United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
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During World War II thousands of Japanese American families were relocated from the west coast to the interior of the United States. Internment along with rampant racism and cultural stereotyping focused public attention on individuals of Japanese descent in this county and raised questions about identity and national allegiance. Research from Amache, the internment camp located in Colorado, is used to explore issues of children’s national identity and broader understanding of the war. ...
From "Splinter Fleet" to Easy Street: One Vessel's Journey as a World War I Subchaser and Pleasure Craft (2016)
Though maintaining a neutral stance in the early part of World War I, German U-boat attacks in American waters in 1916 spurred the U.S. Navy to develop a specialized fleet of anti-submarine watercraft. Dubbed "subchasers," these small but remarkably long-range ships played an important role as a deterrent to the U-boat incursion. Purpose-built subchasers were primarily wooden-hulled; however, steel-hulled vessels were donated to the war effort due to wartime shortages. One such vessel, SC-144,...
From Above and Below: Combining High-Resolution Bathymetry and Photogrammetry to Document Operation Crossroads in New Detail (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Mapping Crossroads: Archaeological and High Resolution Documentation of Nuclear Test Submerged Cultural Resources at Bikini Atoll" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1946, Operations Crossroads subjected a fleet of warships moored in Bikini Atoll to aerial and subaqueous atomic blasts to determine the effect of atomic weapons in naval settings. A new expedition was conducted in June 2019 to examine effects...
From Alcatraz to Standing Rock: Archaeology and Contemporary Native American Protests (1969-Today) (2018)
Since the occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes (1969-1971), Native American and First Nation protests have been well-documented through a variety of media. Unfortunately, many Americans and Canadians lack the background necessary to understand the messages being conveyed. For example, after the National Park Service began including the Alcatraz occupation in their site interpretation, I witnessed visitors discussing how inappropriate it was to celebrate a prison riot. More...
From Algonquians to Appomattox: The Contributions of Stephen Potter to Potomac Archeology (2016)
Dr. Stephen Potter, National Park Service National Capital Region Regional Archeologist, will retire in 2016, after 39 years of service. During his tenure, he saw to implementation of many archeological projects, including a nine year project to identify and document archeological resources along the entire 184 mile length of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal NHP. Potter is also a noted writer. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley is the first...
From Big House to Farm House: 100 Years at Arcadia Mill's Simpson Lot (2015)
The Simpson House at Arcadia Mill Archaeological Site in northwest Florida represents the high-status residence within a multi-ethnic antebellum community organized by hierarchy, race, and possibly gender. On a bluff overlooking the water-powered mill complex, the big house consisted of a three-story Louisiana-style mansion with a brick basement, veranda and main floor, and a second story. The Simpson House was constructed ca. 1835 and survived the Civil War including a short occupation by...
From Bore to Bowl: An Analysis of White Clay Tobacco Pipes from the Anne Arundel Hall Replacement Project (2018)
From 2009 to 2014, archaeologists at Historic St Mary’s City performed excavations around and beneath the 1950’s academic building known as Anne Arundel Hall at St Mary’s College of Maryland in preparation for the building’s demolition and replacement. During the survey, a variety of features and artifacts were uncovered, including a large collection of white clay pipe fragments, a number of which are decorated or marked. Our analysis of the white clay pipe fragments found at the Anne Arundel...
From Buried Floor to Missing Roof: Using Archaeology to understand the Architecture of an Late 19th/Early 20th Century Vernacular Irish Cabin. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Meaning in Material Culture" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Often less studied than more standardized forms, the vernacular architecture of Ireland’s rural poor provides valuable information to understanding rural life in the periods following the Great Famine. The author conducted an architectural study during a five-week archaeological investigation of a late 19th/early 20th century cabin, under the direction of...
