United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
3,526-3,550 (3,819 Records)
Mount Gilead AME Church in southeastern Pennsylvania formed the heart of a rural African American community throughout much of the 19th century. Oral history associates it with the Underground Railroad, but with little specificity. Since most of the church's congregation has dispersed over the past century, its extant cemetery is the main location where much of the church's history can be reconstructed. This study uses spatial, demographic, and GPR data from the cemetery as well as archival...
Underpinning a Plantation: A Material Culture Approach to Consumerism at Mount Vernon Plantation (2016)
This paper adopts an object-centered, material culture approach that triangulates between three primary sources – George Washington’s orders for goods through the consignment system, inventories from a local, Scottish-owned store, and the archaeological record at Mount Vernon plantation – lending fresh insight into the nature of the mid-eighteenth century consumer revolution and addressing questions about elite and non-elite consumer behavior. By quantifying the robust dataset of Washington’s...
Understanding 19th Century Indigenous River-Portage Travel in Maine and New Brunswick Through Network Analysis (2017)
The indigenous people of northeastern North America utilized the river systems of the continent to form an extensive network of travel and communication. While the riverine system offered the opportunity for local and long-distance connections between communities, the environmental dynamics of the system presented challenges for travelers. The directionality of water flow patterns, coupled with seasonal variations in flow magnitude and water temperature, meant that the difficulty of travel...
Understanding And Interpreting Indigenous Places And Landscapes (2016)
Since the earliest encounters of Native Americans and Europeans, places and landscapes with thousands of years of use and history in the "New World" have been renamed, depleted of resources, appropriated and stolen. Despite almost 500 years of contact, colonialism and repression by European settlers and their descendants, Native tribes continue to define places on the landscape in terms of tribal understandings, meanings and uses. This paper addresses the topic of place and landscape...
Understanding Home-Making and Urban Landscape Creation in Montgomery, Alabama (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the summer of 2018 an architectural survey of African American communities around downtown Montgomery, Alabama was conducted. This urban environment was built between 1870 and 1950, and home construction correspondingly progresses from late Victorian, to bungalows, and then to ranch-style homes. Shotgun houses represent a persistent small-house form over time. However, the...
Understanding Maritime Cultural Resources Within Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster presents the first phase of a multi-phase effort within Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary to create a maritime heritage trail leveraging the concept of Maritime Cultural Landscapes. It also provides discussion for future phases and goals for creating an interactive outreach initiative allowing the public to better understand the quantity and quality of the cultural...
Understanding the African-Caribbean Landscape of the Wallblake Estate, Anguilla. (2018)
Historical archaeologists have explored the plantation landscapes of the Caribbean for more than 50 years, and there have been archaeological excavations at historical sites on every major island. However, there are still islands where there have not been any previous excavations at historic sites, including plantations. Anguilla was one such island until June 2017 when archaeological survey and excavations began at the Wallblake Estate to understand the plantation landscape and the major...
Understanding the Battlefield Terrain: Components of the Battlefield Archeological Landscape (2016)
Since its inception, the ABPP has made over 559 planning grants with over $18 million available to preservation professionals for the long term care of battlefield resources. Approximately 40% of those funds have driven both underwater and terrestrial archeological projects since 1996. The vast majority of those battlefield projects have centered on resource identification, inventory, assessment and setting boundaries for aggressive resource protection. A system of identification of the...
Understanding the Culture of Teaching and Learning: The Role Evaluation Played in Developing a Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter Case Study (2018)
Archaeologists have long been interested in developing and providing archaeology-based educational resources to teachers for use in the classroom, but they have spent significantly less attention on evaluating resource effectiveness. Evaluation was a key component in the development of "Investigating a Shotgun House,"one ofthe newest case studies in the Project Archaeology: Investigating Shelter curriculum. This paper will discuss a pilot program conducted during the development of...
Understanding the Irish Famine Using Deep Neural Networks and Protolanguage (2017)
Drawing from historical records and archaeological data, we used multilayer neural networks to construct a sociocultural model of the Irish Famine. We found that Capital Exchange optimization for non-elites frequently contained polynomial-time mappings to the Assignment and Knapsack problems (which are both NP-hard). However, we only occasionally encountered nontrivial instances of these mappings when the same algorithms were applied to elites. That pattern of asymmetric computational...
Understanding The Material And Spatial Strategies Of Border Crossers Through Water Bottles And Beverage Containers (2015)
Because of the clandestine and complex nature of undocumented migration in southern Arizona, many aspects of this social process have proven difficult to systematically analyze using ethnography alone. Using a combination of ethnographic and archaeological data collected between 2009 and 2014, this paper uses statistical analysis to further understand the relationships between artifacts associated with clandestine migration and the material and spatial strategies migrants employ to cross...
Understanding the Materials and Methods Used in the Construction of the 1617 Church at Jamestown, Virginia (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Excavating the Foundations of Representative Government: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Historical Archaeology." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. From 2016 to 2018 Jamestown Rediscovery excavated the 1907 Memorial Church where the foundations of: 1) a 1617 timber-framed church and 2) a 1640s brick and mortar church are located. The 1617 church is where the first legislative assembly in British North...
Understanding the Placement of LA 20,000, a Spanish Colonial Settlement Located in New Mexico (2015)
This project will explore the environmental and social factors that influenced the placement of Spanish New Mexican sites by looking at the location of LA 20,000, a seventeenth-century secular ranch located about 25 miles southwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. This project will use GIS to explore the environmental factors essential to the Spanish colonists who settled as farmers, specifically focusing on the natural resources around LA 20,000, including distance to water, soil fertility, and...
