United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
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In 2015 the University of Massachusetts Boston’s undertook a second season of fieldwork along the eastern side of Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts. Excavations targeted a strip of land in the gap between a series of 19th-century buildings and historic burials within the cemetery. Two areas uncovered preserved early deposits. In one of these an intact Native American component of the site was identified, while in the other several colonial era features were discovered and documented. The...
Plymouth Memory Capsule: A 19th-Century Tale of Woe? (2017)
While searching for remnants of 17th-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts, a collection of organic materials and Victorian-era artifacts of personal adornment—all associated with a female—were uncovered in during excavations associated with Project 400 carried out by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. This unexpected cache provides a rare glimpse into the town of Plymouth’s rich history. This memory capsule filled with domestic items including a...
Poaching Pots and Making Places: Slavery and Ceramic Consumption in the Shenandoah Valley (2018)
The Shenandoah Valley, with its German / Scots-Irish heritage and its focus on small-scale mixed farming, formed a distinctive region within early 19th century Virginia. Here, unique ways of interacting with global markets emerged as residents profited off the sale of agricultural products while simultaneously choosing to purchase locally made earthenwares over imported wares, practices which reproduced local ethnic identities. However, many of the region’s White residents owed Black Virginians,...
A Political Economy of Adornment: Indigenous Mass Consumption and Euro-American Shell Bead Factories in 19th Century New Jersey (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Between 1750 and 1900 CE, Euro-American colonizers of northern New Jersey appropriated the production of wampum, a Northeastern Indigenous style of shell bead. The industry began as a widespread small-scale cottage industry, and it culminated in the Campbell Wampum Factory (1850-1900), famous for its mass...
Political Economy, Praxis, and Aesthetics: The Institutions of Slavery and Hacienda at the Jesuit Vineyards of Nasca, Peru (2016)
At the time of its expulsion from the Spanish Empire in 1767, the Society of Jesus was among the largest slaveholders in the Americas. The two Jesuit Nasca estates (San Joseph and San Xavier) were their largest and most profitable Peruvian vineyards, worked by nearly 600 slaves of sub-Saharan origin. Their haciendas and annex properties throughout the Nasca valleys established agroindustrial hegemony in the region. This paper explores the political and economic dynamics among enslaved subjects...
The Political Waves of Displacement: Heritage and Neoliberal Urban Renewal (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the 19th and 20th centuries in the US, some urbanization methods included displacement of the working-class and communities of color. Discriminatory housing policies delineated communities to the periphery of the urban landscape, many to industrial zones or fringe housing stock. Largely forgotten, these communities now find...
The Politics of Pots: Becoming New Communities in the Historic Northern Rio Grande (2018)
In contemporary New Mexico, the tripartite division of presumed "Anglo", "Indian", and "Hispano" ethnic communities is naturalized in scholarship and in everyday life, but projecting this division into the past elides diverse historical realities. Pueblo, Apache, and vecino notions of community and landscape stand in contrast to the American imaginaries that underpin some historical anthropology and archaeology in the Southwest. This paper considers the archaeological interpretation of...
The Politics of Practice Theory: Feminist Archaeology Meets Marx and Bourdieu (2019)
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 his influential book Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation, Charles Orser provided arguably the clearest and most powerful explanation of the usefulness of Bourdieu’s practice theory for historical archaeologists. Despite the use of practice theory for more than two...
Politics, Professionalism, and the Public in Archaeology: The Endeavour Bark Project (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) incorporates the public into professionally directed marine archaeology research. Its volunteers understand how archaeology differs from the popular media, understand the importance of cultural resource protection, and become a constituent group empowering that protection. RIMAP's ongoing study of the British transports scuttled in...
Politics, The Public, And Archaeology In Texas (2017)
This study examines organizations performing CRM archaeology in the state of Texas and the federal laws that dictate their projects (e.g. Section 106 and its implementing regulations at 36 CFR 800.2 [c]). Specifically this research focuses on the legal requirements to "consult the public" or implement a "public outreach" program. However, who constitutes the public and what constitutes outreach and consultation is not specified in the regulations. Consequently, the standards do not necessarily...
The Polk Brothers Livestock Stockyards of Fort Worth (2017)
Brothers James Hilliard Polk and Lucius Junius Polk banded together to form the Polk Brothers Livestock stockyards of Fort Worth. Established in 1885 they were the first stockyard in Fort Worth. They were located south of the present Fort Worth Union stockyards and situated conveniently at the intersection of two rail lines. One notable contract they received was to supply the British Army with horses and mules during the Boer Wars in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Around...
Pollen Analysis as a Proxy for Land Use Practices in Massachusetts, 1500-1700 CE (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. Questions of land—who owns it, who controls it, who alters it—are central to human relationships, particularly in colonial contexts where power dynamics are embedded within the physical landscape. In Massachusetts, land was central to cooperation and conflict between the Wampanoag and English. Land...
"Poor White" Economic (In)Activity and the Politics of Work in Barbados (2015)
Situated on the fringes of the plantation landscape, the "poor whites" of Barbados occupied unique spaces within local and global capitalist networks during and after the period of slavery. Historically and contemporarily portrayed as being irrelevant within broader economic systems of production, a discourse of marginalization coupled with stereotypes of idleness has severed them from broader Barbadian and global socioeconomics. This paper addresses the power dynamics inherent in identifying,...
