North America (Geographic Keyword)
876-900 (3,602 Records)
Archaeology at a Danish colonial merchant's residence in Charlotte Amalie projects the complex yet distinct array of consumer goods available in a 19th century Danish Caribbean port town. The walled compound housed a series of 19th and early 20th merchants/bankers and their household servants. This study explores the intersection of micro and macro history as it assesses the material and documentary record of the site. The house and its furnishings were selected for commemorative photo...
The Dardenne Presbyterian Church Archaeological Project (2016)
This paper examines the archaeological remains of the Dardenne Presbyterian Church in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri. Constructed in 1845, the Church served as a gathering ground for residents of the area for both religious and social purposes. During the course of the Civil War, the Church was encountered by Union soldiers who proceeded to burn it down in 1862. Today, the remains of the church can still be found. Through selective shovel testing and excavation, various building materials have been...
Dark Places: Archaeological Investigations of Historic Underground Mines (2015)
Despite decades of research at historic mines, archaeological forays in North America have seldom extended to investigate underground workplaces. The reasons are understandable: underground mines are hazardous environments, and it is also the case that fewer mines are accessible due to environmental remediation. The current underrepresentation of the underground, however, has limited disciplinary insights into the mining life. This paper draws from a set of pioneering studies that draw attention...
Dark Shadows of the Homefront: Crystal City and Internment During World War II (2015)
Dark Shadows of the Home-front During America’s World War II Crystal City and Internment Carroll-Scogin-Brincefield MA The textbooks and historical documentaries all discuss the shameful treatment of Japanese Americans being forced to relocation and internment camps during World War II, but selective amnesia concerning German and Italian Americans have left a void in the true history of internments in the United States. Texas had 21 POW camps and 3 Internment camps, that’s twice the amount of...
The Dark Side of Gentility: Race and Masculine Becoming at 18th-century Harvard College (2018)
Materialities of gentility drew captured and enslaved Africans and African-Americans into the production of white male privilege one of its most iconic incubators, colonial Harvard College. During the long 18th century, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution was an intercultural, interracial, intergenerational space of becoming. Archaeological finds and documentary archives clarify how gentility was moralized in this religiously orthodox community, emerging as a tool of racialization and...
Data Recovery at the Elkins A & B Site [7NC-G-174] A unique look at two adjacent single-occupation 18th century farmsteads (2016)
The Elkins A & B site has produced some of the most interesting data seen along the U.S. Route 301 corridor. The site represents two very different sites from two different periods in the 18th century. Elkins B, the earlier of the two , was occupied from around 1720 to circa 1740 on property owned by John Greenwater Jr. This site had array of interesting items, such as a set of red-bodied earthenware vessels thought to have been manufactured in Philadelphia by the Hillegas brothers, numerous...
Data Recovery of the CSS Georgia (2018)
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District, in partnership with the Georgia Ports Authority, is proposing to expand the Savannah Harbor navigation channel on the Savannah River. As designed, the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project (SHEP) will consist of deepening and widening various portions of the harbor. Previous surveys identified the remains of the CSS Georgia, a Civil War ironclad within the Area of Potential Effect, and as proposed, the SHEP would adversely affect this National...
Data Sovereignty in Archaeological and Anthropological Research (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Social Justice in Native North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While collaboration has started to become an expected part of research with Native communities, prioritizing the needs and wants of Native communities has yet to be normalized within academic research. In this session, we will discuss how principles of "data sovereignty" might be applied to archaeological and anthropological research...
Database Creation for the Legacy Collection of Hannastown (2016)
The rapid technological advances in digital computing of the preceding fifty years have allowed for an ever increasing complex analysis of archaeological assemblages. For those working with legacy collections curated before the advent of personal computing, the task of digitizing and formatting data into a usable form while also insuring against the same obsolescence that is being corrected can be daunting. The Applied Archaeology program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania takes a...
Dating Charred Food Crust: Offsets, Pretreatment, and Organic Compunds (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike charcoal, charred food residue has an obvious advantage of fundamental association with use of the pottery and hence, human activity. Food is annual or short-lived. Usually animals hunted for food live only a few to perhaps a few tens of years. Therefore, good dates on food residue from ceramics or pottery should tighten ceramic chronologies and provide...
A Day in the Life: Artifacts from Pipestone Indian Boarding School, Pipestone, Minnesota (2015)
Agency as reflected in the archeological record is a well-studied and disputed theme among archeologists. Broad generalizations arise from these conversations resulting in an over-simplification of the conditions under which the record was created. It is easy to paint the narrative that emerges in black and white terms. Life in the United States was rarely that simple during the Indian boarding school area. Oral histories show that employees and students alike had mixed feelings about their...
De-Polarizing Archaeology’s Views on Cultural Pride: The Case of Houses and Plants in Castroville (2017)
In archaeology, we commonly view pride in cultural heritage as either beneficial or dangerous. When we see it as dangerous—ethnocentric or nationalistic—we challenge it by producing material evidence of cultural hybridity and heterogeneity. When we view it as beneficial—emancipatory and unifying—we bolster it by providing communities with material symbols of past accomplishments and cultural continuity. This paper considers how we might de-polarize archaeological perspectives on cultural pride...
Deaccessioning for Education: It's Not a Four Letter Word (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological curators struggle with the growing number of collections in our repositories, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘curation crisis.’ Yet ‘crisis’ is an acute term, when the problem is instead chronic. The discipline of archaeology marches on, and so must repositories, even as the quantities...
