United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
2,451-2,475 (3,819 Records)
Cemeteries and their associated grave markers have been repeatedly identified as a measure of cultural complexity and change in archaeology site studies. Cultural patterns can be revealed through the ritual materials of mourning and death to reflect notable behavior of the living, and these expressions can radically differ depending on social status and identity. The culmination of this Master’s thesis explores how one ethnic Hungarian group’s expression of identity changed over time by means of...
Nålbinding Textiles from Vasa in a Wider Context (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Expressions of Social Space and Identity: Interior Furnishings and Clothing from the Swedish Warship Vasa of 1628." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In addition to the woven textiles that make up the majority of the fragments in archaeological finds, there are other techniques which occur in particular regions and periods. Nålbinding, a single-needle technique which builds up a durable fabric through a...
O is for Opium: Offering More than Education at the Abiel Smith School (2018)
The Abiel Smith, constructed between 1834 and 1835 in Beacon Hill in Boston, MA, is one of the oldest black schools in the United States. The Smith School is central to Beacon Hill’s Black history because it helped Black Bostonians advance in society and negotiate racism through education. However, the Smith School may have served another important role in the Black community. Medicinal bottles excavated from the site suggest that the school administered medicine to students. In the nineteenth...
Oak and Bluestone: Resource Extraction, Agriculture, and Economy in the Catskills (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper evaluates existing data and collections from compliance based archaeological studies located in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Over the course of European settlement, the economy in this region has been based almost entirely in agriculture and resource extraction to...
The Oak Forest Institution-Cook County’s 20th Century Poor Farm (2018)
Built at the height of the Progressive Era on over 300 acres of land southwest of Chicago, the Oak Forest Institution or Poor Farm was to be an example for the rest of the nation. Buildings designed by the architectural firm of Holabard and Roche provided light, space and services for the poor, elderly and sick that reflected the era’s emphasis on fresh air, wholesome food, medical treatment (especially for tuberculosis) and relief from the vices and overcrowding of city living. Richly...
Oak, Steel, and Men: The History of USS Constitution through Artifact Biographies (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. USS Constitution is the oldest warship afloat in the world. After launching on 21 October 1797, the vessel served with distinction in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. To this day, it still a commissioned warship in the U.S. Navy and crewed by active-duty Navy personnel as well as a living heritage piece. This study analyzes...
Object Entanglements in the Connecticut River Valley (2016)
We examine the material residues of 17th century Pocumtuck Indians to understand their long-term entanglements with others: kith and kin, ally and adversary, Native and non-Native. The Pocumtuck resided in New England’s middle Connecticut River Valley and were enmeshed in the Euro-Native exchange networks made possible by the river, its smaller tributaries, and well established trail networks linking Native and non-Native communities in all directions. We consider objects of copper alloy, stone,...
Objects and Voices: Conversations about artifacts, memory, and meaning with the former residents of Timbuctoo, NJ (2015)
Today’s historical archaeology places significant emphasis on the value and necessity of working with communities to create knowledge, and making that knowledge both useful and accessible to the public. Oral history has risen as a forefront method for this co-production of knowledge, allowing for voices beyond those of academics to be heard in the telling (and re-telling) of history. As historical archaeologists, we are just beginning to explore novel ways of incorporating oral history and the...
Objects past, objects present: materials, resistance and memory from the Le Morne Old Cemetery, Mauritius (2015)
The body of literature on slave artefacts and consumptive waste highlight the nuances and complexity of slave life-ways. Despite this, these represent small concessions traded against much greater losses, with the notion of ‘social death’ poignantly expressing a slave’s inevitable disconnect from ancestral practices. Allied to this, but fundamentally different, is the development of numerous syncretic belief systems that have their origins in a marriage between African and European faiths. Thus,...
Obligations and Opportunities of Old Collections, a Boston Perspective (2015)
The City of Boston Archaeology Laboratory contains nearly two-dozen archaeological assemblages totaling 2,000 boxes and well over 1,000,000 artifacts. The vast majority of these collections were excavated between 1975 and 1995, which poses a monumental challenge of re-cataloging, re-organizing, and re-analyzing collections that have defined the early history of Northeast historical archaeology. These collections also represent a great opportunity for students and researchers to examine...
Oceanographic Processes Relating to the Regional Variation of Shipwreck Preservation (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. Shipwreck preservation varies based on the location of the shipwreck and materials of the ship itself. Biological, chemical, and physical processes all affect the in situ preservation of shipwrecks with differences in temperature, dissolved...
The Oconee River Wreck: The Discovery and Preservation of a Georgia Flatboat Timber (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In June of 2019 two recreational fishermen notified the Museum of Underwater Archaeology about a piece of wreckage that had been pulled from Oconee River near Milledgeville, Georgia. The initial investigation suggested the 27-foot-long timber might be an early nineteenth-century flatboat. This paper will discuss the background research, investigation, and preservation plan currently...
Of Capitalism and Crabs: Understanding and Challenging the Dynamics of Preservation in Charm City (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Slow Archaeology + Fast Capitalism: Hard Lessons and Future Strategies from Urban Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Preservation in Baltimore is guided by local and national regimes of values. Often these values are tied to commercialism and market-based identities. Narratives that contradict or counter these profit-centered and contrived values are often minimized or ignored. The result is the...
Of Monks and Mothers: Examining Privilege, Parenting, and Best Laid Plans (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. Becoming a mother was a learning experience in misogyny and discrimination. From a radical lack of maternity leave to the second shift at home, exhausted does not begin to describe my condition. However, as anthropologists, we are also trained to see our privilege (in my case a private office for pumping breastmilk and a flexible work...
