United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
3,701-3,725 (3,819 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Perspectives from the Study of Early Colonial Encounter in North America: Is it time for a “revolution” in the study of colonialism?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Research into the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) has long played a pivotal role in Canadian national history. The HBC, a long-lasting commercial institution, was first established in the 1670s. Its earliest trading posts were placed along waterways...
What Guides Us with Collections? A discussion on Rethinking our Relationship with Artifacts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "What Guides Us with Collections? A discussion on Rethinking our Relationship with Artifacts" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This forum is a structured discussion on how historical archaeology handles the volume of materials generated through excavation. HA has not critically evaluated the vast differences in material production technologies that create the artifacts we excavate or account for differential impacts on...
What Have We Accomplished So Far in Japanese Diaspora Archaeology? (2018)
Before we can move forward in Japanese diaspora archaeology, it is crucial that we take stock of what we have accomplished thus far. Such stock-taking will aid in identifying common themes and approaches that can help shape our field of study and highlight gaps where more research is needed. Here I present an overview of archaeological studies on Japanese sites completed to date in North America and the Pacific Islands, and offer my opinions on where we should be headed in the future. I...
What Have We Here?: Discovery at the UTA District Depot Project in Salt Lake City, Utah (2016)
In July 2014, the construction of the Utah Transit Authority’s Depot District Service Center project in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, uncovered foundations and associated cultural materials from the historic Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad train maintenance facilities (42SL718). Initially, the foundations provided far more questions about how the rail facility evolved than they answered. Subsequent monitoring and archaeological data recovery uncovered several incarnations of the rail...
What if the place is gone? Reinvigorating Place, Memory, and Identity through New Media (2017)
While Utah is not known for its mining heritage, the Bingham Copper MIne located west of Salt Lake City is one of the few human manifestations visible from space. While the massive open-pit is a testament to human engineering, fortitude, and profit, the copper extracted from its stony core brought thousands of immigrants to Utah during the 19th and 20th centuries. These immigrants created places, communities, and a cohesive social identity. The same mines that created their community in the late...
What Lies Beneath: An Analysis of Historic Ceramics Found at 23SC2101, a Multi-Component Historic Site. (2017)
23SC2101 is a multi-component site with French Colonial through 20th century domestic occupations. Multiple projects located ceramics from all time periods and all levels of excavation. The site is in an urban area and many of the upper levels have suffered from severe disturbance. Besides the normal analysis of socio-economic status and site function, the analysis of ceramic date ranges by level may help to determine how severe the disturbance has been. Information on disturbance is often...
What They Wore: An Examination of the Clothing and Shoes Recovered from H.L. Hunley (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Lives Revealed: Interpreting the Human Remains and Personal Artifacts from the Civil War Submarine H. L. Hunley" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Following the excavation of the Hunley submarine, a plethora of artifacts related to the crewmember’s clothing were documented and recovered for conservation at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center. These artifacts included buttons from military and non-military...
What This Fort Stands For: conflicting memory at Bdote/Historic Fort Snelling (2016)
For Dakota people, there is no more painful and conflicted a site of memory in Minnesota than Historic Fort Snelling (HFS). Built on sacred grounds and used as a prison camp following the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, this historic property has until recently been represented in a highly selective fashion, suppressing Dakota and others' memory. In this paper I trace some of the specific processes of forgetting at HFS, and why those processes are now failing through rising historical pluralism. Yet...
What Transferware Can Tell Us: A Case Study Utilizing an At-Risk U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Collection from the Veterans Curation Program (2018)
The study of transferwares from historic sites in the United States can provide a window into the lives of the people who used these materials. However, there are many existing collections containing transferware that remain underutilized. Since 2009, the Veterans Curation Program has rehabilitated 231 at-risk collections, rendering them accessible for research and educational purposes. The Tombigbee Historic Townsites Project is one such collection. Completed in 1983, this project aimed to...
What Trash Tells Us: A Look at Fort Davis's 20th-Century Population (2017)
Following closure of the military post in 1891, the racially and socially diverse community that had grown around Fort Davis lost one of its main economic resources. In the decades after, the civilian population saw a shift of resources from predominately military issued goods to items brought in by rail through the neighboring communities of Alpine and Marfa. This paper analyzes a select assemblage of metal, ceramic, and faunal materials excavated from an early twentieth-century domestic trash...
What We Knew Then and What We Know Now: How New Archival Research Has Changed Our Understanding of the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Cemetery Population (2017)
During the initial Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery investigation, the most significant documentary source was the Register of Burials at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery, believed to account for all burials between 1882 and 1974. Preliminary research based on the Register of Burials, Milwaukee County Death certificates, and the spatial analysis of grave goods recovered from excavations conducted in 1991 and 1992 resulted in the tentative identification of 190 individuals. We now...
What's So Different About Public History? (2015)
When historical archaeologists discuss public archaeology, does their use of "public" imply the same things as intended by public historians? As more archaeology undergraduate and graduate students are enrolled in public history coursework (and public history students enrolled in archaeology courses), how is this relevant to their training? This paper will provide a brief review of public history’s development as a distinct field, noting current trends in civic engagement. It discusses the...
What’s for Dinner: An Intra-site Analysis of Faunal Remains from James Madison’s Montpelier (2018)
While much work at James Madison’s Montpelier looks at the differences in faunal remains between sites, the amount of intra-site analysis is lacking. This paper seeks to explore the relationship between previously analyzed faunal remains and their physical locations within the South Yard. The majority of domestic tasks at Montpelier centered around the South Yard, which included three dwellings for domestic slaves, two smokehouses for cured meats, and a kitchen where Nelly Madison had her meals...