The Dead’s Vitality: Maintaining Souls in Virginia Communities (2016)
Solar-powered bulbs and flapping-winged ladybugs, wind chimes, whirligigs, jack-o-lanterns, valentines to the deceased, and much else adorn gravesites in the Valley of Virginia. A 2003 bowling trophy sits on the headstone of a person who died in 2001. A stuffed rabbit faces another stone and holds recent photos of children, as if showing them to the buried teen. These objects relate not only to the deceased’s personal histories and interests but also represent gestures, through exchange and...
Death in Texas: Burials Patterns Within the Campo Santo of San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio (2018)
In 2016 and 2017, CAR-UTSA conducted limited exploration of a portion of a Campo Santo associated with San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio. As a component of that work, we reviewed a summary of parish records that provided information on roughly 1,800 interments. Focusing on the period between 1809 and 1848, during which time San Antonio transitioned from an outpost on the northern frontier of Mexico to a town under US jurisdiction, we explore three broad categories of death. These are...
Decadal Drought and Wetness Reconstructed for Subtropical North America in the Mexican Drought Atlas (2016)
A new drought atlas has been developed for subtropical North America, including the entire Republic of Mexico. This Mexican Drought Atlas (MXDA) is based on 251 tree-ring chronologies, including 82 from Mexico and another 169 from the southern U.S. and western Guatemala. The new reconstructions of the Palmer Drought Severity Index for June-August provide a more detailed estimation of decadal moisture regimes since AD 1400. Droughts previously identified in a subset of chronologies are...
Deciphering Ornamental Landscapes at Monticello (2016)
Pollen data can serve as valuable evidence to advance our understanding of change and spatial variation in the landscape of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello from its initial European settlement in the 18th century to the present. The data presented in this paper draws from a multi-year campaign of stratigraphic sampling conducted in the largely ornamental mountaintop landscape immediately surrounding Jefferson's mansion. Comparing these data to stratigraphic samples collected away from the...
The Decisive Moment in Archaeology: Photography and the Loss, Recovery, and Repatriation of America’s Missing in Action (2017)
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the decisive moment (1952) is one of the most enduring and debated ideas of photography. Defined as when "the visual and psychological elements of people in a real life scene spontaneously and briefly come together in perfect resonance to express the essence of [the] human situation" (Suler 2012, 372), the decisive moment has been explored and practiced extensively in the space of modern photojournalism. Less common is the exploration of the decisive moment in...
Decoding the Midden: How DAACS Helped Reveal the Secrets of the Most Complicated Context at Fairfield Plantation, Gloucester County, Virginia (2015)
Fairfield Plantation's midden spans an historically complex period in Virginia's history (mid-18th-to-mid-19th century). This refuse deposit includes materials representating a cross section of the plantation's population, particularly those living in and near the 1694 manor house. Although plowing in the late 19th and 20th century impacted the interpretive potential of the midden, all was not lost. DAACS cataloging of artifacts recovered from 138 five-foot-square test units within and...
Decolonizing a Metropolis: the materialization of the late Portuguese empire through Lisbon’s commercial spaces (2013)
After the formal independence of the Portuguese African colonies between 1974 and 1975, massive numbers of Europeans and settlers of European descent moved to Portugal in one of the most rapid migrations of the century. This traumatic experience and the problems of redefining a national identity led to the continuous reproduction of an imperial imagination in the old metropolis, but this time without colonies. In this paper I will discuss how old and new urban spaces such as small shops, cafés...
Decolonizing Landscapes: Documenting culturally important areas collaboratively with tribes (2017)
The Characterizing Tribal Cultural Landscapes project outlines a proactive approach to working with indigenous communities to identify tribally significant places, in advance of proposed undertakings. A collaborative effort among BOEM, NOAA, tribal facilitators, and the THPOs of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon, Yurok Tribe in California, and Makah Tribe in Washington, we use a holistic cultural landscape approach to model methods and best practices for agencies and tribes to...
Decolonizing the Persuasive Power of Paradigms and Discourse (2016)
The historical archaeologies of the Chinese Diaspora has made progress departing from its assimilation/acculturation roots. There remains, however, much room for future growth, particularly from a critical Ethnic Studies/Asian American Studies standpoint. This paper utilizes an interdisciplinary perspective to consider how increased self-reflexivity along with critical interrogation and consciousness must be integral to how we approach our work on racialized communities. We must question the...
Decolonizing the Practice of Archaeology through Collaboration and Community Engagement: Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned (2018)
Collaboration or Consultation—while both terms involve working with stakeholders; consultation implies a formulaic, reactionary response or product that can produce negative connotations. In contrast,collaboration suggests a voluntary, shared method and a mutual goal, invoking more positive associations. Within archaeology, collaboration is not a new practice. Yet the task of decolonizing the practice of archaeology within academia and the public sector is easier said than done. Through...
Deconcreting the Hunley: Revealing the Surface of the Submarine for the First Time (2016)
Deconcretion of the exterior of the H.L. Hunley submarine is in full swing with more than 1250 lbs. of marine deposits and corrosion removed. This presentation will provide an overview of the recent progress by conservators at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston, SC. After a brief review of the project's major milestones, emphasis will be placed on the technical challenges of the deconcretion work including the lab setting requirements, the deconcretion plan, techniques of...
Deconstructing Ubiquity: the Interpretive Value of Metal Drum Container Artifacts (2017)
As 20th and 21st century artifacts, metal drum containers straddle historical and contemporary archaeological studies that will be conducted during the next 50 years. They are found across the globe as repurposed objects within site features, as components of expedient structures, as well as vernacular landscape artifacts. Although often simply described in CRM reports as "ubiquitous 55 gallon drums," archival research and field data demonstrate that not all drums are created equal in function,...