Popular Plates, Personal Traits: The Biry House and a Ceramic Analysis from Castroville, Texas (2016)
The 1840’s witnessed an influx of immigrants flocking into the United States in search of economic opportunity and stability. The Biry family, along with several other Alsatian families, followed suit in 1844. They established the town of Castroville, Texas and continue to celebrate their Alsatian heritage today. While they did find opportunities within Texas, they were also forced to engage in negotiations of national, ethnic, and class identities. This paper reflects on these negotiations by...
Porcellian Porcelain and White Male Fragility: The Journey of a Privileged Plate (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Meanwhile, In the NPS Lab: Discoveries from the Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archeologists at Boston’s African Meeting House were surprised to discover an intact porcelain plate on the site’s surface. More shocking was the mark identifying the plate as coming from the exclusive Porcellian Club, one of the storied finals clubs of Harvard University. The club was founded in 1791 and boasts...
Port of Badagary, a Point of No Return: Investigation of Maritime Slave Trade in Nigeria (2016)
Two Danish ships that wrecked at Cahuita Point in Costa Rica carried many slaves of Yoruba ethnicity from a geographic locale in the vicinity modern day Nigeria in Africa. Danish Company records reveal that in addition, to human cargoes of around 400 slaves each, one ship included 4,000 pounds and the other 7, 311 pounds of ivory. Founded in 1425 A.D., the port city of Badagry played a strategic role in both the transatlantic slave and ivory trade. Maritime Cultural Landscape Theory is a useful...
Portrait of a Port: Industry and Ideology in El Salvador (1805-1900) (2018)
The impact of the Industrial Revolution affected El Salvador far more slowly in the pre-independence period due to the Spanish trade monopoly. Yet Atlantic World demand for commodities such as balsam, cacao, coffee, indigo, and sugar steadily increased through the early Republican period of independence, encouraging entrepreneurs to invest in the technologies of the nineteenth century. Technologies like the steamship and railroad inextricably connected El Salvador to global markets, resulting in...
Portsmouth Island Life-Saving Station, Innovative Technology Reconstructing The Past (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Life-Saving Stations offered vital support and rescue operations for distressed mariners since the Life-Saving Service’s formal creation as an agency of the United States Treasury in 1878. After its construction in 1894, Portsmouth Island’s Life-Saving Station assisted mariners navigating the treacherous waters surrounding Cape Lookout and served as a focal point for the island’s...
Portuguese East Indiamen Shipwrecks Of 1503. Al-Hallaniya Island, Oman. The Land Archaeology Survey And Excavations (2018)
In the spring of 2013 and 2014 I participated in the "Portuguese East Indiamen Shipwrecks of 1503" project conducted by Oman’s Ministry of Heritage and Culture and Blue Water Recoveries Ltd. (Midhurst, UK). The focus was upon identifying the shipwrecks associated with the 1503 Portuguese East India expedition. The work described here was an archaeological survey and excavation on Al-Hallaniyah Island in areas where potential Portuguese burials might have occurred. Initial results identified 60+...
Post Emancipation Material Culture and Housing on St. Kitts, West Indies (2018)
The post emancipation period in the British Caribbean (post-1834) represented a drastic change for the formerly enslaved Africans on St. Kitts’ sugar plantations as they faced new challenges in their freedom. This paper presents ceramic and housing data from two structures occupied from the late seventeenth century until the 1850s. Focusing on the period 1800 to 1850, ceramic types and frequencies indicate changes in the acquisition of European ceramics from the era of slavery to the post...
Post-1800 Mining Camps, Redux: A Reappraisal at Age 50 (2016)
Mining camps are certainly a minor one of the kinds of historic sites with which we are occasionally concerned. So began Franklin Fenenga’s prospectus for an archaeology of mining that appeared in the inaugural issue of our journal in 1967. Fenenga went on to identify areas where archaeology stood to make notable contributions and topics where archaeological attention promised only limited yields. Investigations of the mining industry had been sporadic at the time of Fenenga’s article, but...
Post-Construction Chinese Worker Housing on the Central Pacific Railroad: 1870-1900 (2017)
The construction of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the world, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was one fraught with difficulties, involving tens of thousands of workers. When it was completed in May 1869, the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) portion of the line, between Ogden, Utah and Sacramento, California, retained many ethnic Chinese workers for operations and maintenance work. Housing for workers during construction was not consistent, however after construction the...
Post-Emancipation African American Life in the Upper South and South Louisiana: insights from a comparison of material culture from the Hermitage, Tennessee, and Alma and Riverlake Plantations, Louisiana (2018)
The DAACS (Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery) database also includes data relevant to post-Emancipation, including Jim Crow era life of African Americans. DAACS facilitates comparative research, expanding the scale of archaeological inquiry. Through the use of DAACS, post-Emancipation assemblages from the Hermitage site in Tennessee were compared with those from Alma and Riverlake sugar plantation sites in southern Louisiana. Evidence of shared economic strategies related to...
Post-Industrial Placemaking: The Keweenaw Time Traveler and Community-Engaged Historical GIS (2018)
Placemaking in post-industrial communities often becomes contested due to issues of conflicting memory, lack of economic resources, collective mistrust, and the problems of environmental degradation. A historical spatial data infrastructure known as the Keweenaw Time Traveler offers an interactive public-participatory platform to promote the health, both cultural and economic, of Michigan’s remote post-industrial mining region. This online GIS-based historical atlas breaks down traditional...
Post/Mining Heritage Landscapes and the Energy Transition: Digital Tech for Heritage-led, Community-driven Design Thinking. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digital Technologies and Public Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Thousands of post-mining communities struggle with recession, de-population, and ecological contamination. Community leaders work against oppressive odds to balance economic revitalization, environmental remediation, and cultural renewal. Mining ruins and landscapes are complex anchors of local heritage. Our research team has...