United States of America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph E. Clemens. Zachary S. Andrews.

The large labor force needed to operate an iron furnace in the late 18th and 19th century necessitated the workforce to live close to the industrial complex they operated.  Information drawn from the surviving structures at Catoctin Furnace, near Thurmont Maryland, along with primary sources such as oral histories, historic maps, company ledgers, and court documents, provides a comparative example for iron furnace villages in the area that are less well preserved.  Understanding the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catrina Cuadra.

For the colony of La Florida, life on the edge of the world was far from comfortable. Despite the hardships and dangers the residents of St. Augustine faced on a daily basis, they managed to find ways to amuse themselves. This poster investigates the distribution and spatial analysis of gaming pieces found in four colonial St. Augustine sites: Fatio, De Leon, De Mesa, and De Hita. These domestic sites span both the first and second Spanish periods and allow us to explore recreation and quality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Byram. Jun Sunseri.

Earthen architecture has significant representation in building traditions across large temporal and geographic expanses, so everyone’s people at one time or another dabbled in this technology. Adobe, also known also as dagga, ferey, cob, and other names is a variant in which soil and other materials are formulated into discrete construction components, often in communities of practice for which adobe recipes, preparation, and application are integral to daily intersections of home and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley McCuistion. Victoria Gum.

Gloucester Point, located at the confluence of the York River and Chesapeake Bay in eastern Virginia, was considered a strategic military position during the Civil War. Confederate soldiers quickly recognized the importance of defending this location and constructed a battery along the banks of the river, from which the earliest shots of the of the Civil War in Virginia were fired. The Confederate army abandoned the camp a year later, and it was subsequently occupied by Union troops. The Union...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Itinerant Bureaucrats and Empire" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Obraje (textile mill) de Chincheros, located in the Apurímac region of Peru, was established in the late Sixteenth Century and operated throughout the Spanish colonial period. At the Obraje men, women and children worked long, hard hours to pay the taxes demanded of them from the colonial Spanish government. As men had to serve a forced labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William W. Fitzhugh.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Comparative Perspectives on European Colonization in the Americas: Papers in Honor of Réginald Auger" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 1861 discovery by Charles Francis Hall of Elizabethan relics on Kodlunarn (White Man) Island in the outer reaches of Frobisher Bay, southeast Baffin Island, and a peculiar Viking-age radiocarbon date on one of Hall’s iron blooms, set in motion a multi-year international...

DOCUMENT Citation Only L. Chardé Reid.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores the complex relationship between making African Diaspora history and culture visible at Historic Jamestowne, a setting that has historically been seen as “white”. The four hundredth anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans in Virginia has created a fraught space to examine African American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Sheehan.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The recordation, analysis, and preservation, of very large historic sites presents a series of interesting and unique challenges. The largest remaining segment of the Transcontinental Railroad in Box Elder County, Utah, provides an ideal laboratory for the exploration of these challenges. This poster will examine approaches taken to the recordation of small section stations, large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Purser.

This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Santa Rosa, California has experienced two waves of transit-driven landscape change over the past century. The first occurred when the 101 freeway was constructed through the downtown adjacent to its 19th-century railroad corridor in the 1940s. The second is occurring now, with the development of high density housing zones along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie M. J. Hall.

The archaeology of gender is a complex field, examining the intersection of gender, sexuality, and class as performed through material culture.  Research in the field also turns a spotlight on biases inherent in Western culture that are often blindly projected onto the past.  Dr. Elizabeth Scott’s work challenges these biases, inspiring students and colleagues to think critically about perception and perspective while examining the lives of people "of little note." Her research elucidates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Norton.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Women’s Work: Archaeology and Mothering" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. I never wanted to get married or have children, and of the two not having children was the more concrete. In the end I chose to do both, marry and reproduce. I will talk about how I came to the decision to have a child just out of grad school when I was still early career, what consequences that had at the time, and what the last 5.5...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Gibson. John Dietler. Alyssa Newcomb.

Archaeological research at San Gabriel Mission over the last decade has greatly increased our understanding of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish mission enterprise in Southern California at a grand scale, illuminating the interplay between its key communities and industries. The archaeological discovery of a rare domestic context—the floor of a Native American house—allows us to explore issues of identity and production at a household scale. We examine material evidence related to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerald F. Schroedl. Todd H. Ahlman. Walter E. Klippel. Bobby R. Braly. Ashley H. McKeown.

James Lees became the first Royal Engineer stationed at the Brimstone Hill Fortress in the late 1770s, a post he resumed after French occupation of the fort ended in 1783 and which he continued to serve until 1790. Among Lees' responsibilities was calculating the number of enslaved African laborers needed at the fort and determining where to house them.  For this purpose Lees constructed a line of four buildings –two hospitals, a kitchen and "a hut for the colony laborers".  All were abandoned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James P Horn.

