North America (Geographic Keyword)
926-950 (3,602 Records)
A series of mortuary sites on the Texas Coastal Plain provide a dataset useful for analyzing demographic change through examination of age profiles. Other archaeological data suggest that populations peaked during the Late Archaic period (4000-800 BP) and sharply declined during the Late Prehistoric period (800-350 BP). Analysis of the ratio of adults to young individuals has been used to identify rapid population growth among other populations. Hunter-gatherer groups living in the Texas...
The Demography of Fire (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past seven years, Alta Heritage Foundation (AHF) has responded to nearly a dozen catastrophic fires on the west coast. AHF is a 501(c) non-profit that works with canine human remains recovery teams to identify cremains, the cremated remains of individuals who were cremated prior to the fire and stored in private residences, and retrieve them for...
Dena Dincauze: The Matriarch of New England Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Female Firsts: Celebrating Archaeology’s Pioneering Women on the 101st Anniversary of the 19th Amendment " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dena Dincauze (1934–2016) made a great impact throughout her archaeological career, not only in New England, but also throughout North America more broadly. As one of the first women to receive her PhD from Harvard University, Dena was also one of the first tenured female...
Dendrochronology at Ash Lawn-Highland (2016)
Over the last few decades, dendrochronology, or the science of tree-ring dating, has become a widely used tool for dating historic houses. In 2014, a comprehensive dendrochronological study was launched at Ash Lawn-Highland in order to establish a dated framework for the various phases of construction at the main house. This paper discusses the results of that study and its effect on the interpretation of the house and its surrounding landscape.
Dennis Stanford at SI: The Man, The Place, The Career (2018)
Dennis Stanford heads up the Archaeology division at the Smithsonian Institution and its Paleo-Indian Program. From the time he completed his graduate studies (PhD 1974, University of New Mexico), Dennis has held positions in the Department of Anthropology at SI, repository of the major archaeological collection in the United States. In his more than four decades at SI, he has fostered acquisition of archaeological (especially PaleoIndian) additions to the Department's collections, conducted...
Dentistry as Social Discourse: Aspects of Oral Health and Consumer Choice using a Bioarchaeological Perspective (2016)
This study examines the presence (or absence) of professional dental restorative work in the form of fillings, crowns, bridges, or even full sets of dentures, using an integrative biocultural approach. The dataset is derived from an intensive survey of historic cemeteries subjected to bioarchaeological analyses, and include differences in geography (urban versus rural), gender, race/ethnicity, age, and commensurate socioeconomic levels. Since restorative dental work was both expensive and...
Designing a Collaborative Website for Inter-Site Research: The Colonial Encounters Project (2016)
The Colonial Encounters project is a multi-institution collaboration intended to provide on-line and downloadable access to some 35 important archaeological assemblages from sites in the Potomac River valley dated between 1500 and 1720. Part of a larger project intended to provoke inter-site studies by standardizing and organizing previous archaeological projects, the website described in this paper was designed to deliver site summary documents, historical data, images, and a database...
A Detailed Analysis of the Dentition of Jamestown’s First Settlers (2017)
Archaeologists and an interdisciplinary team of researchers are studying the skull and dentition of a 15-year-old boy (1225B) who appears to have been the victim of a battle with Native Americans during the initial settlement at Jamestown in 1607. Specimens recovered from the boy’s teeth and jaws yield clues about diet and other aspects of daily life in the 17th century.Detailed study of the remains began with the morphological and temporal study of the skull and teeth using Cone-Beam computed...
Detecting Dutchness: Global Identities in the 17th Century Dutch Atlantic (2018)
This paper discusses the development of a Dutch national identity in the 17th century Dutch Republic, as evidenced in both the archaeological and historical records, and how this identity persisted with some variation in the West India Company colonies of New Netherland and St. Eustatius. By the early 1600s, a common Dutch identity rooted in the shared values of pragmatism, cleanliness, self-interest, Calvinist morality tempered by an appreciation for material comforts, and a conviction in the...
Deterioration of Historic Structures on Barbuda, West Indies (2015)
Three and a half decades have passed since the author first observed the historic structures of Barbuda, a low-lying limestone island in the northern Lesser Antilles. Natural and cultural processes, ranging from hurricanes to stone-robbing, have transformed these buildings, resulting in their structural integrity being compromised. In many cases, architectural features that were observed as recently as twenty years ago no longer are extant because of the degree of deterioration. Preserving...
Determining Battle Lines: a pXRF study of lead shot from the Battle of Palo Alto. (2016)
In 2012-2013, the Southeast Archeological Center undertook a project to analyze the chemical composition of the lead shot recovered from their recent archaeological surveys at Palo Alto National Historical Park, site of the first battle of the U.S.-Mexican War. Using a portable x-ray fluorescence machine, 771 lead shot samples were analyzed in order to ascertain whether there was a difference in the chemical makeup between the lead shot that had been previously identified, using traditional...
Developing a Geotrail: Utilizing Geocaching and Letterboxing in Public Archaeology (2013)
Geocaching is a world-wide scavenger hunt game where players try to find hidden containers by using GPS coordinates of their location posted online. Activities like geocaching offer organizations a great opportunity to promote cultural resources and provide interpretation to players. In 2011 the Florida Public Archaeology Network created a geocaching trail, or geotrail, highlighting historic and archaeological sites in Northwest Florida as a way to promote heritage tourism in the region....
