United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
2,951-2,975 (3,819 Records)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Although the United States was late to enter the First World War, the waters of the nation became a battlefield from 1917 onward. Ships operating along North Carolina’s coast recurrently fell victim to the unrestricted U-boat campaign. This paper reexplores the topic of the First World War’s impact on the North Carolina coastline. Originally presented at the 2018 Society of...
Revisiting Josiah Henson's Role in Maryland History. (2016)
Long overshadowed by and conflated with the fictional story of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the life of Josiah Henson is revisited at the location he was enslaved in suburban Maryland. Archaeological research on the former plantation has uncovered traces of life on the farm and the 19th century landscape. This work provides part of the framework for the design of a public museum to be built at the park, dedicated to Henson's life and slavery in Montgomery County. This paper will discuss the ongoing...
Revisiting Parting Ways Forty Years Later: Some Research Challenges and Successes (2015)
Nearly 30,000 18th- and 19th-century artifacts were recovered during the excavation of the small African American community of Parting Ways in Plymouth, Massachusetts by James Deetz beginning in 1975. The artifacts are currently housed at the Massachusetts Historical Commission in Boston. Original interpretations attributed all the artifacts to the late 18th- and 19th-century African American occupation of the site, but subsequent research indicated that Parting Ways was occupied in the middle...
Revisiting Past Excavations: An In-Depth Look at Feature B7 from the African Meeting House, Boston, MA (2015)
This paper analyzes a pit feature that was identified during a 1984 excavation in the basement of the African Meeting House, located in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood. Full excavation of the feature followed in 1986; however, complete analysis of the resulting artifact collection was not possible at the time. Predating the construction of the prominent African Meeting House, the feature is likely the privy of Augustin Raillion, a hairdresser who occupied a house at 44 Joy Street with two...
Revisiting Providence Cove Lands: Lessons in Curation and the Potential of Existing Collections. (2018)
The Providence Cove Lands Archaeological District (RI 935) is located at the confluence of the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket Rivers near the State House in Providence, Rhode Island. Between 1981-2, De Leuw, Cather/Parsons (DCP) completed archaeological and environmental surveys of the District, focused primarily on two sites—Carpenter’s Point (RI 935A) and North Shore (RI 935B). Based on DCP’s findings, the Keeper of the National Register determined that the District is eligible for listing on...
Revisiting Root Cellars at The Hermitage, Davidson County, Tennessee. (2018)
The Hermitage, a plantation owned by Andrew Jackson near Nashville, Tennessee, has been the site of archaeological investigations since the 1970s. Much of this work has focused on the large enslaved community living at the site, with the study of the remnants of their dwellings a key element of this research. Sub-floor storage pits, generally referred to as root cellars, have been found at nine Hermitage slave dwelling locations. These features are present in all three of the separate quartering...
Revisiting Sacramento’s Gold Rush: Maritime Archeological Investigation in the Sacramento River (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2018, archaeologists from SEARCH and California Department of Parks and Recreation conducted an underwater remote-sensing survey in the Sacramento River, Sacramento County, California. The survey focused on relocating and assessing the condition of three vessels associated with the Sacramento gold rush: the Sterling and La Grange in downtown Sacramento and the Clarksburg Wreck...
Revisiting Snowtown: A 21st Century Analysis of the North Shore Site in Providence, Rhode Island (2018)
In the early 1980s, archaeologists from De Leuw Cather/Parsons conducted a large-scale data recovery project in downtown Providence within the Providence Cove Lands Archeological District. In 2013, The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) began a multi-year project to assess, analyze, catalog, and re-curate the Cove Lands Collection. In total, PAL’s effort re-cataloged and re-curated an assemblage of approximately 150,000 artifacts dating from the Middle Archaic period through the...
Revisiting the Highbourne Cay Shipwreck Site: Research Potential, Conservation in situ, and the future of Bahamian Material Culture (2015)
The Highbourne Cay Shipwreck, found in the Exumas, Bahamas, is the most intact example of a ‘Ship of Discovery’ in the world. The identity and purpose are still unknown, yet a recent, non-intrusive visit to the site recorded no obvious signs of damage to the ballast mound. Because the site has been disturbed and re-covered on two documented occasions, valuable reflexive questions can be asked decades later regarding the effectiveness of conservation in situ. Soon, the Bahamas will be lifting...
Revitalizing the Powhatan Indian Town: Collaborative Engagement at the Jamestown Settlement (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For several decades the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation (JYF) has run an immersive living history museum with a re-created Powhatan Indian town on the grounds of the Jamestown Settlement. Based on the nearby archaeological site of Paspahegh, a pre- and post-contact Powhatan town site, the material culture used by the interpretive staff has been driven almost exclusively by archaeological...
Revolution or Fad: Perspectives on Community Engagement in Archaeology (2020)
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. Over the last twenty years community engagement has become more prominent if not mainstream in archaeology, perhaps to the point that our concept of community archaeology has become generalized. In this paper I will examine the concept of community archaeology, its theoretical underpinnings as activist archaeology...
The Revolution Will Not Be Analyzed Here: Knocking the Cooper River Strawberry Vessel Shipwreck Out Of The American Revolution With Metallurgical Analysis Of Hull Sheathing (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Since its discovery by sport divers in the Cooper River near Charleston, South Carolina during the 1970s, the Strawberry Vessel shipwreck was believed to represent the remains of a British gunboat lost in 1781, however XRF and SEM analysis of hull sheathing samples recovered from the wreck in 2018 suggests the Strawberry Vessel was constructed no earlier than 1810. In light of these...
