North America (Geographic Keyword)
701-725 (3,610 Records)
The commoditization of cowrie shells in the 17th and 18th centuries was central to the economics of the consumer revolution of the early modern world. Cowries drove the Africa trade that cemented economic relationships between rulers, investors, merchants, and planters in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From their origins in the Pacific, to the markets of India, from Europe to West Africa, and from West Africa to the New World, cowries played a central role as both commodities and...
Commodity Culture: the formation, exchange, and negotiation of Early Republican Period identity on a periphery of the Spanish Empire in Western El Salvador (2017)
During the Early Republican Period, the sugar industry increasingly connected a fledgling Salvadoran country to a global market. A creolized labor force produced sugar on large estates known as haciendas. The hacienda was a crossroads of indigenous, African, and European interests as evidenced in the ceramic landscapes of the Río Ceniza Valley. The extensive organization of labor, on a periphery of the Spanish Empire, was underscored by a complex set of power relations. This research focuses on...
Common Men in Uncommon Times: Examining Archaeological and Historical Evidence to Reconstruct the Daily Lives of Civil War Sailors (2015)
The American Civil War was a tumultuous period in history for the United States, forcing brother against brother in a battle over the secession of the Confederate States. To study the Civil War sailor, a wealth of archival information exists in the form of personal narratives. Like their ships, naval crews were very much a reflection of where they were built and supplied. This paper extracts evidence for shipboard life from these sources and seeks to contextualize the daily lives of sailors...
Communal Spaces and Ideas of Belonging in a WWII Japanese Incarceration Center (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans was based on a questioning of national allegiance and the role of minority groups within this nation. This paper looks at the development of communal spaces at the Amache Incarceration Center in southeastern Colorado and explores the ways these areas express ideas of national and...
Communities in Conflict: Racialized Violence During Gradual Emancipation on Long Island (2016)
From New Amsterdam to Seneca Village, Diana diZerega Wall has examined the often-conflicting interactions of communities living in close relation. In the early nineteenth century, the nearly 30-year process of Gradual Emancipation slowly dismantled the system of slavery in New York State, but it also created the conditions for the perpetuation of inequality among closely intertwined peoples: the black and white inhabitants of eastern Long Island. Inspired by Wall’s ability to uncover the...
Communities of Culture on the Early American Frontier: Investigating the Daniel Baum Family, Carroll County, Indiana (2018)
Daniel and Ascenith Baum arrived in Carroll County, Indiana on a keel boat in April 1825. One of the pioneering families in the region, the Baum residence quickly became a social entrepôt. The first store in the county was opened in one of the Baum cabins, the first courts were held in the Baum house, and travelers coming up the Wabash River regularly stopped at the Baum’s. The Baum farm, then, was a focal point for the development of a community identity for the region’s early settlers. This...
Community Archaeology and Collaborative Interpretation at a Rosenwald School (2018)
Of more than 5,000 Rosenwald Schools built during the 20th century in the southern United States, the Fairview School in Cave Spring, Georgia was constructed to provide an educational facility for the local African-American community. Following the site’s rediscovery in 2009, the local Cave Spring community and alumni of Fairview have spearheaded efforts to preserve and interpret Fairview’s historic campus. Most of the buildings located on the Fairview campus were demolished, originally...
Community Archaeology and the Criminal Past: Exploring a Detroit Speakeasy (2016)
Community-engaged archaeology has played a role in reshaping the city of Detroit’s popular heritage narrative from one of decline and decay to one more rich and complex. In 2013, archaeologists from Wayne State University investigated Tommy's Bar, a rumored Prohibition-era speakeasy and haunt of the infamous Purple Gang. The project was a partnership between the University, a historic preservation non-profit, and the bar's owner. The project culminated in a theme party where archaeologists...
Community Archaeology in Action: The Partnership Between NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and the Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group (2016)
In the three-plus years of its existence, the Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group has been engaged in a mutually-beneficial partnership with NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. The Group, which is a part of the Institute of Maritime History, a 501(c)3 educational nonprofit corporation, is made up nearly exclusively of avocational archaeologists and historians all of whom are sport, or recreational, scuba divers. Yet since its founding in late 2012, it has conducted or...
Community Archaeology, Essentializing Identity, and Racializing the Past (2018)
As anthropologically guided archaeologists, we like to think we are beyond searching for romanticized images of "Natives," "Africans," or any essentialized "other," but despite our best efforts, we still fall victim to its simplicity. Collaborating with descendent communities broadens our perspective, but their perceptions of the past and their ancestors can further complicate the dilemma. This paper explores two mixed-heritage communities in Setauket and Amityville, both on Long Island, New...
Community Displacement and the Creation of a 'City Beautiful' at Roosevelt Park, Detroit (2016)
Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Detroit’s City Beautiful Movement. The construction process was a place-making effort designed to implant order on the urban landscape that involved the displacement of a community who represented everything that city planners sought to erase from Detroit’s city center: overcrowding, poverty, immigrants, and transient populations. Current historical archaeological research reveals how the existing...
Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Decolonizing Research (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeology as a field of inquiry aims to bring forward the life histories of individuals through the analysis of skeletal markers of disease, trauma, and activities, at the individual and population level to better understand the experiences and identities of people that came before. A recent and important shift in the...
Community Engaged Scholarship and the Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (OKPAN), founded in 2016, recently engaged in strategic planning that has helped streamline our programs and increase the breadth of our community engagement. In our paper, we highlight two initiatives that have proved particularly effective at empowering communities that have traditionally been excluded...
