North America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret A Comer.

In the twenty-first century, nationalism continues to be a powerful motivating ideology in global, national, and local politics.  In the hope of overtly and covertly strengthening cohesive nationalist sentiment and identity, individual states often use the very bodies of past peoples as symbols and ideological tools. This is evidenced in the differing display (or lack thereof) of human remains in the national museums of Denmark, Egypt, and the United States.  In each case, the identification of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wesley Vanosdall. Ryann Seifers. Rick Weathermon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In late spring 2018, a team of anthropology students and faculty from the University of Wyoming, with support from the Wyoming Military at Camp Guernsey Training Base, recovered a historical burial from an eroding cutbank near Emigrant’s Washtub Spring. Members of the Oregon-California Trails Association marked the location based on interpretations of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Loren.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The body is so many things simultaneously. It is an historical object, a site of experience and violence, a set of behaviors, and is both material and metaphysical. We cannot conceive of history without bodies. Bodily adornments add further nuances that are personal, symbolic, political, situational, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ariane Thomas. Matthew E. Hill Jr.. Chris Widga. Martin Welker. Andrew Kitchen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs of North America share a long history of interaction with humans, yet little is known about how humans managed their dogs prior to modern breeding practices that became popular during the sixteenth century. European colonists recognized a few indigenous dog “breeds” and described these dogs as primarily “wolf-like” in appearance and phenotypically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Hall. J. Barto Arnold.

  Archaeological study and historical research have combined to present a detailed picture of blockade running in the western Gulf of Mexico during the American Civil War. From the beginning of the conflict until weeks after Appomattox, the Confederate coastline west of the Mississippi was a hive of blockade-running activity, first with sailing vessels and later with steamships. The wrecks of the paddle steamers Will o’ the Wisp, Acadia, and Denbigh, all dating from the final months of the war,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn Breda.

This is an abstract from the "Human Remains in the Marketplace and Beyond: Myths and Realities of Monitoring, Grappling With, and Anthropologizing the Illicit Trade in a Post-Harvard World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The desire to own human skeletal remains has been prevalent for many years; in our modern technological age avenues for this market have exploded across the internet. This research focuses on Facebook groups dedicated to oddity...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex D Velez.

Emigrating from Alsace, a contested border region, to the contested frontier of Texas, many Alsatians had to adjust to life in the American West. This included maintaining their identities as Alsatians in the face of a changing landscape, which manifested through different ways in quotidian life, including choices in food. Through Number of Identified Specimen counts, researchers use faunal assemblages associated with habitation sites to identify patterns of the frequency with which various...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefanie Smith.

With the cooperation of the Westmoreland County Historical Society and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, faunal remains from three areas of the Historic Hanna’s Town site in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania were subjected to detailed zooarchaeological analysis in an effort to answer broad questions regarding the subsistence practices of eighteenth century frontier communities of Western Pennsylvania. As the first court and county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains, Hanna’s Town played a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna K. Suckling.

The skeletal remains excavated from Scott Cemetery were well preserved while, in contrast, coffin and textile remains were generally poorly preserved. A soil pH test was conducted, with the sandy soil being an alkaline 7.8. The well preserved bone, adipocere formation, and poor textile preservation reflect established literature on the effects of alkaline soils. Burials with a high degree of roots, likely from remains of a tree that had grown through the grave shafts, were less preserved than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Ramsey.

This is an abstract from the "The Big Bend Complex: Landscapes of History" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bonfire Shelter is a rockshelter in Eagle Nest Canyon, a short tributary of the Rio Grande in West Texas, that contains three distinct bone beds of varying ages. The middle bone bed, Bone Bed 2, is a Paleoindian-aged deposit dating to ~12,000 years BP. Bone Bed 2 was originally interpreted as the remains of one or more bison mass kills;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karla J. Jageman.

The Johnson Lake Mine was an early twentieth century tungsten mine. It is located above 10,000 feet on the eastern slope of the South Snake Range in east-central Nevada in what is now Great Basin National Park. The mine was in operation from 1908 – 1950. It was owned and operated by Alfred "Timberline" Johnson, Thomas Dearden, Sr. and Joseph Dearden. This presentation will discuss the recorded historic features and artifacts with a brief synopsis of the capitalism of tungsten mining as it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tonia Deetz Rock. Misti Furr. Kurt Thomas Hunt. Katie Jacobson. Kristina Wyckoff.

In this paper we present our public outreach efforts in response to the American "reality" television series "American Digger," which portrays looting of archaeological resources as a desirable and profitable enterprise at the expense of archaeological context and communal knowledge of our past.  Our efforts included blog posts, the creation and dissemination of a Change.org petition, and the facilitation of involvement and open dialogue through the creation and ongoing administration of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Ewen.

Archaeologists in the United States have been horrified by the debut of new reality shows featuring treasure hunters looting sites for fun and profit.  Most troubling was that one of these shows, "Diggers", was the brainchild of the National Geographic Society, long time supporters of archaeology.  Meetings with National Geographic have shown them willing to compromise to make the shows more ethical if they could still be profitable. However, the real question is, how willing are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen von Jena.

