United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
3,376-3,400 (3,819 Records)
This poster presents analysis of children’s toys from two features excavated during the 2014 field season at a nineteenth- and twentieth-century Texas-Alsatian homestead in Medina County, Texas. The features that we focus on in this analysis are a slack-lime pit and a well, whose depositions are largely comprised of 20th-century artifacts. Toys considered include clay marbles, a "Frozen Charlotte" doll, and a promotional Little Orphan Annie seal. We address the socioeconomic status of occupants...
The Texas Historical Commission and Ongoing Research at Site 41MR211 (2017)
The historical record offers only brief references to the village of Sha’chahdinnih or Timber Hill as the last Caddo settlement in the traditional Caddo homeland. Unfortunately, not long after its abandonment in the early 1840’s, its true location was lost to historians. In 1998, the combined efforts of archival and field researchers succeeded in locating a site designated as 41MR211, and believed to be a possible location for Timber Hill. In the interest of confirming the identity and...
Texas Tribal Histories Project: Collaborating with Native Voices (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Texas Tribal Histories Project is an effort to create geographic historical narratives of tribal presence in Texas through collaboration with tribes. The narratives focus on the physical locations and specific time periods during which various tribal nations were present in Texas. These histories will reflect the tribes’ perspectives on the historical and archeological data that...
Texas’ White Elephant Fleet (2016)
As part of its effort in World War I, the United States and its Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) began an aggressive shipbuilding campaign to counter the merchant shipping losses from Germany’s submarine warfare. Over 100 wooden ships were contracted in the Gulf District (the Gulf Coast west of New Orleans). Construction of these vessels was far slower than anticipated, and when the war suddenly ended, the country was left with a surplus of both complete and incomplete wooden ships. The EFC...
The Textile Trade with Iceland, AD 1400-1700. (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. Archaeological textile collections from the North Atlantic and specifically Iceland represent an important data-set with potential for shedding new light on issues of international trade between these remote islands and Northern Europe. Woolen cloth produced by women, along with dried fish, was one of the most...
"That Kind of Place": Re-Illuminating Enslaved Women at Buffalo Forge Plantation, Rockbridge County, Virginia (2018)
Often unacknowledged in archival documents and recent historical research, enslaved women’s diverse roles in industrial contexts shaped antebellum Virginia’s infrastructure, economy, and culture. This paper on the Buffalo Forge iron plantation in Rockbridge County, Virginia, uses archaeological, documentary, and architectural research to illuminate enslaved women as active agents within the plantation’s complex built environment. Archaeological examination of yards around two extant quarters in...
"That These Dead Shall Not Have Died in Vain," The Above-Ground Archaeology of New Jersey’s War Memorials (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Monuments, Memory, and Commemoration" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines New Jersey’s war memorials with a focus on understanding how and why some conflicts are commemorated and others are overlooked. Memorials commemorating conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the Gulf Wars are examined. Particular attention is paid to two factors that drive commemoration, periodicity, e.g. celebration...
That’s a lot of wood: Excavations of the 1755 Carlyle Warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia. (2017)
In 1755, the Board of Trustees of the City of Alexandria, tasked prominent merchant, Thomas Carlyle with providing the Alexandria with a public warehouse. The warehouse, once built, would be rented out to various merchants on behalf of the town for several decades. The well preserved foundations of one of the earliest public buildings in Alexandria was uncovered beneath nearly 10 feet of building debris along Alexandria’s waterfront. The following is a brief history of the warehouse, the...
"Their complaint was that they did not get enough to eat": Landscape of Child Labor at the Blackfeet Boarding School, Montana (2017)
The boarding school system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was designed by the United States government as a formal program to eradicate Native American cultural identities and lifeways. It was a system that removed Native children from their families and forced them into to a way of life that garishly clashed with their traditional beliefs and culture. One of the primary goals of the Cut Bank Boarding School on the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana was to transform...
Theories of Place and the Archaeology of Late 19th and Early 20th Century Experiences at Stewart Indian School (2017)
This paper explores the usefulness of employing theories of place in illuminating the nuanced experiences of Native children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada. Stewart Indian School was established in 1890 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs with the goal of stripping surrounding Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone children of their tribal identity through the imposition of Euroamerican education and vocational training. During the last two centuries,...
Theorizing Capitalism’s Cracks (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Capitalism’s Cracks" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Perpetual economic and ecological crises, coupled with Marx’s loss of credibility have left many questioning whether any viable alternative is possible. While historical archaeology has done important work revealing capitalism’s destruction, exploitation and trauma, there is an inherent danger of perpetuating the idea of an...
The Theory Of Coastal Abandonment During Times Of Warfare And Piracy Applied To The Island Of Cyprus During The Crusades (2017)
This poster will outline the ten coastal fortifications that ring Cyprus. Using GIS this poster will show the line of site of these fortifications. The line of site will include the Mediterranean Sea. Using this data, it will be possible to extract distance from the shore, and from that it will be possible to calculate reaction time for the population to retreat inland during a raid. The Crusader Era was chosen specifically due to the fact that piracy and raiding was heavily present around...
"There and Back Again": The Atlantic World Concept in Historical Archaeology (2013)
The concept of an "Atlantic World" is a useful one for historical archaeologists because it provides a general geographic starting point for investigations that focus on the transformation of the world and the expansion of European imperial networks but defies strict physical, temporal, and cultural boundaries. As the limits of the known world expanded for Europeans and non-Europeans alike, its mysterious edges contracted, and people and places isolated from outside developments became...
