Chesapeake (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Poole.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As individual artifacts, wine bottle seals are valued for the names and dates they that they deliver, for their utility as status markers, and for their unique beauty. Considered in large numbers across a broader spatial context, personalized bottle seals hold additional potential to reveal social interaction. Colonial...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Anne Dowling Grulich.

This article follows a diminutive, headless, seventeenth century pipe clay figurine of a king from its conception in post-medieval Europe through its use, interment, and rebirth three centuries later in southern Maryland, USA. It is not so much the monarch it represents or the historical figure who owned it, but the meanings embodied by the artifact and our role in that process that this biography develops. This battered 300 year old figurine beckons us with its props and its demeanor. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara J. Heath. Kandace Hollenbach.

Historians of the 17th-century Chesapeake have emphasized the importance of tobacco for export and maize for domestic consumption, arguing that wheat became an economically important crop after about 1720. Results from a regional analysis of paleoethnobotanical samples dating from 1630 to 1725 reveal that Eurasian grains began to appear with some consistency in Virginia’s Northern Neck and Maryland after about 1660. Documentary evidence indicates that planters and tenants grew small grains in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thunderbird Archaeological Associates, Inc..

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth M Mitchell.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 1774 to 1813 most of the town known as St. Mary’s City was owned by John Mackall. Upon his death in 1813 he owned over 1,700 acres, and his inventory names 40 enslaved people. The same land was later owned by John Brome, who had 58 enslaved individuals by 1860. Where on the landscape did the enslaved live, and what is the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma K Derry.

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. The Jamestown Rediscovery collection contains 150 lapidary beads, including crystal quartz, chalcedony, carnelian, agate, amethyst, amber, and jet. Historically produced in regions where raw materials, craftsmen, and infrastructure came together, lapidary beads were transported across vast...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Kostro.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. By the late eighteenth century, Virginia taverns were regularly equipped with long covered porches that served as outdoor living spaces for socializing and much-needed respite from the region's stifling heat and humidity. This paper draws on recent archaeological excavations of three eighteenth-century Williamsburg public houses:...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Rivers Cofield.

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. Horseshoes are common finds on post-contact sites in the Chesapeake and elsewhere. While they are typically interpreted as artifacts of transportation or agriculture, horseshoes also served magical functions such as warding off evil and bringing good luck. This creates an interpretive problem for archaeologists as the...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Julia King.

In the last 25 years, a number of studies have emerged demonstrating that, while vertical stratigraphy is indeed destroyed by plowing, the horizontal or spatial distribution of materials is affected only minimally. Artifacts recovered from plow zone contexts are usually found close to where they were both used and discarded, with important implications for examining the spatial layout of archaeological sites. Distributions of plow zone artifacts and soil chemicals have been used to identify room...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Bollwerk.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Colonial Forts in Comparative, Global, and Contemporary Perspective", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Enclosed Compound (44PG65) at Flowerdew Hundred plantation, located on the south side of the James River in Virginia, was an early 17th century fortified site constructed to protect its inhabitants from the local Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco and the perceived ever-present threat of Spanish...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa E. Fischer. Cynthia J. Deuell. Caroline E. Gardiner. Erica G. Moses.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Adaptation and Alteration: The New Realities of Archaeology during a Pandemic" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant changes to daily life, forcing many cultural organizations that rely on public visitation to reorient their engagement efforts amidst site closures. Suddenly, communicating with audiences through the web and social media became even more vital. At the same...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cathrine M. Davis.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Firsthand accounts of the early years at James Fort paint a grim picture of death, apathy, and scarcity, and the nearly-failed colony has maintained a haunted reputation through the centuries in literature and historical tomes alike. In recent years, evidence of cannibalism has called attention to deviant treatment of the dead...

DOCUMENT Full-Text C. Jane Cox. Al Luckenbach. Dave Gadsby. Shawn Sharpe.

