Chesapeake (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett R Fesler.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For two days in August 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, and a core group of followers rampaged across rural Southampton County, Virginia, killing some 55 white people. Broadly speaking, Turner had initiated a social justice movement, albeit a violent one. One month later, 46 free Black residents of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. H. Ogborne.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Bastions, Buttons, and Burials: Recent Research at Historic St. Mary’s City", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Multiple fragments of tangled metallic threads and a complete woven button were found during the 2023 excavation season in a St. Mary’s Fort cellar feature at Historic St. Mary’s City. These discarded threads once adorned garments that communicated the social and economic status of the wearer,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Katherine D. Cavallo.

This paper examines the types, quantities, and distributions of marked and decorated white clay tobacco pipes from four 17th century archaeological sites located along the lower Patuxent River in southern Maryland. Although marked pipes often account for a relatively small percentage of total pipe assemblages, important patterns in both their temporal and spatial distribution are clearly evident. For example, even though records indicate that Bristol pipemaker Llewellin Evans was working from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Levy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Land Unto Itself: Virginia's Northern Neck, Colonialism, And The Early Atlantic", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The John Washington Site on the Potomac River was excavated in the 1930s and the 1970s. The site was occupied by English colonial settlers from the 1650s until the end of the century and conforms to reigning understandings of regional architecture and assemblages: a gentry family's modest home...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Edward E. Chaney.

All too often, archaeological studies of the Contact Period, as it occurred in the Chesapeake Bay region, have focused on the European impact on Native American life. The opposite side of this interaction—the effects Indians had on colonial life—has been downplayed. Indian-made artifacts found on colonial sites are often seen as little more than indicators of “trade.” However, a closer examination of the evidence suggests that the Native impact on English settlers was more profound. Using data...

PROJECT Julia King.

Using detailed comparisons of the archaeological assemblages from 18 early sites in the Chesapeake, this project explores the material conditions of culture contact, plantation development and organization, the rise of slavery, and consumer behavior. Comparable artifact databases have been created for the 18 sites, and analysis of artifact distributions has provided great insight into differences and similarities.

DATASET Gregory Brown.

Coding Conventions for the use of the comprehensive artifact catalog associated with the Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture project. Also linked to the Manual for the comprehensive artifact catalog.

DATASET Gregory Brown.

Comprehensive artifact catalog for the Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture project, an NEH-funded comparative analysis of 18 early seventeenth-century archaeological sites in the Chesapeake region. The artifact catalog, composed of about 186,000 records, was created from the individual artifact catalogs for the 18 sites, combined and standardized into a single MS Access database. The associated manual and coding conventions documents (below) explain in detail how to use the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Gregory Brown.

Manual for the use of the comprehensive artifact catalog associated with the Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture project. Also linked to the Coding Conventions for the comprehensive artifact catalog.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julie Schablitsky.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Archaeology of Harriet Tubman's Birthplace", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Maryland Department of Transportation archaeologists discovered a substantial brick house foundation, large cellar, and kitchen fireplace on Harriet Tubman’s Birthplace on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. While a 19th century ceramic and faunal assemblage reflect a family of humble means, the brick foundation and location adjacent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia A King.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The capture, enslavement, and sale of Indigenous people emerged early in the colonized Chesapeake Tidewater but remains understudied by archaeologists, in part because researchers have traditionally considered Indigenous enslavement as rare in the region. I use a fragmentary archive,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Bloch. Elizabeth Bollwerk. Karen Y. Smith. Corey Sattes. Jillian Galle.