Boston Latin School: A Look at Ethnic and Engendered Spaces Kathleen von Jena, Boston Landmarks Commission   During the summer of 2015 the Boston City Archaeology Program conducted excavations on the site of the original Boston Latin School and neighboring Schoolmasters house dating to 1635-1748. Boston Latin was the first purpose-built free school in America where Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams and John Hancock attended. Public Archaeology conducted at this site provided an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allison L Bain. Reginald Auger.

A decade of environmental and palaeoecological research at the îlot des Palais or Intendant’s Palace site in Quebec City has yielded rich and detailed datasets that document the site’s transformation from a marshy riverside setting to an important hive of activity for Intendants, artisans and occupants. The methods presented in this paper include archaeoentomology, zooarchaeology, dendrochronology and macrobotanical analyses. They demonstrate that products imported from the metropole and within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Sainz.

In 2014, students from Binghamton University excavated several historic features in the rear yard of a Texas-Alsatian homestead in Castroville, Texas.  This poster presents the analysis of the glass bottles found in Feature 7, a well built in the 19th century and filled in during the mid-20th century.  During this time, the well became a dumping ground for a range of historical materials discarded by later occupants of the house and other local residents, like the American Legion next door.  The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Stine. Teddi Burnett.

During the early decades of the 1840s several of Guilford County's wealthier citizens constructed artfully designed estates within a short walk or ride of burgeoning downtown Greensboro.  The finest example of an urban estate with picturesque landscape is the Italianate Blandwood Mansion, designed by A. J. Davis for Governor J. M. Morehead.  Blandwood, The Elms and other large estates circling the one square mile core of Greensboro held numerous outbuildings, including housing for enslaved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Wright. Lawrence Todd.

In the early 21th Century, the Washakie Wilderness, which encompasses roughly 2850 km2 of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, was a virtual blank spot on the map of prehistoric archaeology with only three sites reported and no systematic inventories having been completed. By 2017 cooperative investigation between the Shoshone National Forest and Greybull River Sustainable Landscape Ecology (GRSLE) has completed 16 field seasons in the Washakie and documented 388 previously unknown prehistoric...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth A. LaVigne. William Chadwick.

On the morning of 11 September 1777, Hessian Captain Johan Ewald was leading an advance force ahead of the Crown Forces column that outflanked the American position along Brandywine Creek. The precise location of Trimble’s Ford, where the Crown Forces ultimately crossed the west branch of the Brandywine, and the road system that was traveled by the Crown Forces to reach the ford was the subject of a multi-faceted study. Geophysical investigation utilizing ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LisaMarie Malischke.

Fort St. Pierre (1719-1729), in present-day Mississippi, was a short-lived fort on the periphery of colonial Louisiane. In December of 1729 its physical boundaries, the dry moat and palisade, were breached and burned as the fort and its soldiers were attacked by Yazoo and Koroa warriors. Using statistical and documentary evidence, along with newly analyzed information from the 1977 excavations, this presentation will discuss first the slow-decline and then immediate demise of the fort. It will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelika R. Kuettner.

Coupled with inventories, receipts, account books, trade cards, and newspaper advertisements, archaeology broadens the interpretation and understanding of an object’s value and worth in the period in which it was made and used. Evidence of mended ceramics in the archaeological collections at Colonial Williamsburg and in other collections provides a means to assist in the identification, dating, and contextual understanding of repairs made to ceramic objects of a variety of materials. Questions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Borrelli. B. Lynn Harris. Melissa Price.

Ships wrecked in Caribbean waters seldom preserve their structural integrity. Often only ferrous artifacts and ballast remain as the cultural indicators. The ballast of a wreck, if carefully documented, may have significant interpretive value to the site. An East Carolina University team investigated a wreck site in Costa Rica consisting of yellow brick stacked in a concentrated, organized pile.  This paper examines the function of brick as both ballast and cargo in the historical record of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Hendrix.

As a result of the development of a large U.S. military complex in the newly obtained territory of Florida, Pensacola experienced a historic Brick Boom in the 1830s. The opportunity to profit from brick manufacturing prompted many individuals to establish brickyards along the region's many waterways. The Scott Site is one such site, where excavations have been ongoing since 2008 via a joint-education program between Florida Public Archaeology Network and Milton High School. The resulting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jess Hendrix.

In the mid-1820s the newly acquired American port town of Pensacola began to develop a huge military complex. Resulting from the demand for brick needed in the construction of a number of third-system masonry coastal forts and a Naval Yard, Pensacola developed a substantial brick industry almost overnight. Today, little remains of the many brickyards that supplied millions of bricks for forts located from New Orleans to the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Key West, Florida. Over the last several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Barnett. Keri Deneau.

Archeologists have identified many historic archeological sites by the presence of cultural vegetation. When Euro-Americans claimed homesteads, they often planted exotic vegetation species on their properties, either for beautification of their land or for utilitarian purposes. In the National Park Service (NPS), natural resource programs now consider many of these non-native species to be invasive and have instituted management plans to stop the uncontrolled spread of these plants. The fact...