North America (Geographic Keyword)
676-700 (3,610 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work adds collagen δ15N and δ13C to the apatite δ13C and δ18O values previously presented by the author, as well as C:N ratios demonstrating the viability of many samples from Hell Gap. Bison bone can be found throughout Paleoindian deposits at the site, providing a possible proxy for regional climate change. Carbon ratios for collagen samples (n=23)...
Collections Care and Preventive Conservation in the Archaeological Repository (2018)
The scale and diversity of objects held in archaeological repositories is enormous. Collectively, the actions taken to prevent or delay deterioration of these objects and their associated documents and sample collections are referred to as collections care. Preventive conservation identifies the short and long term priorities for collections care. This paper will explore current trends and topics in archaeological collections care including: object stabilization through storage packaging;...
Collections Care as Care Work: Examining the Gendered Nature of Museum Work in Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite women receiving the majority of archaeology PhD degrees for decades, issues with gender representation continue within the discipline, such as the well documented underrepresentation of women in prestigious academic positions. It follows that the majority of archaeological museum collections...
Collections Crisis in the Nation’s Capital: Problems and Solutions for the Washington, D.C. Historic Preservation Office (2016)
Successful collections management encompasses proper housing, monitoring, and curation to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility. However, successful collections management also involves identifying and addressing issues(s) that threaten collections. The Washington, D.C. Historic Preservation Office (DCHPO) is in the midst of addressing a collections crisis. The DCHPO consults on both District and Federal compliance projects, and without a curation facility, its collections are...
Collections Management at the National Park Service: The Interior Collections Management System User Satisfaction Survey (2016)
The Museum Management Program (MMP) provides national guidance and policy to the National Park Service (NPS). It also administers the Interior Collections Management System (ICMS) for the NPS and the Department of the Interior (DOI). In an effort to look towards the future, the MMP and the Interior Museum Program (IMP) administered a user satisfaction survey to federal and non-federal users of ICMS. This poster examines the results of this survey and looks for solutions to common problems, the...
Collections-Based Pedagogy: Where Pasts Meet Futures (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ideas, Ethical Ideals, and Museum Practice in North American Archaeological Collections" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been a recognized teaching crisis in archaeology for at least 25 years—almost as long as there has been a “curation crisis.” In this reflection, I focus on collections-based university teaching in American archaeology. As in the popular archaeological imaginary, archaeological instruction...
Collective Action in Inter-Theoretical Perspective (2013)
It has been five years since The Archaeology of Collective Action was published in UPF’s "American Experience" series. This paper summarizes the purpose of the book and reflects on the dozen or so reviews that appeared in a wide variety of publications. It also describes the "reviewer polarization" that was produced when the essence of the book was distilled and packaged for inclusion in an edited volume on the evolutionary dynamics of cooperative behavior. This polarization forced...
Colonial America Visits Colonial California: A Scenic Transfer-printed Vessel at Mission Santa Clara de Asís (2018)
Ceramics can often be used to identify changes in artifact assemblages on a scale of years, rather than in generations or centuries. There are potentially some useful applications of absolute and relative dating techniques for ceramic assemblages recovered from California’s Spanish missions. Recent excavations at Mission Santa Clara’s Rancheria (Indian Village) produced an assemblage of imported English ceramics, some with tightly defined production dates, which aids in our interpretation of the...
Colonial Brunswick Town: Archaeology of an Artificial Economy (2018)
Brunswick Town was established in 1725 on the Lower Cape Fear River by an influential anti-proprietary faction known as The Family. Their purpose was exploitation of English mercantilist policy which provided a fixed price for naval stores. This singular focus and their monopoly of valuable land retarded the development of organic economic networks and linkages, restricted areas for settlement, and created the conditions for the town’s demise during the Revolutionary War.
Colonial Foodways in Barbados: A Diachronic Study of Faunal Remains and Stable Isotopes from Trent’s Plantation, 17th-19th centuries (2018)
The origins of modern cuisine in the Caribbean lie in the complex interactions that occurred during the colonial period. Studying foodways on plantations offers insight into the social relationships, power structures, economic practices and cultural transformations during this time. Here, we integrate and compare the results from zooarchaeological analysis with stable isotope (δ18O, δ13C, δ15N, δ88Sr) analysis of human and faunal remains from Trent’s Plantation in Barbados. Trent’s Plantation...
Colonial Impact on Kanaka Maoli Diaspora and Dispersal (2018)
Hawaiians were historically a mobile population. Their Polynesian ancestors crossed the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean to settle the Hawaiian archipelago, and the Kanaka Maoli descendants that worked and lived on the land continued this diasporic tradition. By the 17th century, Kanaka Maoli lived in or utilized the many varied ecosystems available to them. Within the moku political districts, the Kanaka Maoli remained highly mobile—moving between the highlands and the lowlands for resources....
Colonial Stigma in ‘Post’-Colonial Archaeology (2017)
Legacies of archaeological social complexity models continue to stigmatize living Native communities. Pervasive in discussions of pre-Contact peoples in the modern United States, these models rely on the Eurocentric foundations steeped in racism, sexism, and religious bigotry on which they were built during early colonization. Archaeological evidence provides the opportunity to interrogate how past peoples were and continue to be entangled with living communities, rather than to buttress myopic,...
Colonialism and the 'Personality of Britain' (2016)
Where did ‘colonialism’ come from? Clearly, and at once, colonialism is a set of practices that can be traced back to the ancient and medieval worlds. However, also and at the same time, it is an analytical term which, if used loosely, holds the danger of uncritically back-projecting a 19th century model of colonial worlds into earlier centuries. How to map patterns of colonial practice before they were colonial? This paper tries to engage with this difficult issue through a comparative...