From Cacao to Sugar: Long-Term Maya Economic Entanglement in Colonial Guatemala (2016)
This paper explores highland Maya sugar production as a product of later colonial entanglement influenced by precolonial and early colonial innovations and traditions. In the mid-17th century, the colonial Kaqchikel Maya community of San Pedro Aguacatepeque is described as a producer of sugar. Hoewever, the community’s embrace of sugar cane production (and associated sugar products) emerged in a complicated manner: as a product of preexisting precolonial and early colonial cacao tribute...
From Caffe’ Latte to Mass: An Intimate Archaeology of a World War II Italian Prisoner of War Camp (2015)
Camp Monticello, located in southeast Arkansas, served as a Prisoner of War camp for Italians from 1943 to 1946. The spatial arrangement of the camp, which consists of two officer’s compounds and three enlisted men’s compounds, was structured according to the central principles of surveillance, discipline, and control. The food, clothing, and possessions of Camp Monticello's inmates were provided by the institution. From mess hall menus and a chapel, archeological research reveals intimate...
From Cedar to Stone: Urban Life in Transition in Early Modern Bermuda (2013)
The town of St. George's served as Bermuda's colonial capital from 1612 to 1815. Over nearly three hundred years, the town flourished as Bermuda transitioned from a restrictive agriculture economy under the Somers Island Company to a powerful maritime economy under the Crown during the Free Holding period. In this paper I explore the changing urban landscape of St. George's from 1684 to 1730 as the town underwent a dramatic rebuilding when the Somers Island Company was dissolved and the town...
From Chinese Exclusion (1882) to Chinese Revolution (1911): The Archaeology of Resiliency in Transpacific Communities (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Arming the Resistance: Recent Scholarship in Chinese Diaspora Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Historical archaeologists are increasingly using transnational approaches to understand diasporas, particularly because migrants are affected by social and political events in both their homeland and their diasporic community. My paper examines Chinese migration to the U.S. and the development of...
From Circular Lodges to Rectangular Cabins: Continuity and Change in Indigenous Use of Domestic Space at the Twilight of the Fur Trade (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For over five hundred years, circular earthlodges were the traditional homes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara on the northern Plains. Construction, layout, and use of these structures were imbued with ceremonial and ritual significance. The last traditional earthlodge village was forcibly broken up with allotment in 1886. Yet prior to forced acculturation, some families willingly...
From Colonialism to Imperialism: Political Economy and Beyond (2016)
This paper explores some of the theoretical and evidentiary challenges facing the comparative study of colonialism and its imperial dimensions through the lens of political economy. It focuses on the advantages and limitations of political economy as a framework for understanding the transformation of colonies into post-colonial societies. Drawing on case material from North America, the Caribbean and India –three areas with vastly different colonial histories - this paper asks whether political...
From Colony to Empire: Fifty Years of Conceptualizing the Relationship between Britain and its New World Colonies through Archaeology (2017)
Through a series of brief case studies drawn from archaeological research in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Williamsburg, Virginia, St. George's, Bermuda, and Bridgetown, Barbados, this paper examines how American historical archaeology has developed its understanding of Britain's establishment of its colonies throughout the New World. It is argued that the gradual but significant shift in geographic scale from regional specialization to frameworks like the Atlantic World,...
From Compliance to Investigation: Research Design and Methodology of the Monterrey Shipwrecks Project (2015)
In 2011, three potential sites were discovered during oil and gas industry surveys approximately 320 kilometers southeast of Galveston, TX, and reported accordingly. NOAA OER’s 2012 cruise that revealed one site to be a shipwreck – Monterrey Shipwreck A – and was selected for further investigation. A research design focusing on specific questions and targeting individual data sets was drafted in order to place the site within a larger theoretical and methodological framework as a means to...
From Field to Faubourg: Race, Labor, and Craft Economies in Nineteenth-Century Creole New Orleans (2017)
The effects of the Haitian Revolution on the city of New Orleans have been the subject of historical inquiry for several decades. Scholars have detailed the political and cultural transformations that were set into motion when some 10,000 refugees arrived in the port city from the Saint-Domingue. While it is acknowledged that they contributed heavily to everyday practices in New Orleans, the extent to which the refugees - and free people of color in particular - actively sought to preserve the...