Tobacco pipes made in the colonial Chesapeake are often referred to as “terra-cotta” pipes. Made of local clays, they often exhibit a brown, reddish, earthen color, though they also come in a fascinating array of colors from orange to pink to almost pure white. These New World products have been fascinating Tidewater archaeologists for decades. Who in colonial society most likely produced and used terra-cotta pipes has been an ongoing discussion for over three decades. Theories have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia M. Samford.

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. At Smith’s St. Leonard, the site of a Maryland tobacco plantation dating to the first half of the 18th century, a number of apotropaic objects have been discovered by archaeologists over the last two decades. Including bent silver coins, horseshoes, fossils and altered spoons and lead disks, these objects seem to embody...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis G. Parno.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper traces Mary Beaudry’s legacy in two intertwined narratives: one that follows Mary’s time (1997-2005) as a commissioner of the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission (HSMCC) and one that examines the current research trajectory of the Historic St. Mary’s City Department of...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Dennis J. Pogue.

My own long-term interest has been to trace the process by which English cultural norms were adapted to New World conditions, to provide insight into why that adaptation occurred, and to assess the role of material culture in effecting that change. As such these are the kinds of questions that have been in the air at least since the 1970s, but which require a rich corpus of comparative and regionally representative evidence in order for archaeologists to have any hope of success in answering...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca J Webster.

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. Archaeologists studying the Chesapeake have interpreted the long 17th century as a period of certain and extended colonialism. However, by taking a sub-regional approach when examining the period, the shifts in power between Indians and settlers become more visible. In this paper, I examined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Buck Woodard. Elizabeth Bollwerk.

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. The preservation of textiles and basketry is exceedingly rare in the archaeological record of the Indigenous Chesapeake. However, Historic Jamestowne’s collection offers an unusual window into Native textiles of the region, with multiple examples of weaving technologies and preserved forms....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca J. Webster.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In circa 1640, John Mottrom, a planter and Indian trader, established his manor complex, Coan Hall (44NB11) in Northumberland County, Virginia. Mottrom’s manor house became the center of the Chicacoan settlement, a consortium of primarily former Kent Islanders who were exiled after the Maryland...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Philip Levy. John Coombs. David Muraca.

In previous papers we have sought to use archaeological data to rethink some of the reigning assumptions about life in colonial Chesapeake, and move toward a new vision of an early colonial Virginia “frontier.” Our work has focused principally on a few sites in the Virginia tidewater and along the upper reaches of the Rappahannock spanning the years between 1640 and 1760. Last year, for example, we used the artifactual and architectural data from a circa 1690 Rappahannock plantation to argue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve T. Lenik.

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. This paper examines the 1857 Slave Dwelling at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest in Bedford County, Virginia, as an object with its own life-history. Originally built as housing for enslaved laborers, the structure has seen several modifications during its existence, while it has gradually deteriorated since it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris L Coogan.

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. In March of 2023, excavations began on a new capital project aimed at recovering and analyzing archaeological materials located at the Leonard Calvert House Site in preparation for the reconstruction of the large structure in the heart of Historic St. Mary’s City’s Town Center. This project, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Boroughs. Lily Carhart.

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. In the Spring of 2024, Mount Vernon archaeologists recovered 29 intact bottles of fruit from a series of sub-floor storage pits in the cellar of Washington’s 18th century mansion. The bottles were carefully placed and intentionally buried under the floor between 1758-1775. Resting in situ for a quarter millennium,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Catherine Alston.

A group of scholars interested in the daily lives and social and cultural relationships of the inhabitants of the Colonial Chesapeake developed the project A Comparative Archaeological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Beginning in the fall of 2003 we began collecting information from 18 rural 17th to 18th century archaeological sites in Maryland and Virginia into digital form....

DOCUMENT Citation Only 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. Prior archaeological studies of ordinaries primarily focused on determining the material correlates of the ordinary or how the ordinary functions as a liminal space, often because of alcohol. There is a recent trend of interrogating ordinaries as a place of strategic decision making, but not at the household level. The Bakers...