Colonowares and Colono-kachinas in the Spanish-American Borderlands: Appropriation and Authenticity in Pueblo Material Culture, 1600-1950 (2016)
Following the Spanish colonization of New Mexico, Pueblo peoples began to adopt various technologies, cultural practices, and beliefs introduced to them by their colonial overlords. This tradition continues today, with contemporary appropriations of "foreign" elements into "traditional" Pueblo practices. How should we as historical archaeologists interpret this appropriation of outside influences and material culture? This paper explores the phenomenon of post-colonial difference through case...
The Colony and the City: Contemporary Caribbean Landscapes in Transatlantic Context (2016)
Following Raymond Williams’ critical analysis of the relationship between the English countryside and its urban counterpart in The Country and the City (1973), this paper expands Williams’ analysis to incorporate the entanglements of the colony, specifically the Caribbean post-colony of Barbados, and English urban centers. Despite studies of well-known historical relationships existing in terms of Atlantic world economics, there has been less discussion of the repercussions of...
The "Colored Dead": African American Burying Grounds in a Confederate Stronghold (2018)
Some call Lexington, Virginia the place "where the South went to die": Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are buried there, along with countless Confederate soldiers. The extent to which the South truly expired is controversial, given for example the continuing, frequent presence of enthusiasts with gray uniforms and battle flags. How, in this context, have African Americans been memorialized? This paper considers marked and unmarked antebellum burials, Reconstruction-era graves, and...
The Colors On The Boxer Codex (2018)
Created in early Spanish Manila, the Boxer Codex inherited the codices making tradition from the Americas. The illustrations of the Boxer Codex offer some of the earliest images of people living in the Philippine archipelago and its Asian neighbors during the late sixteenth century. This study focuses on the visuality and materiality of the codex illustrations and aims to investigate the nature of the pigments and dyes used in these images. Scientific analysis was conducted with two non-invasive...
Comales and Colonialism - Identifying Colonial Inequality through a Spatial Analysis of Foodways on a Seventeenth Century New Mexican Spanish Estancia. (2017)
During the late sixteenth and seventeenth century colonization of New Mexico by Spanish colonists and indigenous Mexican auxiliaries, rural ranches or estancias, were established in close proximity to autonomous Pueblo villages along the Rio Grande. These estancias were the setting for complex negotiations of colonial power structures which were based upon the exploitation of labor from indigenous peoples. At LA-20,000, an early colonial estancia located off a branch of El Camino Real near Santa...
"Comanche Land and Ever Has Been": An Indigenous Model of Persistence (2016)
In 1844, the Comanche leader Mopechucope signed a treaty with the state of Texas, in which he described central and western Texas as "Comanche land and ever has been" (Gelo 2000: 274; Dorman and Day 1995: 8). Mopechucope’s understanding of Comanche history lies in stark contrast to the narratives of terra nullius and cultural decline found in colonial documents and reified in anthropological and historical scholarship. Drawing on an indigenous understanding of history and place-making this paper...
"Comfort and Satisfaction to All": Excavation of a Nineteenth-Century Coffee House (2017)
In 2015, the Missouri Department of Transportation investigated a mid-nineteenth century property formerly known as the Racine House. From 1850 until 1872, the house operated as a coffee shop, saloon, boarding house, hotel, and general gathering place for working class men. Catering almost exclusively to French-Canadian immigrants, the Racine House was one of many such "social clubs" in this heavily-Germanic neighborhood. Recent archeological excavations uncovered a pair of features located...
Commemoration and Contestation: New methodologies in archaeological heritage interpretation at the W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite (2013)
Today, the former homeplace of William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois is a National Historic Landmark administered by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which assumed stewardship of the property in 1987 after more than seventy years of relative abandonment. Nondescript and overgrown, the space appears to be little more than a vacant parking lot and accompanying sign alongside Route 23 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Indeed, ongoing efforts to commemorate Du Bois and to interpret the...
Commemorative Hauntings: Race, Ghosts, And Material Culture At A Civil War Prison Camp (2016)
Ghosts and other spectral forms have a history of use as literary devices for safely ‘remembering’ particularly traumatic events. Beyond the literary, in the everyday, lived world of the vernacular, ghost stories can also reveal trauma—what geographer Steve Pile refers to as a "fractured emotional geography cut across by shards of pain, loss, and injustice." Like ruins, ghosts and other haunted places are often about coming to terms with grief and with loss. Nowhere is that more true than at...
Commerce and Consequences: Considering the Impact of Mexican Independence on Eastern New Mexico (2018)
While the struggle for Mexican independence was a relatively remote concern for colonists in New Mexico, its consequences were immediate and profound. After Mexico opened its northern border to trade with the United States, commerce between the two countries brought American merchants and merchandise to and through New Mexico, creating new economic opportunities for local residents and introducing numerous changes to their daily lives. These opportunities came with a cost; 25 years later,...
Commerce, Cloth and Consumers: Results of Lead Seal Analysis from Three French Colonial Sites in North America (2018)
Lead seals ("bale seals") remain some of the more mysterious artifacts found at colonial period North American sites, but they have an incredible potential to enrich our understanding of eighteenth-century textile consumption. This presentation will showcase results of the analysis of nearly 300 lead seals from three French colonial sites with different locations, purposes, and inhabitants: Fort St. Joseph, Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga), and Fortress Louisbourg. These varied sites provide a window...
Commercial Connections in the Chinese Diaspora (2016)
What do Chinese work camps in the American West tell us about emergent capitalist networks in the mid-nineteenth century? This talk will draw upon current archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork as well as historical studies to contextualize the historical archaeology of Chinese railroad laborers. The extant archaeological remains found on work camps - hearths, ceramic sherds, game pieces, etc - only tell part of the story. A focus on remittances, and the transnational flow of cash, goods,...