Community Formation, Consumption, and Gender at Camp Nelson’s ‘Home for Colored Refugees’ (2013)
Following the tragic expulsion of four hundred African-American women and children from Camp Nelson, KY in November 1864, of which 102 died, these refugees were allowed to return and the ‘Home for Colored Refugees’ was constructed. This expulsion also led to the emancipation of these refugees by the Congressional Act of March 3, 1865. By the summer of 1865 this ‘Home’ housed over 3000 former slaves who lived in a variety of housing, including duplex cottages, tents, dormitories, and home-made...
Community Networks at the Stanford Arboretum Chinese Workers’ Quarters (2016)
The historical response and endurance of Chinese diaspora communities in California, living with legally reified racism, is a critical component of understanding the economic and social impacts of immigration restriction. Between 1876 and 1925, the Chinese employees at the Stanford Stock Farm and Stanford University impacted the development of agriculture and infrastructure through their labor and entrepreneurship as farm workers, in construction, as gardeners, and as domestic workers. Over that...
The Community of Chase Home: Institutional and Material Components of Children’s Lived Spaces in Victorian Portsmouth (2016)
The Chase Home for Children opened in 1883, housed in an immigrant-rich neighborhood of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Home accepted children, "without distinction of race, creed, or color*" who needed temporary or long-term care and housing. Chase Home was guided by tenants of the Progressive Era and supported solely by the local community, at a time before state welfare was available. In contrast to single religious denomination orphanages typical in Victorian America, or strict reformatory...
Community-Based Archaeology in the Bahamas: Linking Landscape and Memory (2018)
In 1871, the last owner of the Millars Plantation Estate on Eleuthera, Bahamas left a portion of the former plantation acreage to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. In the intervening 175 years since emancipation in the Bahamas and the 125 years since the property transferred to "generation land", south Eleuthera has experienced a series of economic transformations and demographic transitions. Despite these changes, the Millars descendant community maintains their connection to...
Community-Based Ethnoarchaeology to Inform Experimental Archaeological Research: Learning from the Diasporic Tigrayan Community in Vancouver, British Colombia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental archaeology is an extremely beneficial method of inquiry, as it centralizes the physical knowledge of material culture and sensory experiences. While experimental archaeology brings researchers closer to the realities of creating and using material culture, ethnoarchaeology reconnects researchers...
Community-Based Explorations of "Schooling" at the Grand Ronde Reservation (2018)
In 1856, members of twenty-seven Bands and Tribes were removed to what today is known as the Grand Ronde Reservation in northwestern Oregon. Like other Indigenous adolescents, children at Grand Ronde were sent to schools driven by assimilationist policies as part of a broader project of Euro-American colonialism. However, unlike many others, they attended school on the reservation, closer to their homes. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, five different schools are...
Como la paja del páramo: Everyday Traditions on the Hacienda Guachalá, Ecuador (2016)
The post-independence period (post-1830) of Ecuador and Latin America presented profound socio-political transformations, catalyzing intense debate over the meaning of citizenship and equality for marginalized indigenous populations. Many of these changes manifested on agricultural estates known as haciendas, which often became spaces of direct political actions such as uprisings led by female indigenous activists Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amanguaña in the Cayambe area of Ecuador. These...
The Company’s Feast: Commensality And Managerial Capitalism (2016)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many mining companies in the American West provided their employees with housing and boarding arrangements, even recreational green spaces and company-sponsored festivities on holidays. Daily meals offered by some mining companies were a part of larger managerial capitalist policies common during this period. These meals placed the necessity of eating under a company roof and at a company table with foods purchased with company funds. The town...
A Comparative Analysis of a Potential Tavern Site in Jackson, North Carolina (2015)
Residents of Jackson, North Carolina in Northampton County have found what they believe to be an 18th century tavern site. The area was inhabited by the Tuscarora until the Tuscarora War ended in 1715, after which European settlers began to move into the region. The residents of Jackson believe this to be a tavern owned by Jeptha Atherton. This research assesses this claim by comparing those artifacts to the artifacts at two other contemporary taverns: Dudley’s Tavern in Halifax, North Carolina...
Comparative Analysis of Food Production, Waste, and Socioeconomic Dynamics in Red Light Districts and Brothel Sites across Three Port Cities during the American Industrial Revolution (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE New Orleans and Its Environs: Historical Archaeology and Environmental Precarity" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I present a comparative analysis of brothel sites and red-light districts in three major port cities during or around the period of the American Industrial Revolution. With a focus on Storyville in New Orleans, Louisiana, I will use Five Points in Manhattan, New York, and Hell's Half Acre...
Comparative Analysis of the Ceramic Assemblage from the Anniversary Wreck, St. Augustine, Florida (2018)
The Anniversary Wreck was discovered in 2015, the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, Florida. Preliminary analysis of the material recovered dates the site between 1750 and 1800. A closer examination of the ceramic assemblage and a comparison to terrestrial ceramic assemblages from St. Augustine are used to attempt to accurately place the shipwreck within the prevailing historical divisions of Florida’s History that span the years 1750 to 1800, that is, the late First Spanish...
Comparative Analysis Of Waterscreening Soil From A French Colonial Living Floor In St. Charles, Missouri (2016)
Excavations collected approximately 14.4 cubic meters of a hard-packed living floor from a Fremch Colonial outbuilding for waterscreening (from 23SC2101). This paper will discuss the partial analysis of the materials and information recovered from this mass soil collection process and draw broad conclusions about the efforts usefullness.