United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
2,226-2,250 (3,819 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the mid-1980s historical archaeology was still deeply mired in its pursuit to identify and define normative markers of patterned human behavior. At this moment in time, when historical archaeology perched on the precipice of processual irrelevance, Chuck Orser published his "The Material Basis of...
Material Boundaries of Citizenship: Central American Clandestine Migration through Mexico (2015)
Each year, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Central American migrants transit through Mexico by hopping freight trains. Migrants navigate organized crime networks and government officials that seek to extort and detain them. They also receive assistance from sympathetic Mexican citizens and a network of humanitarian shelters that have developed along common migrant routes. Throughout this process, migrants seek to both highlight their presence as non-citizens and blend in with the citizen...
Material Challenges to Mothering During Incarceration (2020)
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. Japanese American internees during WWII faced many challenges to the practices of mothering. Confinement in government run incarceration centers limited access to familiar resources, tools, materials, and activities while individual backgrounds created divergent ideologies surrounding appropriate strategies for child rearing....
Material Culture and Consumer Choices at Tech Flats: Archaeological and Historical Investigations of the Techwood/Clark Howell Urban Revitalization Tract, Atlanta, Georgia (1998)
Archaeological survey and data recovery were conducted by Brockington and Associates, Inc., at the Techwood/Clark Howell Homes Urban Revitalization Tract, in Atlanta, Georgia. Fieldwork within the 50 acre development tract was conducted in three phases over a period of approximately two years (between June 1995 and May 1997). Funding for these investigations was provided under a federal Housing and Urban Development Block Grant to the Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta (HACA) through...
Material Culture and Structural Violence: Reframing Evidence of the Social Gradient in Industrial Contexts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Bodies and Persons: Health and Medicine in Historic Social Context" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Coal mining is an industry which has historically exposed laborers to a variety of environmental and occupational health hazards which resulted in injury and/or physical disability. These health hazards however, did not impact all laborers involved in coal mining equally. As a coal mining company town...
Material Culture And The Archaeology of Western Identities (2015)
While the popular perception of the American west is one of material hardship and deprivation, the reality of life in the west was frequently quite different. Excavations at several locations in Idaho have indentified a material world where people were enthusiastically striving for Victorian ideals of gentility. In one sense this is to be expected as aspirational consumption in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was clearly an integral part of American society as a whole. However,...
The Material Culture of Folk Religion in French North America, 1600-1763 (2018)
By law, permanent residents of French settlements were Catholic. Systematic Catholicizing of French North America was nominally successful, but lay religion retained unorthodox elements, including belief in powerful supernatural beings and the effectiveness of magic in daily life. This study briefly surveys folklore and ethnohistory from New France and Louisiana to shed light on such folk religious beliefs and practices, then moves to consideration of diverse forms of material culture associated...
"Material Culture Studies as an Alternative Mitigation: an Example from the US Route 301 Project" by Rachael E. Fowler and Kenneth J. Basalik, Ph.D. (2016)
Abstract: Additional archaeological fieldwork is not always the most cost effective means of mitigating project impacts to archaeological sites. DELDOT in conjunction with the Delaware SHPO has recently developed a series of alternative mitigations for projects on the US Route 301 Project. One of these alternative mitigations involves material culture studies. The material culture studies are unusual in that they address the material culture from numerous historic archaeological sites...
Material Elements of the Social Landscape at Fort Vancouver’s Village (2015)
Fort Vancouver contains the archaeological vestiges of houses, activity areas, and other landscape features of the British and American Colonial Period, AD 1827 to 1860. Data from this site are used to explore the lives of its inhabitants who worked in the fur trade and other economic activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Most of the material culture recovered from Fort Vancouver is imported European articles, tied closely to the marketing and sales of trade goods to its employees and family...
Material Engagements with Japanese American Incarceration History (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was a traumatic event that had lasting repercussions on multiple communities. Archaeologists have sought to productively pursue community-based methodologies in studying this period, employing object based oral histories, outreach events, and community participation in fieldwork. However, less...
The Material Evolution of Northern Ute Culture: An Analysis of Trade on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation (1880-1910) (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The turn of the 20th century was a period of transformation for the Utes in northeastern Utah. Forced to compete for their traditional resources with Euro-American settlers, and to do so within the restrictions of the reservation system imposed by the federal government, the Utes could no longer rely solely on those traditional resources to sustain themselves. Despite changes to...
Material Expressions of Class, Status and Authority Amongst Commissioned Officers at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856-1866. (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 19th century United States Army was a military institution characterized by a hierarchical system of authoritative, social and economic inequality between members of its different military grades. Although necessary for insuring military discipline this system of inequality also influenced the non-military social lives of officers and their families coloring much of military...
Material Expressions of Rank: Non-Verbal Communication Amongst Commissioned Officers at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856-1866 (2017)
The 19th century U.S. Army was a hierarchically ranked subculture characterized by a caste-like system of institutional inequality. Individual officers were commissioned into hierarchically ranked military classes, known as ranks, that were both authoritatively and socially distinct and within which each officer behaved in accordance with military discipline and a strict set of non-militaristic social norms. This paper examines how commissioned officers at two mid-19th century U.S. Army posts...