The sweeping reforms of 1618-1619 introduced by Sir Edwin Sandys and the Virginia Company of London transformed Virginia and subsequently had an enormous influence on the evolution of British America. Most historians have failed to comprehend the significance of the reforms and what they portended, either because they have adopted the dominant narrative that revolves around Edmund Morgan’s paradox of slavery in the midst of freedom or because they have written off Jamestown as a colossal failure...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Kelso.

This presentation compares early English Jamestown and early French New Orleans, apparent historical apples and oranges, but in reality founded and developed in parallel ways. Established a century apart and by two European cultures, Jamestown and New Orleans went through similar rites of passage to establish a social and economic outpost at a safe distance from Spanish settlements. More specifically, the paper first reviews the Jamestown texts and artifacts that have revealed the townscape of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary R. Hartley. David Givens. Sean P. Romo.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Excavating the Foundations of Representative Government: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Historical Archaeology." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Excavations conducted by pioneering women archaeologists in the 1890s uncovered evidence of the 1617 Church, where the first meeting of the General Assembly occurred in July 1619. However, those excavations did not determine the church’s complete limits....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Lenik.

A central objective of the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits, that emerged soon after the order’s founding in 1540 was to send out missionaries to establish and maintain communities of indigenous converts to Christianity. The mission emerged as a common institutionalized form to carry out this proselytizing, and has provided a useful analytical unit for archaeological research. However, the Jesuits operationalized other modes of colonization in the Americas including ranches, parishes, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew R Beaupre.

This is an abstract from the "Jesuit Missions, Plantations, and Industries" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Records indicate that during the French colonial period, Jesuit fathers established four mission congregations within the territory now known as Vermont. These missions were established to preach to both French colonists and Native converts on Ilse La Motte, on the Missisquoi River in Swanton, at Fort Saint-Frederic on Lake Champlain and in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James D. Spirek.

This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2019, three cannons from the CSS Pee Dee were installed between the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs building and the National Cemetery in Florence, South Carolina. The cannons were jettisoned at the Mars Bluff Naval Yard and the gunboat scuttled in the Great Pee Dee River during the waning days of the American Civil War. The presence of these cannons represents the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Sickler.

One of the rarest metals in the Americas, copper has long been traded across the North American continent by indigenous cultures who viewed the raw material as holding immense spiritual and social significance.  Native American societies from the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake Bay have fashioned copper into various objects that were often used by elites to uphold social distinction and maintain political order. Archaeologists studying indigenous groups have observed that the consumption of copper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carter C. Hudgins.

Drayton Hall c. 1738 is widely regarded as the first fully executed example of Palladian domestic architecture in Colonial America.  Located 12 miles from the colonial capital of Charles Towne,  SC, the property was conceived as a gentleman’s country estate situated at the center of a network of commercial plantations totaling more than 100,000 acres.  Drawing on recent historical and archaeological examinations, this paper will examine the design and orientation of John Drayton’s garden house...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jasmine Saxon.

The success of Connecticut’s industrial history found its beginning in the hard-working farmers and tradesmen of the early 17th century. The John Hollister site, located in South Glastonbury, Connecticut, provides a unique snapshot into the mid-17th century when successful economic activity began developing in New England. The tobacco business created an economic boom in the New and Old Worlds and was quickly associated with wealth and affluence. Comparing tobacco pipe fragments excavated at the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Merritt. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant. Chase Roberts. Diana Gonzalez-Tennant.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Tucked into the northeast corner of Utah, and along the Green River and the Outlaw Trail frequented by the likes of Butch Cassidy, the John Jarvie Ranch is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Vernal Field Office as a public interpretive site. In 2019, the Utah Division of State History and Digital Heritage Interactive, LLC initiated a project to assist the BLM in a multi-pronged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annelise E. Morris.

The legal status and civil rights of Free Persons of Color in the U.S. were constantly being negotiated throughout the 19th century from state to state, and varied from relative amounts of freedom and legal rights to strict "Black Laws" barely removed from slavery. This paper explores the ways in which Free Black Pioneers utilized the changing state and local boundaries (and with them, quickly changing legal status for Free People of Color) to their advantage, capitalizing on their racial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Garrett Fesler.

In this paper I examine how archaeologists make sense of the archaeological record at sites occupied by enslaved Africans in the Chesapeake region during the antebellum period.  In particular, I offer an alternative explanation for some assemblages of artifacts that are routinely interpreted as African Diasporic spirit caches.  In addition to sharing similar cultural belief systems, enslaved Africans experienced comparable levels of privation.  Poverty may have motivated some enslaved Africans...