Developing an Ecological Interpretation of Land Use in Virginia’s Piedmont: The Montpelier Example (2016)
Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) provides an intriguing opportunity for the interpretation of plantation management strategies. HBE has been applied with some interesting results to interpretations of past human behavior, but many claim it is inappropriate to interpret past life through the application of economic theory developed in the modern era. This approach is also criticized as a reductionist analytical approach based in conservative microeconomic theory. In light of these...
Developing Digital Identity and Student Opportunities in a Public Archaeology Degree Program (2018)
At the beginning of the Masters Program in Public Archaeology (MAPA) at Binghamton University, we worked with the Director to create a digital identity, write a social media strategy, and develop a student blogging group for the program. Student blog posts on contemporary political events and scholarly debates have garnered attention from the archaeological community for the two years since. In this paper, we evaluate the public response to the MAPA blog by analyzing social media posts that link...
Developing Long-Term Research Goals at Gloucester Point through Problem-Oriented Research (2018)
Fieldwork and archival research has been conducted at Gloucester Point since the mid-1970s, yet only recently has an effort begun to synthesize the data developed from this piecemeal effort. Synthesis requires a concentrated effort at compiling and organizing cartographic and historical records, not solely to develop context and create narratives for the occupants of this place over time, but also to create research questions that can be addressed with the vast amount of available archeological...
Developing Personhood: The discourse, experience, and material culture of children’s play activities in a WWII Japanese American Internment Camp (2016)
Recent studies apply the concept of "personhood" to the archaeological record as part of the continuing attempt to understand the complexities of past societies by moving away from gross categories and instead examining socially constructed roles. This paper explores the application of "personhood" as a way to transcend a broadly defined focus on "children" or "childhood." Such generalizing terms can obscure the impact of gender, age, and other social or economic variables on children’s...
Development and Use of Interactive Cultural Resources Tribal Relations Viewer for Informed Air Force Decision-Making (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Crucial Issues in United States Department of Defense Cultural Resources Management " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands (CEMML) collaborated with the United States Air Force Civil Engineer Center (AFCEC) to develop an interactive Cultural Resources Tribal Relations Viewer. This application uses WebApp Builder for ArcGIS and enables exploration of critical historic...
Development of Horticulture in the Eastern Woodlands of North America: Women's Role (1988)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Dialogues on the Experience of War: Difficult Heritage (2018)
War in the Pacific: Difficult Heritage recently engaged veterans, veteran families, and WWII survivors on the Pacific island of Saipan in considering how conflict heritage can be seen as universal to humanity and how it can be used to examine the veteran’s experience. The starting point for this consideration was to focus on the historical and contemporary warrior/veteran’s experiences as it relates to collective human experience of war and how we might come to understand and interpret the...
A Diamond Trowel: Minecrafting Archaeology at Fort St. Joseph (2016)
The development of digital technology is transforming society, including archaeology, in new and ever-expanding ways. From theodolites and GIS to informational databases and ion dating, the technological boom of the twenty-first century has provided new tools that increase the precision and complexity of archaeological analysis. The use of digital media by the average person has exploded, and such technologies provide new and intriguing avenues to reach and educate the public about archaeology....
Diaspora and social networks in a WWII Japanese American Incarceration Center (2018)
The rich documentary record available to historical archaeologists creates a unique opportunity to recreate social networks in past communities. Social network data can demonstrate how communities and individuals responded to changes to existing social structures, such as those caused by diaspora. Japanese American internment represents a forced diaspora as incarceration altered existing social structures and networks. Data from the Amache Internment center in Southeastern Colorado are used to...
Diasporic Flows and "Dwelling-in-Travel" in Southeastern North America (2013)
The establishment of the Carolina colony in AD 1670 prompted a series of population movements toward Charleston among numerous Native American peoples eager to exchange slaves and hides with English colonials. In microcosm, this is a precursor and embodiment of the population flows associated with globalization today. We consider how diasporic movements between Indigenous home territories and the Carolina frontier established a pattern of what James Clifford has referred to as...
The Diet of Dogs: Dental Microwear Texture Analysis to Interpret the Human-Canine Connection in Prehistoric North America (2018)
The archaeology of dog-keeping by indigenous Native North Americans enriches our understanding of ways people conceptualized their environments in the past. Finding new ways to investigate this topic contributes to broader anthropological knowledge about relationships among humans and the natural world. In this paper, I present exploratory research to examine ways that domestic dogs were maintained and the assumed value of dogs among Native Americans who lived in the Ohio River valley, in Plains...
A Different Breed: Historical Archaeology in Arizona (2016)
Arizona is renowned for the well-preserved cultural remains of its prehistoric indigenous peoples. Cultural Resource Management companies have identified thousands of archaeological sites over the last 50 years. However, during this time, a growing number of historical archaeological sites have also been documented, including linear sites; waste-pile sites; homestead, farming, and ranching sites; and mines. Unfortunately, many archaeologists schooled and trained in prehistoric archaeology, are...
A Different Kind of Screen Time: Using Emerging Mobile Geospatial Technologies to Engage with Public and Professional Audiences. (2018)
Emerging technologies have empowered archaeologists to interact with the public in new and exciting ways. At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, archaeological staff are incorporating geospatial analysis and story-telling tools to present to, and interact with various public and professional audiences. This paper will briefly discuss the use of ESRI Storymaps to engage with and inform the public both in the field and from the comfort of their own homes. Further tools, such as ESRI’s collector...