Material Interaction Between the Wampanoag and English in the Plymouth Colony Settlement: An Assessment from Excavations on Burial Hill (2018)
Recent archaeological excavation has recovered the first intact features related to the early-17th-century Plymouth Colony settlement in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts. This paper presents an overview of these investigations with a particular focus on the representation of Native Wampanoag lithics and pottery across the English features. These data are critically examined to assess whether this represents inclusion of Native materials from an underlying site or the use of Native technology...
The Material Legacy of Late Colonialism in South Africa (2013)
This paper explores the legacy of late colonial mineral extraction in South Africa through its architectural and archaeological remains. Key sites of the late 19th century diamond fields, particularly the labor compounds, do not figure into portrayals of the history of the diamond rush at the De Beers corporate diamond museum. The aim of this paper is to examine how material sites and archaeological remains can tell the story of the tightly interlocked corporate-colonial project in Southern...
Material Masculinities: Archaeology of a World War II Italian Prisoner of War Camp (2016)
Camp Monticello, a World War II prisoner of war camp located in rural Arkansas, housed 3,000 Italian enlisted men, officers, and generals. As a military institution and a homosocial space, Camp Monticello provides a lens into the social construction of masculinity and the intersections of class, gender, and cultural difference in the 1940s. This paper will deconstruct heteronormative white maleness and explore the ways that gendered and cultural identities were both maintained and performed...
Materialities of Nationhood, Land, and Race in Early Republican El Salvador (2018)
The idea of "nation" in Latin America invoked discussions of ideal citizens. The colonial metamorphosis from social classification—the casta system--to racial thinking centered on defining places, social and geographic, for and by Afro-Latin Americans. In cases such as Cuba, political efforts aimed to end racism and build "raceless" nations, while others, such as Mexico, enthusiastically embraced indigenous heritage but at the same time elided or even rejected African descent, creating what...
The Materiality of Affluence and Taste in Trump Tower (2018)
This paper examines Donald Trump’s New York City apartment as a populist performance of affluence that simultaneously justifies ostentatious shows of wealth and defends idiosyncratic individual taste. Rather than reduce the grandiose penthouse simply to a transgression of "good taste," this paper examines a distinctive notion of material wealth that embraces pretentious and idiosyncratic expressions of style and affluence. In a conservative world that has often been characterized by stylistic...
Materiality on the Margins of Empire: 19th Century Networks of British Trade and Exchange in Rural Ireland and Scotland. (2018)
How did people’s geographic position impact their access to material goods and necessities through trade and distribution within the 19th and early 20th century British world system? Throughout the 19th century an increasing distinction emerged between urban capitalist elites, the urban working poor, and a rural peasantry across Britain and Europe. While rural Ireland and Scotland were well connected to the urban economic centers of the United Kingdom, both nations were considered economically...
Materializing the Past: Ghosting Slave Landscapes at James Madison’s Montpelier (2015)
Starting in 2010 the Montpelier Foundation, the organization that operates James Madison’s plantation in Orange County, Virginia, began a systematic process to reestablish elements of the ca. 1812 slave occupied landscape found adjacent to the Madisons’ house. These ghosted structures, which include slave dwellings, smoke houses and a kitchen, are based on archaeological and documentary evidence and were recreated using traditional framing techniques. More recently the Foundation finished a...
Materializing Transformations In Western Ideologies Of Mothering (2020)
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. Western gender ideology transformed the morally superior childrearer from fathers to mothers over the 18th century because by 1690 women already formed 75% of church congregations as men were pulled out of churches by the conflicting overly-competitive values of capitalism, which promoted the biblical sins of usury, price gouging and...
Matters of Steel: Examining the Deterioration of a World War II Merchant Shipwreck (2015)
Between May 24th and June 1st, 2014, NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary collaborated with the Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group to survey and map the merchant shipwreck Caribsea, a freighter sunk off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in 1942 by the German submarine U-158. The data acquired from this project was instrumental in a study designed to illustrate and interpret site formation processes affecting World War II ferrous-hulled merchant shipwrecks. This...
"May the Dragon never be my guide!" African American Catholicism at the Northampton Slave Quarters and Archaeological Park (2016)
During excavations conducted in the 1990s by The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a number of small religious objects (i.e. medals, rosary, cross) were uncovered at Northampton, a prominent Prince George’s County, Maryland, plantation. These artifacts were discovered within two slave quarters, a wood frame quarter dating to the late 1790s and a brick quarter dating to the second quarter of the 1800s. Both enslaved African Americans and African American tenant farmers lived...
McKeen Family History: Examining Antebellum Grave Markers in the White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In compliance with federal law, the United States Forest Service has been conducting archaeological investigations of an upcoming timbering site within the White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire. This poster summarizes recent findings related to an antebellum familial grave site uncovered during archaeological survey. Four grave markers belonging to a McKeen family provide...
The Meaning Of The Offshore: The Role Of Islands In The Maritime Cultural Landscape Of Peru (2015)
The authors will present their research about the relationship of the islands to the mainland in Peru, emphasizing the islands role as sacred places, economic spaces, and harbors for oceanic crossroads. This paper will present the close relationship between the islands and the Andean mainland over time, from prehispanic times to present day, including a panoramic view of the role and value societies place on the islands located in the Peruvian offshore. Using written sources such as ethno...