Understanding Variation in Utilitarian Ceramic Assemblages of the Chesapeake: The Impacts of Local Production (2013)
Utilitarian ceramics made of earthenware and stoneware were important tools in the early American domestic sphere. Milk pans, storage jugs, baking dishes, and other specialized forms made a variety of domestic industries possible. However, the abundance and characteristics of these wares were not consistent through time or across households. In turning analytical focus to this under-investigated class of artifacts, a better understanding of the relationship between domestic and economic life in...
Understanding Your Neighbor: An Analysis of Mixed-Use Immigrant Households in Nineteenth Century Port Richmond (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Millions of Europeans left their homes during the closing decades of the nineteenth and dawn of the twentieth centuries, seeking new lives and opportunities in the United States. Many clustered in specific, less desirable neighborhoods of American cities drawn by cheap housing, available jobs, and proximity to their ethnic and religious kin. One such immigrant-heavy neighborhood was...
Underwater 3D Imaging with Structured Light: Implications for Ethics and Economics (2015)
A prototype underwater 3D imaging technology is discussed that is both inexpensive and creates accurate, high resolution 3D data. We focus on the connection between this technology and archaeological ethics and economics. First, we discuss a cutting edge, low cost, highly portable and user-friendly 3D imaging system using structured light, which has generated very high resolution images in both terrestrial and underwater contexts. Next, we compare it to other low-cost 3D techniques. Finally, we...
Underwater Archaeology in Cuba: a Critical Review (2017)
This paper endeavors to take a critical look at underwater archaeology research in Cuban coastal areas, mostly after 1959. Stress is made on the early research and the organizations which participated and the foreign companies which made an effort in underwater archaeological excavation on the Cuban shelf. However, this paper underlines the controversial role played by Carisub, a company in charge of underwater archaeological research until 2004, and its role in granting permits for commercial...
Underwater Archaeology Skills, Training, and Opportunities in U.S. Colleges: The 2017 ACUA University Benchmarking Survey (2018)
The Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology developed a series of three Benchmarking Surveys to understand how students, professors, and employers perceive and prioritize "basic" underwater archaeological skills. The ACUA surveys are intended to guide students, faculty, and employers as new generations of archaeologists enter the profession. The second survey, completed in 2017, was directed to university faculty in the United States, and received fourteen responses from eight universities....
Underwater Archaeology Through the Ages (2019)
This is an abstract from the "POSTER Session 2: Linking Historic Documents and Background Research in Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeology underwater is a broad field. While traditionally associated with historical resources such as ships, harbors, and sunken cities, growing attention is focused on less researched portions of the submerged archaeological record such as prehistoric sites, shipwrecks in deep water, and sunken...
Underwater Cultural Heritage Law: Looking Back, Looking Forward (2016)
The law protecting and managing underwater cultural heritage (UCH) is relatively new and has largely been developed over the past 50 years. This presentation will look back at the threats to UCH from treasure hunting and provide an overview of the laws that have been applied and developed to address that threat as well as from other activities that may inadvertently effect or harm UCH, such as fishing, the laying of submarine cables and energy development. Special attention will be given to...
Underwater Historic Preservation for Sport Divers: Florida’s Training Courses for Divers and Diving Leadership (2015)
Public efforts to support preservation of Florida’s historic shipwrecks began in earnest in the late 1980s with the development of the state’s Underwater Archaeological Preserve system. As part of the process, local sport divers received training to assist with recording and monitoring these historic wrecks. The success of this program led to the development of the Submerged Sites Education & Archaeological Stewardship (SSEAS) program targeted to sport divers, and the Heritage Awareness Diving...
Underwater in the High Desert: Exploring Site Presence and Preservation on Drowned and Buried Lake Features (2018)
Walker Lake, NV, a high desert, perennial lake in the western Great Basin, has been subject to naturally changing water levels for over 15,000 years. Ranging in size from the southernmost branch of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan to a small alkali wetland, Walker Lake provided varying landscapes for people to use and live around through time. Fieldwork during summer 2017 investigated drowned river channels and beach features for depositional history, site presence, and site preservation. Submerged...
Underwater Survey Methods in Low to Zero Visibility (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The King's Shipyard Surveys, 2019: Submerged Cultural Heritage Near Fort Ticonderoga" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The King’s Shipyard Survey was conducted over four weeks in spring 2019. The team surveyed a nearly 63,000 square-foot area of Lake Champlain near Fort Ticonderoga in New York for shipwreck and harbor remains. Divers faced a challenging environment. Although water depths ranged from ten to...
Underwater Survey of the Historic Anchorage for Portsmouth, Dominica (2015)
The town of Portsmouth, located on the northwestern coast of Dominica, is bordered by Prince Rupert’s Bay. Utilized as a deepwater port off the Guadeloupe Passage, this coastline was preferred as a watering site by the indigenous Kalinago and by sailing ships entering and leaving the Caribbean Sea. Dominica, originally a British colonial outpost (1763-1977), is strategically situated between the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. From its inception, Portsmouth was a planned...
Understanding Rural and Urban Privy Vaults: An Overview of their Utilization and Morphological Transformation Through Time. (2016)
Until the advent and widespread adoption of modern plumbing, the privy vault played nearly as important a role to permanent occupation as would a sustainable water source. This paper will examine the various construction methods employed while investigating the rationale behind changes in morphology. Special focus will be given to privies within the urban setting of turn of the century East St. Louis, Illinois and comparisons will be made between privy vaults found in various St. Louis, Missouri...