From Fife to the Chesapeake: Scottish Immigrants and the Development of Public Landscapes in Early Eighteenth Century Maryland. (2013)
Ninian Beall was captured at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 along with many of his countrymen and sent to Maryland as an indentured servant. Beall’s arrival marks an important milestone in the settlement of the Chesapeake region. Beall sponsored the transport of many Scottish immigrants who settled along the banks of the Potomac and Patuxent Rivers. Some of these individuals became powerful local politicians, slave owners, and active participants in trade with Native Americans living in the...
From Forest to Field: Over Three Centuries of Vegetation Change at Poplar Forest (2017)
A sealed context dating to the mid-17th century at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation and retreat in Bedford County, Virginia has provided an opportunity to examine aspects of the protohistoric environment prior to the introduction of large-scale European agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Palynological analysis conducted on this context reveals ratios of arboreal to non-arboreal pollen as well as the presence or absence of disturbance indicators that provide a baseline for...
From Freetown to the City Up North: Mapping Rural to Urban Migration in Early Twentieth Century Austin, Texas (2018)
The mobility patterns of rural black southerners who relocated to southern cities during the early 1900s is an often-overlooked topic in discussions of early twentieth century rural to urban migration. Using geographic information systems (GIS) software to map and analyze census records, city directories, and other historical documents, this paper presents a micro-level case study of the migration and settlement patterns of former residents from Antioch Colony, Texas between the years of 1900...
From gods to God: The Shifting Role of Hawaiian Ritual Locations from the Pre-Contact to Post-Contact Era in Maui, Hawai'i (2018)
Recent work in the district of Kaupō, Maui, has demonstrated the presence of a highly intensified dryland agricultural system interspersed with extensive residential sites and bounded by a range of ceremonial structures that include some of the largest temples in the Hawaiian Islands. In this talk, I discuss the ritual sites of Kaupō and how their Pre-Contact placement on the landscape (before the first arrival of Europeans) demonstrates a unique expression of elite power. While the initial...
From Horse to Electric Power at the Metropolitan Railroad Company Site: An Old Collection Provides a New Narrative of Technological Change (2015)
The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site in Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts, was first excavated in the late 1970s by staff of the Museum of Afro American History. Researchers recovered nearly 20,000 artifacts related to the site’s life as a horsecar street railway station and carriage manufactory from 1860 to 1891, its subsequent conversion into an electric street railway until around 1920, and finally its modern use as an automobile garage. Using the framework of behavioral archaeology, this...
From Island to the City: A Preliminary Archaeological Investigation of Krio and Aku Settlements at Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Contact and Colonialism" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In May-June 2018, I conducted a preliminary archaeological investigation on Tasso Island and Freetown, Sierra Leone. The goal of this investigation is/was to identify, map and record the archaeological remains of the early colonial period of coastal Sierra Leone, focusing on the Krio and Aku settlements. The Krio and Aku people are descendants...
From Jugs to Jazz: Examining the Role of 19th Century Stoneware in the Rise of African American Jug Bands (2018)
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, African American musicians harnessed the acoustic capacities of stoneware jugs in musical groups that came to be known as "jug bands". These bands played tunes on variety of household objects turned instruments, blending African musical styles with experimental rhythms. In many cases, jugs were the centerpiece of these musical ensembles. Jug players produced tuba-like intonations by blowing and vocalizing into their instruments at different angles...
From Luxury Liners to Aircraft Carriers: A Closer Look at the Conversion Process of USS Sable and USS Wolverine (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Developing Standard Methods, Public Interpretation, and Management Strategies on Submerged Military Archaeology Sites" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores the conversion process of SS Seeandbee and SS Greater Buffalo into USS Wolverine and USS Sable as they were transformed from luxury paddle-wheel steamers to training aircraft carriers in the Great Lakes and underscores the impact these two vessels...