For over a decade, archaeologists collaborating with the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) have conducted fine-grained analysis of colonoware ceramics from 24 sites in Virginia and South Carolina, investigating how these ceramics were made, marketed, and used. We found significant variation in vessel abundance and sherd attributes, such as thickness, paste inclusion type and density, surface treatments, and presence of residue among these occupations of the 17th-19th...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace M Gordon. Nick B Beard. Kyle K Vanhoy.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2023 the archaeology department at George Washington’s Mount Vernon undertook an intensive excavation of the mansion cellar. The cellar has been expanded twice in the eighteenth century and altered several times over the course of time. These changes have added various architectural components and changed others. While many of these changes were documented and known, certain elements...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean E Devlin. Emily Zimmerman.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Serving as connections between the natural and human-built world, garden landscapes speak loudly to the social purposes and the intentionality of their creators. Traditional analysis of colonial era gardens in the Chesapeake have focused on gardens as one means by which members of the elite expressed their social power over the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sierra S. Roark.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Opening the Vault: What Collections Can Say About Jamestown’s Global Trade Network", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Plants played an integral role in the colonization of North America. When colonists and investors realized that gold and other precious metals would not be viable for export, they turned their attention to other natural resources. It was in plants that the colonists found the answers to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reeves.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Clientage Model, as defined by Dr. Michael Blakey and his team, is one in which the archaeologists give the descendants primacy in defining the research and interpretive agenda directed towards their ancestral material record. We have strove to have descendants guide our approach to the archaeological record at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara J. Heath. Kandace Hollenbach.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Our paper summarizes analyses of samples of carbonized seeds, nutshells, and plant parts and tissues which we use to investigate the relationships between people and plants in the foodways, economy, and ecology in Maryland and Virginia in the period from 1630 to 1720. Incorporating multiple contexts from five...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Catherine Alston.

In 2003, a consortium of researchers at various institutions undertook the project, ‘A Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture,’ funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. This project is designed to document and interpret the interactions between the multiple groups that made up the Chesapeake society by comparing material culture recovered from various colonial sites in Maryland and Virginia. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry M. Miller.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Bastions, Buttons, and Burials: Recent Research at Historic St. Mary’s City", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Early Maryland’s first brick building was a Catholic chapel constructed in the 1660s, closed due to religious bigotry in 1704, and demolished a decade later. Archaeologists relocated the site in 1983 and major investigations extended from 1988 to 1996. Following analysis and extensive architectural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only D. Brad Hatch.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Traditional crafts associated with Virginia Indian tribes have drawn the attention of colonizers, collectors, anthropologists, and material culture researchers for hundreds of years. The vast majority of these crafts have a connection to traditional foodways systems and serve as major aspects of tribal identity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick B. Beard. Grace G. Gordon. Kyle K. Vanhoy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This study will examine excavations around the Historic Core of Mount Vernon, searching for patterns in the size of artifacts to infer where high traffic areas, like desire paths or work spaces, may have existed. Multiple historic lanes lie on the landscape today, but were not always used by all parts of the population at all...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine M. Davis. Jade S. Burch. Ruth M. Mitchell. Henry M. Miller.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Bastions, Buttons, and Burials: Recent Research at Historic St. Mary’s City", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological findings at the 1634 St. Mary’s Fort provide evidence for one of the earliest colonial burials in Maryland. Discovered during testing in 1992, this burial remained unexcavated until 2023 when it was investigated in collaboration with Smithsonian forensic scientists. Consultation was...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Catherine Alston.

Conducting comparative archaeological studies is a trend that has developed over the past few decades, and with each project the concept and methodologies become more and more robust. In doing such comparative projects, digital technologies are essential for a successful study. Due to a comprehensive database set and the ability to spatially map the material culture recovered at the sites, the project “A Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture” is proving to be a powerful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, Norfolk District.

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DOCUMENT Citation Only Carley J Arrowood. Sabrina L Wandres. Dakota L Kalavoda.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Bastions, Buttons, and Burials: Recent Research at Historic St. Mary’s City", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Leonard Calvert House (ca.1630s/1640s - ca.1710) served originally as the home of Maryland’s first governor and was later converted into the colony’s first statehouse and public ordinary. The varying functions and occupants of this structure are reflected in its complex yardscape. Here, seven...