United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
2,376-2,400 (3,819 Records)
This paper looks at wills written by and for Wampanoag people in their own language and in English and their relation to other native mortuary customs in the eighteenth century. I argue that while writing wills was an innovative practice adopted by Christian Indians and suggests a breakdown in native community structure in the eighteenth century, the practice was consistent with other evidence for strong community identification. Knowledge of the "writing culture" of southern New...
Native Songs: Music and Mount Vernon’s Enslaved Community (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the twilight of George Washington’s life in 1799, a community of 317 enslaved Africans and African-Americans worked the five contiguous farms that comprised the 8000 acre Mount Vernon plantation enterprise. By far the largest of three principal groups of music-makers, the enslaved community was joined by the Washington household and hired white workers and their families, each...
The Nautical Archaeology Digital Library (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Nuts and Bolts of Ships: The J. Richard Steffy Ship Reconstruction Laboratory and the future of the archaeology of Shipbuilding" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Originally conceived as a set of internet tools to store and share information and primary data from archaeological excavations, the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library project was retaken a decade later, with the same objectives, but in the...
Naval Battlefield Reconstruction as a Predictive Model for Deep Water Remote Sensing:Search for Bluefields and U-576 (2015)
In 2011, the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program awarded a grant to East Carolina University and NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary to conduct a battlefield analysis of a naval action which occurred off North Carolina during the Second World War. Specifically, researchers investigated action initiated against convoy KS-520 by German U-576 in July, 1942. Though the primary objective of the grant was to conduct historical and archeological evaluation of this naval...
Navigable Waterways as Plantation Landscapes (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Roads, Rivers, Rails and Trails (and more): The Archaeology of Linear Historic Properties" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Navigable waterways were essential to European colonization of the South Carolina Lowcountry beginning in the late 17th century. Despite early attempts by colonial leaders to keep land grants within close proximity to Charleston, colonists quickly began to establish plantations where...
Navigating Freedom: Examining the Impact of Emancipation on the African American community in Orange County, Virginia (2015)
A comparative study of late antebellum slave quarters with the homes of newly freed African Americans provides insights into the dramatic impact of emancipation on the African American community in Orange County, Virginia. This paper outlines initial observations from past and present excavations at James Madison's Montpelier that focus on the Post-Madison era. It also outlines the approach for additional research, including excavations, oral histories, and the incorporation of ecological models...
Navigating the Narrative: Ceramics from Ocean Floor to Museum Door. (2013)
So far, some 200 ceramic sherds representing at least 17 vessel types have been excavated from the early eighteenth century shipwreck (31CR314), Queen Anne’s Revenge, off the coast of North Carolina. This paper will briefly describe this ceramic assemblage, from its global origins to its consumer uses. The main focus, however, will be to tell a story. A story of how many voices of archaeology including conservators, material culture specialists and scientists, are working together to unravel...
Navigational Instruments found on the Storm Wreck (2016)
Between 2009 and 2015, excavations of the Storm Wreck (8SJ5459), a late 18th-century British shipwreck off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida by the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program (LAMP) has revealed a variety of navigational instruments and components of such instruments. The primary navigational instruments discussed in this paper are a pair of navigational dividers, an octant, and a mathematical device known as a sector rule. This paper presents a historical analysis of each...
The Navy’s Ultimate Piston-Engine Fighter: An Investigation of a Submerged Experimental Bearcat (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. As a continuation of the Naval Air Station Patuxent River (NAS Patuxent River) Aircraft Survey, this paper will focus on the study of a submerged aircraft which may represent the first F8F Bearcat. Naval History and Heritage Command is continuing to research potential...
"…near the side of an Indian field commonly known as the Pipemaker’s field": Reanalyzing the Nomini Plantation Midden Assemblage (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Contact and Colonialism" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Excavated in the 1970s by Vivienne Mitchell, a crew of volunteers, and avocational archaeologists from the Archeological Society of Virginia, the Nomini Plantation (44WM12) midden assemblage represents an extraordinary collection of mid- to late-seventeenth-century material culture. However, a full analysis and report were never completed, due...
Negotiating And Creating Tension And Change Through Religion, Mortuary Practices, and Burial Sites Within African-Descent And Moravian Communities In The Caribbean (2018)
Historical archaeologies of the African diaspora in the Caribbean have recently expanded on analyses of relationships between religion, mortuary practices, burial sites, and varied environmental, social, economic, and cultural contexts. In addition, studies currently investigate the politics of death and burial, including who controlled mortuary spaces, at what times, by which means, and for what purposes. Finally, research collaborations analyze community formation and activity through the lens...
Negotiating Changing Chesapeake Identities: Indigenous Women’s Influence on the Transformation of Seventeenth-Century English Immigrant Culture in Maryland (2013)
Documentary evidence indicates English colonists in seventeenth-century Maryland were trading for/purchasing native-made pottery for use in their daily routines. I undertook a subtypological analysis of historic-period indigenous ceramics which demonstrated changes occurred in pottery treatments throughout the century. While exterior attributes showed a trend towards smoother surfaces and thinner walls, echoing European-made ceramics, interior attributes maintained cultural traditions. This...
Negotiating the transformation of a workspace into a classroom and museum at James Madison's Montpelier (2013)
James Madison’s Montpelier is the plantation home of the forth president of the United States, and author of the U.S. Constitution. The historic home is located in the Piedmont Region of Virginia, and has had an archaeology program since 1985. Throughout the years, like any department it underwent a multitude of changes from the beginning to present. However, for the last several years we have employed a vigorous public archaeology program educating all ranges of people from archaeology...
