can be determined using XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) and...
You Don’t Find Jack: Archaeological Investigations at Two Rural, Nineteenth Century Midwest School Houses (2018)
The archaeology of rural one-room school houses is part of the larger archaeological enterprise of the study of institutions, but remains relatively undeveloped. In large part this is due to the often frustratingly incomplete archaeological and historical records associated with these resources. As a result, these sites rarely conform to the criteria needed to be potentially eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It is thus often impossible to either preserve such...
You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee; Consumer Goods at the 19th Century Maya Refugee Site at Tikal, Guatemala (2017)
In the mid-nineteenth century Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1857-1901) briefly reoccupied the ancient Maya ruins of Tikal. These Yucatec speaking refugees combined with Lacandon Maya, and later Ladinos from Lake Petén Itza to form a small, multi-ethnic village in the sparsely occupied Petén jungle of northern Guatemala. The following paper will discuss the recent archaeological investigation of the historic refugee village at Tikal, with a focus on the recent...
You Missed a Spot: How Proper Conservation Revealed Much about an Obscure Aspect of Nineteenth Century Naval Technology (2017)
The Texas A&M Conservation Research Laboratory is currently in charge of the conservation of artifacts from the CSS Georgia, a massive Confederate ironclad vessel purposely scuttled in 1864. Among the artifacts being treated are brass gun sights used to enhance the accuracy of naval cannon. However, literature on these specific sights is simply nonexistent. Yet, great research is not always the consultation of numerous scholarly articles or thick, heavy tomes. Sometimes, great research is just a...
You Say You Want a Revolution: Eighteenth Century Conflict Archaeology in the Savannah River Watershed of Georgia and South Carolina (2016)
Revolution came with a vengeance to colonial Georgia and South Carolina by the late 1770s. This poster explores revolutionary events at Savannah, New Ebenezer, Brier Creek, Carr’s Fort, and Kettle Creek in Georgia, and Purysburg in South Carolina. Since 2001 several entities have completed battlefield archaeology studies in the Savannah River watershed of Georgia and South Carolina. This includes investigations by the LAMAR Institute, Coastal Heritage Society, and Cypress Cultural Consultants....
You Say You Want A Revolution? Diverging Consequences Of The French Revolution On French Caribbean Slave Societies. (2018)
The late 18th century was a period of tremendous social and political upheaval throughout the Atlantic World, as revolution wracked the British colonies of North America, leading to the establishment of the United States. The American Revolution in turn inspired the French Revolution, with far-reaching impacts throughout the Americas, including the abolition of slavery in some colonies, revolution in other colonies, and a degree of stasis in yet other French colonies. All of these outcomes had...
Zanzibar Before the Transnational Storm: Considerations of the Uneven Stops and Starts of the Colonial Project (2018)
Much recent scholarship has addressed the uneven nature of the colonial project. Metropoles are no longer theorized as monolithic fonts of culture or centers of political power. Likewise, the dynamism and influence of peripheries are topics enjoying intense archaeological investigation. This paper builds on such scholarship by exploring the fits and starts as well as the failures associated with early colonialism. In so doing it provides a stark contrast between the tenuousness of early...
Zooarchaeological Evidence of Dietary Impacts from Contact at Maima, Jamaica (2016)
Recent field research at the Taino village of Maima on the north coast of Jamaica has revealed a complex late prehistoric and contact era village settlement. Occupied during the late prehistoric era, Maima was impacted by Columbus and his crew when they were stranded on the island for a year in 1503. After that initial contact, the villagers were forced into labour at the nearby Spanish settlement of Sevilla la Nueva. Faunal evidence, including shell and vertebrate bone, show that the impact...
Zooarchaeological Insights from Upper Delaware (2016)
Analyses of faunal assemblages dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are able to show how domestic livestock and wild fauna were managed, collected, and consumed by colonial and post-colonial New Castle County, Delaware farmers and their laborers. Animal species, their numbers, and butchery marks on their bones reveal identities, possible coping strategies and/or cuisine in rural Delaware. These faunal remains are also able to provide some data that can allow archaeologists to...