What’s in a Button?: Sartorial Artifacts, Colonial Journeys, and the Archaeological Imagination (2019)
This is an abstract from the "One of a Kind: Approaching the Singular Artifact and the Archaeological Imagination" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological objects related to clothing wield an affective power derived from their inherent closeness to the historical body, to the life of a particular individual. Despite being quotidian and even mass-produced, such artifacts become singular by virtue of their role in practices of embodiment....
What’s in the Cellar: the Archaeology of an 1885 Officers’ Quarters at Fort Walla Walla, Washington (2015)
This paper will provide insights into the daily lives of the families that lived on Fort Walla Walla, one of the Pacific Northwest’s earliest communities, from its early use as a military base and into its transition to a veteran’s facility. Established in 1858, Fort Walla Walla was built along the Oregon Trail by the U.S. Army to defend settlers moving into the territory and played a major military role into the early 1900s. After the Fort closed in 1910, it was converted into a veteran’s...
"What’s This Doing There": Archaeological Evidence of the St. Louis Barter Economy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Iliniwek to Ste Genevieve: Early Commerce along the Mississippi" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Beginning in 2013, excavations conducted by the Missouri Department of Transportation have identified buildings associated with six different properties dating to the late 1700s, but it is the latest finds that have generated the greatest interest. Excavations conducted in the winter and spring of 2017 revealed the...
What’s Under The Ice: A Geophysical Survey Of The King's Shipyard, Lake Champlain, New York (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 Kings Shipyard, near Fort Ticonderoga, New York has been the resting ground for many ships that sailed Lake Champlain during the 18th century. Because of its sheltered position, near Fort Ticonderoga, it was used to build vessels and store vessels, with some being allowed to decay and...
(What’s) Left of the Commodity: Archaeology and the Creative Resuscitation of Spent Goods (2018)
Hobo jungles and other transient laborer and homelessness related sites present a sustained material critique of Capitalism. These kinds of sites provide insight into the creative strategies people employ to circumvent commodity markets when capital is not available. Whether residual evidence of an intentional statement against an oppressive system, or of a means to persist in the most desperate of situations, the assemblages left behind by people who reside on the fringes of...
When All You Have are Artifacts: Reassessing Intrinsic Issues in Assigning Cultural Identity to Artifact Assemblages in Colonial South Carolina (2016)
Just several years after the 1670 founding of Charles Towne, occupants of Barbados, England, and France seized opportunities for land and prosperity. By the 1680s, English settlers from Barbados began to settle the area along the Wando River, encroaching on land designated for the remaining indigenous population. Researchers and investigators examining archaeological sites do so with the aim to reconstruct the history about past landscapes. Inherently, archaeologists assign cultural identity to...
When Archeology is the Vehicle, Not the Point (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. Beginning in 2012, the National Park Service has held Archeology Corps at parks across the country with youth-serving non-profit organizations. Not quite summer camp, nor field school, the Corps projects have used archeology as a vehicle to provide safe spaces for summer employment,...
"When it’s steamboat time, you steam:" The Influence of 19th Century Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico (2016)
Driven by technological advances of the industrial revolution and the introduction of the steamboat in the Gulf of Mexico, the economy of the southern United States flourished. When Charles Morgan brought his first steamboat to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the stage was set for a commercial venture that helped transform the region. By the mid-19th century steamships served as the primary vehicle to transport agricultural products from the Mississippi River Valley to markets along the east...
When Men Cannot Work; Camp Au Train a Civilian Conservation Corps Camp (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Great Depression represents the collapse of the economic conditions of capitalism. This meant millions of Americans were out of jobs, a situation that had real ramifications for men whose social roles were defined by their work. This crisis of masculinity devastated all men, but Government attempts to deal with it varied by age. Programs for young men were geared toward keeping...
When the Conflict Ends: Building Reuse on the Wyoming Frontier (2018)
Considering Conflict Event Theory as a paradigm for cuture change, we are then left to consider what happens to sites after the conflict ends, and what that change says about the nature of conflict and its temporal importance to the continuation of culture change. Several archaeological sites are examined within thisparadigm, including Ft Briger and Ft Fetterman. Parallels are also made between Wyoming sites and sites in Texas.
When the Gales of November Come Howlin’: 2016 Archaeological Investigation of the Adriatic (47DR0208) (2018)
Proposed improvements to Berth 1 at the Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding Yard in Sturgeon Bay will require removal of the remains of the self-unloading, wooden schooner barge Adriatic. Built by master shipbuilder James Davidson as a three-masted schooner-barge, the 202-foot long, wooden-hulled Adriatic was launched in 1889 and later converted into a self-unloading barge, one of the earliest examples of what would become an iconic vessel type on the Great Lakes. The vessel spent its final seventeen...
‘When the King breaks a town, he builds another’: Space, Politics, and Gerrymandered Identities in Precolonial Dahomey (2015)
Scholars have long argued that sub-Saharan Africa in the era of the slave trade was dominated by ethnically distinct communities whose members underwent the process of creolization after being displaced to the New World. Archaeological research across West Africa, however, is challenging this notion, revealing how West African cultural identity transformed in response to intersecting economic, political, and cultural forces unleashed by trans-Atlantic commerce. This paper examines the political...