The Negotiation of Class, Rank and Authority within U. S. Army Commissioned Officers: Examples from Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856-1866. (2016)
As part of the Federal policy toward colonizing the West Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, 1856-1866, were established to guard the Oregon Coast Reservation and served as post-graduate schools for several officers who became high ranking generals during the American Civil War. During their service these men, often affluent and well educated, held the highest social, economic and military ranks at these frontier military posts. This paper examines the material culture excavated from six of the...
Negotiation, Landscape and Material Use: Agency Expression in Aurora, Nevada (2017)
Negotiation and agency are crucial topics of discussion in areas of colonial and cultural entanglement in relation to indigenous groups. Studies of negotiation often explore not only the changes, or lack thereof, in material culture use and expression in response to colonial intrusion and cultural entanglement, but how landscape use and material culture are related to negotiation and resistance techniques used in response to cultural contact or colonial intrusion. In these contexts, landscape...
Neither Contact nor Colonial: Seneca Iroquois Local Political Economies, 1675-1754 (2016)
Fine-grained attention to the material conditions of indigenous daily lives over time reveals myriad changes completely incapable of being explained by models such as "traditional sameness" or "acculturative change." Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) sites were occupied for only 15-40 years before planned abandonment, so examining a sequence of these sites provides an excellent way to look at change over time. This paper examines local dynamics at three Seneca sites, illustrating strategic Seneca...
Neither Fish Nor Fowl: The Environmental Impacts of Dietary Preferences at Two 17th-Century Maryland Households (2018)
Investigations of household-level interactions with local ecosystems at two seventeenth-century sites, both located on the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center campus, explore human occupants’ interactions with the local environment. English immigrants to late 17th-century Maryland impacted the landscape through traditional agricultural practices including the keeping of livestock herds. Analysis of faunal assemblages from the Shaw’s Folly and Sparrow’s Rest sites, examined at the...
Nervousnous and Negotiation on a Plantation Landscape (2013)
This research focuses on a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century plantation site, L’Hermitage, in order to investigate how a "nervous landscape" can be read through spatial organization, material culture, and interpersonal interactions. I refer to Denis Byrne’s use of the phrase "nervous landscape" to explore how a landscape and its occupants can be literally and figuratively nervous when absolute power fails and a heterogeneity and multiplicity of power and identities are introduced....
Nets of Memory (Líonta na Cuimhne): Islander Mediations of Remembrance and Belonging (2018)
Migration is, above all else, a dissociative event that fundamentally challenges an individuals sense of home and identity. To a 19th century Irish islander living in America, a fishing net was not just an economic tool, or object, or asset; rather it provided a point of entry into the emotional landscape of memory, belonging, and place. Emigrates from rural settings traveled to America to establish better lives for themselves, their relatives, and their future offspring, often in new and very...
Neutral Ground and Contraband: Trade and Identity on the Frontier (2017)
Béxar’s location on the frontier coupled with stifling colonial economic policies prompted Tejanos to look to the east for economic opportunities and initiated an active contraband market during the colonial period that became a robust import economy during the Mexican period. While many have focused on the implications of the relationships created through these frontier markets, there has been less of an effort to examine the goods that formed the basis of this trade and the roles that the...
"A New and Useful Burial Crypt:" The American Community Mausoleum (2016)
A community mausoleum is an above ground communal burial structure. The modern community mausoleum can trace its roots back to 1906, when William Hood patented and built his "new and useful burial crypt" in a Ganges, Ohio cemetery. Hood formed the National Mausoleum Company to build additional structures, but also faced competition from competing firms trying to capitalize on the new community mausoleum craze. In a little over five years, more than 100 community mausoleums were built -- by 1915,...
A New Attitude: Balancing Site Confidentiality and Public Interpretation at Delaware State Parks (2018)
It is generally an article of archaeological faith that the location of archaeological resources needs to kept confidential, secret even, to protect resources from vandalism and to respect the sacredness of ancestral sites. That was the attitude that dominated in Delaware State Parks to such an extent that only a handful of interpretive waysides mention Native Americans in any way at all and only one mentions prehistoric archaeology. This resulted in a public unaware of the stories of Native...
New Ceramic Economic Indices for the Historical Archaeology of the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Centuries (2018)
Since the 1980s, historical archaeologists have productively used Miller's ceramic economic indices (CEIs) to quantify ceramic expenditure patterns. However, the Miller CEIs are suited primarily to antebellum assemblages. This temporal limit is problematic, constraining our use of ceramics to investigate postbellum economics and consumerism. We redress this problem by presenting a new set of CEIs, which we created expressly for ceramics manufactured between 1880 and 1929, by gathering ceramic...
New Data from the Great Meadows: Geophysical and Archaeological Investigations at Fort Necessity National Battlefield (2016)
Fort Necessity National Battlefield marks the location of the July 3, 1754 engagement between British and Colonial forces led by Lt. Col. George Washington and a force of French soldiers and allied Native Americans. The day-long battle took place within the Great Meadows, a natural clearing chosen by Washington to centralize supplies and livestock while clearing a road westward through the Allegheny Mountains. A hastily fortified storehouse referred to as a "fort of necessity" was ultimately...
New Developments on the Emanuel Point II Shipwreck Project: Ongoing Investigations of a Vessel from Luna’s 1559 Fleet (2016)
Investigations on the second shipwreck identified as a vessel from Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano’s 1559 fleet have intensified during the past year due to successful funding efforts. The site, known as "Emanuel Point II", is a well-preserved example of ship architecture related to early Spanish colonization efforts. Archaeologists and students from the University of West Florida have focused recent excavations on the vessel’s stern and midships area, and have uncovered new artifacts and...