Revolutionary Households: Archaeology at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla (2013)
With the signing of the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821, Spain formerly recognized Mexico as an independent nation. As identity shifted from colony to country, processes of modernization accelerated and rural households were transformed. These transformations led to increased attacks on the traditional structures of home life, family, and community, attacks that ultimately erupted in the rural uprisings associated with the Central Mexican experience of the Mexican Revolution. Drawing on...
The Revolutionary Quash (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This is the story of one small man with huge responsibilities. Quash was one of Butler’s enslaved people on Little St Simons Island, Georgia during the antebellum period. Even under the thumb of overseer Roswell King, Quash managed to gain his own form of autonomy, lived in his own house that was much larger than a traditional slave dwelling, on his own island. During the spring of...
The Revolutionary War Gunboat Philadelphia: 2019 Update (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2019, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) hosted international experts in shipwreck timber conservation to consult on the long-term stabilization and preservation of the Revolutionary War gunboat Philadelphia. The gondola sank at the Battle of Valcour Island in Lake Champlain on 11 October 1776 and was raised in 1935. It is the oldest surviving American...
A Revolving Frontier: Change and Continuity in Marginal Icelandic Settlement, ca. 900-1900 CE (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Medieval to Modern Transitions and Historical Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Numerous farmsteads were established in Iceland's highland margins and back valleys during the late 9th and early 10th centuries, as part of the rapid process of settlement across the island. Many of these marginal farms were deserted sometime between the 11th and early 16th centuries, only to be re-settled...
The Rhode Island Archaeological and Historical Geographic Information System (GIS) Development Project (2018)
In 2017 the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission teamed up with the University of Rhode Island’s Applied History Laboratory to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) incorporating the state’s complex assortment of archaeological and historical sites. With support from the National Park Service, their objective is to collect and share the stories of Rhode Island through an effective and sustainable geospatial database of known archaeological sites and properties in...
Rhyolite, Charcoal and Whiskey: The Archaeology of Catoctin Mountain Park (2016)
Catoctin Mountain has always been a challenging landscape, but one that rewards perseverance. Native Americans negotiated its rocky slopes in search of rhyolite for stone tools, and hunted and camped along the freshwater streams and springs. Workers from the nearby Catoctin Iron Furnace burned its ample timber for charcoal to fuel the ironworks. Innovative farmers and homebuilders created flat terraces for their houses and gardens on the mountainside. During the Prohibition era, some of the...
Right to the City: Community-Based Urban Archaeology as Abolitionist Geography (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Advocacy in Archaeology: Thoughts from the Urban Frontier" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper sees heritage as a community resource to challenge racist urban planning policies in a historically African American neighborhood of Brooklyn. It examines this case through Ruth Wilson Gilmore's concept of abolitionist geography, which views urban space as an extension of enslavement and confinement. Urban...
The Right to Wharf Out: Contextualizing Early American Wharf Construction (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Urban Archaeology: Down by the Water" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over a third of Lower Manhattan’s landmass is composed of fill contained within buried wharves, bulkheads, and other landfill retaining structures. Archaeological investigations have increasingly afforded opportunities to examine the construction methods used to build these early structures in New York City and elsewhere. This...
Righting Past Wrongs (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Prior to the Civil War both whites and free African-Americans were interred at Cedar Grove cemetery in New Bern, North Carolina. In 1914, the Jim Crow Era city fathers decided to remove 14 African American burials to the black cemetery three blocks away. A century later, a local reporter and a community activist joined forces to right the past wrong and return the burials to their...
The Rise of Global Markets in Gold Rush San Francisco (2015)
When the discovery of gold in California was announced to the world, San Francisco almost instantly became the focal point of global activity. A steady flow of ships sailed to the fledgling city, carrying immigrants from ports as far-flung as Hong Kong, Valparaiso, London, and virtually every major entrepot on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Flooding into the city with these new arrivals was a vast assortment of commercial goods. Raw materials such as hardware and building supplies,...
The Rise of Slavery in the Valley of Virginia and its Enduring Presence on the Landscape of Lexington and Rockbridge County (2018)
Settled in the 1730s by Scotch-Irish immigrants who initially eschewed the institution of slavery, Rockbridge County, Virginia eventually became home to a society reliant on the enslavement of African Americans. After the Revolution, an elite class of newly minted American citizens established its identity through economic, social, and symbolic associations with Chesapeake plantation society. William Alexander (1738-1797) and his son Andrew (1768-1844) exemplified this transition, with Andrew...
The Rise of the Cedars: 2014-2015 Investigations at the Cox Farm in Georgetown (2016)
In 2014 the District Public Schools began extensive construction and renovation of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, the former Western High School. Portions of the building date to the last decade of the 19th century, the former location of The Cedars residence, the home of the Cox family. The few photographs and descriptions of The Cedars were thought to be all that remained due to the construction of the school. Stantec and EHT Traceries undertook archaeological and archival...
"Rises in the Rice Fields", Aerial LiDAR applications on South Carolina Inland Rice Plantations (2013)
The use of remote sensing technology, such as aerial LiDAR (light detection and ranging), provides archaeologists with a significant tool to aid in research as well as digitally record sites. Inland and coastal rice plantation contexts are extremely well suited for the application of aerial LiDAR in locating potential new sites as well as providing accurate maps of the overall landscape and topography. LiDAR scans produce a more accurate map than traditional topographic maps which enables...