Of Water and War: Examining the Intersection of Desalination Technologies and Military Strategy on Wake Atoll During World War II (2018)
Although desalination systems saw widespread use in maritime settings throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, mechanical improvements in the mid-1800s increased the utility of this technology for military purposes – specifically, the occupation and defense of otherwise uninhabitable lands. This paper examines the implementation and impacts of desalination technologies in one such location. Situated halfway between Hawaii and the Philippines, Wake Atoll is devoid of any natural source of...
Offers You Can’t Refuse: An Overview Of DPAA’s Strategic Partnerships Initiative (2017)
This presentation describes DPAA’s Strategic Partnerships program, which is a novel effort within DoD to leverage the resources and expertise of external sources. Partnership categories broadly include public-private partnerships (P3s), grants, cooperative agreements, voluntary arrangements, and even contracts. The intent is to expand or improve DPAA’s ability to account for the missing by selectively outsourcing some components of the overall workload. In addition, DPAA pursues initiatives that...
An Officer and a Gentleman? Telling the story of Captain Rábago and the Spanish Colonial Site of Presidio San Sabá through Archaeology and History (2013)
Presidio San Sabá, located in Menard County, is the largest Spanish Fort in Texas. Occupied from 1757 to 1770, the garrison was under the command of Captain Felipe Rábago for most of its existence. Prior to and during his command, the presidio underwent several changes that reflect the political and social environment of Spanish Colonial Texas during the late 18th century. Drawing from both archaeological investigations conducted by Texas Tech University and historical research, the story of...
"Oh Freedom Over Me:" Space, Agency, and Identity at Elam Baptist Church in Ruthville, Virginia (2015)
Founded in 1810, Elam Baptist Church was one of the first Virginian churches that free blacks controlled. The church's architectural layout cited that of local white churches, containing separate entrances for whites, free blacks and enslaved blacks. This paper discusses the ways in which the agency and identity of the local free black community emerged through the historically and spatially specific relationships in which Elam was enmeshed. The boundaries that the free black community created...
Oil and Shipwrecks: An Overview Of Sites Selected For The Deepwater Shipwrecks And Oil Spill Impacts Project (2015)
In 2013 and 2014, C & C Technologies, Inc. joined the multidisciplinary team studying the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on deepwater shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. C&C’s primary objective is the archaeological analysis of the selected shipwreck sites for the project. The project shipwrecks include 19th Century wooden hull vessels and 20th Century metal-hull vessels, ranging in water depth from 470 to 4,890 feet below sea level . This paper will discuss the wreck selection...
An ‘Old Admiralty Longshank’ Anchor from Admiralty Bay, Washington: The HMS Chatham’s Lost Anchor? (2015)
In 2008 commercial divers discovered an 18th century anchor in 40 feet of water in Admiralty Bay, Puget Sound. The anchor was recovered under permit in June 2014. The anchor was set in the bay bottom with one arm embedded in the seafloor, and 165-feet of stud-link anchor chain attached to the shank. An iron grapnel was hooked to the middle of the chain. The extension of the chain and the presence of the grapnel indicate the anchor was lost when the cable broke after the anchor was set, and...
"Old Al's Going To Get It," At Least For A While: Recent Riverine Archaeology in Arkansas (2015)
To understand Arkansas history, it is constructive to study the use of the extensive network of navigable waterways in and near the State. In the last 30 years, archaeologists have documented recovered Native American canoes, as well as researched vessels employed from the Trail of Tears in the 1830s to the end of the Wooden Age in the 1930s. A major step was at West Memphis on the Mississippi in 1988, when record low water permitted professionals and amateurs to use dry-land field techniques to...
Old Collections, New Creations: Updates from a Mayflower Family Home (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Around 1627, John and Priscilla Alden, both Mayflower passengers, moved their growing family from Plimoth Colony to nearby Duxbury. The archaeological evidence of their lives at the First Home Site has recently started to be reanalyzed. New creations include three Masters theses, a website, and an...
"Old Fortunes, New Fortunes, Lost Fortunes" Utilizing a Forgotten Assemblage to Help Reconstruct Betty Washington and Fielding Lewis’s Dining Room (and So Much More) (2015)
Decades worth of artifacts excavated from Kenmore, the house of Betty Washington Lewis (George’s sister) and her husband Fielding Lewis, have recently been reanalyzed by George Washington Foundation archaeologists with the intent of shedding light upon what equipage would have graced the Lewis’s dining room table. Re-examination of this collection proved both informative and surprising, yielding clues as to what life was like for this family during and immediately following the Revolution, as...
Old Mobile: The Internal Structure of An Early 18th-Century French Colonial Town (2018)
Twenty-nine years of archaeological investigations at the townsite known as Old Mobile, capital of the French colony of Louisiane from 1702 to 1711, has revealed ten structures in considerable detail, as well as information on the distribution of other structures throughout the town. Recent new overlays of the two extant historical maps of the settlement permit an evaluation of those two cartographic sources, as well as interpretations of the occupants of the excavated structures. The map...
Old Pots on New Plates: Understanding Ancient Vases on 19th Century Transfer-Printed Ceramics (2013)
The discovery of sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum in the early 18th century fueled an international mania for classical antiquities, especially ancient vases. Through a process of translation in multiple media, these ancient pots soon became featured on transfer-printed ceramics mass-produced at the Staffordshire potteries. These ceramics were then exported globally, transporting classical visions to consumers of multiple socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Using an assemblage of...