There And Back Again: The Ironclad Monitor's Tale (2016)
Situated just 16 miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras, N.C., NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary protects the shipwreck of the famed Civil War ironclad, USS Monitor. In 2015, thirteen years after the turret was recovered, NOAA launched an expedition back to the Monitor to document the site. Using closed circuit rebreathers, NOAA and its partners are using the latest technology to assess the ironclad’s current state of preservation. This presentation will highlight NOAA’s efforts to protect...
There is No Landscape like a Commercial Landscape: An investigation into the Working-Class of Corktown, Detroit 1890-1906 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "POSTER Session 1: A Focus on Cultures, Populations, and Ethnic Groups" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster investigates the archaeological, documentary, and photographic record to re-create the commercial landscape of a demolished working-class community within the Corktown neighborhood in the City of Detroit. The years under investigation are 1890-1906. Examining the commercial landscape will help to gain...
There Is No Life Without Water: Irrigation in Utah's Uinta Basin (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 the arid climate of Utah’s Uinta Basin, irrigation is the lifeblood of farming and ranching. Among the first tasks Euro-American settlers in Utah completed would be to secure water for their homestead by digging irrigation ditches. As settlers ventured further away from existing communities,...
There is Nothing Like Looking if You Want to Find Something: The Emerging Accessibility of Historic Documents and the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (2017)
Since the foundation of the Society for Historic Archaeology 50 years ago changing technology has dramatically transformed historic document research. Historical data that would’ve taken countless hours of research to uncover is now available through a few clicks of a mouse. Modern technology cannot be relied upon for all historic research; it can, however, lead the researcher down previously undiscovered paths. Document research initiated in 2013 has aided in the reinterpretation of the...
There’s a Hole in my Bucket! (But I Put it There on Purpose): Modified Can Use at Rural Woodcutting Camps in Mineral County, Nevada (2015)
In 2014, in conjunction with the University of Nevada-Reno, I led a Forest Service Passport in Time project in a survey of rural Chinese woodcutting camps surrounding the turn-of-the-century mining boomtowns of Aurora, Nevada and Bodie, California. In addition to the expected glass bottle fragments, rusting cans, and Chinese-related ceramics and opium tins, we discovered a large portion of the material culture, specifically cans, buckets, and other metal objects, had been modified and repurposed...
Thermal Breakage in Glass Shards: Identification in the Archaeological Record of an University Trash Dump (2017)
Lindenwood archaeology students have been excavating a pre-1960s university trash dump. Finds include glass shards with a breakage pattern originally hypothesized to be artistically cut glass. With no evidence of wear from cutting, we undertook heating experiments and now interpret the glass shards as being the result of thermal breakage, possibly due to trash burning.
These Tangled Threads: An Analysis of the Current State of Waterlogged Textile Conservation in Nautical Archaeology (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The study of conservation methods for textiles has expanded greatly in recent years, with an improved understanding of the complex factors affecting their preservation and stability. By comparing this to protocols in use for the conservation of nautical assemblages, where textile artifacts are rare and much more sporadically studied than other organic materials, this paper broadly...
They Came From The Sea: The Anthropogenic Study Of The Cuban Migrant Craft La Esperanza, The Normalization Of U.S.-Cuba Relations, And The Potential For Future Research (2016)
Since the fall of the Batista regime during the Cuban Revolution of 1959 more than one million Cubans have fled the country seeking protection and opportunities as political refugees. While many of these refugees traveled to the United States by more traditional means, many others desperate to flee the nation took to sea in improvised watercraft to attempt to cross the Straits of Florida. These craft, which greatly vary in size, construction, and technology are often found cast ashore and...
"They Considered Themselves Free": Defining Community and Freedom at Buffalo Forge in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Before, After, and In Between: Archaeological Approaches to Places (through/in) Time" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. On Saturday, May 27th, 1865, Buffalo Forge ironmaster Daniel C.E. Brady noted in his journal: “All hands quit work as they considered themselves free.” This seemingly isolated, abrupt moment in time belies several overlapping periods of transition, tension, and community self-determination...
"They Had Perfect Knowledge of…This Offensive Place": Burial Grounds and Archaeological Human Remains in Richmond’s Public Discourse (2016)
In Richmond, Virginia, racial discrimination is clearly visible in the condition of historical burial grounds. Efforts to reclaim these sacred sites have generated controversy surrounding the proposed Revitalize RVA development adjacent to the city’s oldest cemetery for people of color. Recent outrage, activism, and attempts at dialogue have also occurred in relation to some archaeological collections of human remains from Richmond, while other such collections have received comparatively little...
"They were dying in such great quantity": An archaeology of human burials at Gloucester Point (2018)
Human burials have been a consistent problem for archaeologists excavating in advance of development at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at Gloucester Point. Georeferencing the location of previously identified burials served as a pilot project for a more extensive archaeological GIS. The re-examination of burial features not only reveals their approximate locations on the contemporary landscape, but also illustrates the complex history of human occupation at Gloucester Point, including...
The Warwick 1619: Historical Background (2013)
The Warwick ship was owned by Robert Rich, a leading member of the Virginia and Somers Island companies and commissioned to deliver the new governor and workers for the Bermuda plantation. This paper considers the political and financial context in which the ship sailed, and differentiates it from contemporary ships of the same name with which it has often been confused. Time permitting, the paper will also address the legal aftermath of the sinking.