United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
651-675 (3,819 Records)
The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) was completed in May 1869. Much of the work on that railroad was carried out by more than 10,000 ethnic Chinese workers. After completion of the railroad many, if not most, of them either returned to China or left for work in the mining industry or construction on other railroads. However, a large number remained with the CPRR to work on railroad maintenance. Ethnic Chinese appear to have been a dominant labor force through the mid 1880s, perhaps longer, as...
Chinese Railroad Workers in Utah: Connecting Past to Present (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Arming the Resistance: Recent Scholarship in Chinese Diaspora Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As a build up to the 150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad's completion on May 10, 1869, the Utah Division of State History and the Bureau of Land Management partnered to highlight the unique archaeological landscapes of this construction effort, now located on public lands in northeastern...
Chinese Railroad Workers in Wyoming and Mongolia, 1890-1955 (2015)
Chinese railroad laborers, who worked overseas, left a distinct archaeological foot print where ever they lived. Here we want to look at how this footprint is manifested in Mongolia and Wyoming (1890-1955). This comparison considers the similarity in topography and the dissimilarity in the land the immigrants worked in. What is intriguing is the similarity in material culture and spatial organization. We want to briefly present the similarities and dissimilarities between the two experiences,...
A Chronicle of the Historic Military Railroad Corridor at Fort Belvoir (Camp A.A. Humphreys) (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Roads, Rivers, Rails and Trails (and more): The Archaeology of Linear Historic Properties" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Historic Military Railroad Corridor at Fort Belvoir (formerly Camp A.A. Humphreys), Virginia is a National Register listed linear resource consisting of a four-mile-long main line track bed, five-and-a half miles of sidings, and forty-one associated buildings, sites, and structures....
Chronologies of English Ceramic Ware Availability in the 17th-Century Potomac River Valley (2018)
The mercantile networks that connected England to its North American colonial enclaves in the 17th century were tenuous and often fleeting. At the time, the manufacture and exchange of household goods mostly took place within local or regional networks. Thus, colonial access to objects made in the British Isles depended upon the local or regional networks merchants could access on both sides of the Atlantic Basin. Such mercantile uncertainty complicates the traditional means by which historical...
Chuck’s Stomping Grounds and Historical Archaeology’s Haunts: Or, How Charles Orser’s Work Haunts Me (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. Chuck Orser has taken me all sorts of places, both geographic and intellectual. In fact, he has helped me see the value of connecting concept and place. This paper situates the sociopolitical dynamics of colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity in their inescapably trans-Atlantic places by...
The Church on the Hill: Inter-related Narratives and Conflicting Priorities for the Emory Church Property in Washington, D.C. (2017)
Fort Stevens was one of the only fortifications comprising the Civil War Defenses of Washington that saw combat, during Jubal Early’s raid on July 11-12, 1864. Prior to the Civil War, the land was sold by free African American woman Elizabeth Butler to the trustees of Emory Chapel in 1855 for construction of a church; when Fort Massachusetts was initially constructed in 1861, the church stood within it, but later was razed by the Union army when the fort was expanded and renamed Fort Stevens in...
The Church on the Hill: Inter-related Narratives, Conflicting Priorities, and the Power of Community Engagement (2016)
Fort Stevens is a well-known fort within the Civil War Defenses of Washington. Prior to the Civil War, the land was owned by Betsey Butler, a free black woman, who sold the land to the trustees of Emory Chapel in 1855 for the construction of a church. The church was razed for the construction of Fort Massachusetts in 1861, which was later expanded and renamed Fort Stevens in 1863. The congregation rebuilt the church following the Civil War. The context of the Emory Church is entwined with the...
The Circle of Trees: a Component of the Greensky Hill Methodist Mission Church Landscape (2018)
In 2016 the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians’ (LTBB) THPO initiated archaeological investigations at the circle of trees, a traditional cultural property north of the Greensky Hill Methodist Mission Church near Charlevoix, Michigan. The research is part of a larger study of the surrounding cultural landscape including the church and 19th century Odawa farmsteads. Peter Greensky, the Chippewa Methodist minister who along with his Anishinabe followers founded the mission, is recorded as...
Citizen Science and the Selfish Archaeologist (2018)
Organizing and implementing programs that engage defined and undefined groups of non-archaeologists can be time-consuming and demanding of resources. Most of us enter into them with good humor and a mixture of joy and stress. My approach to public engagement, saturated with selfishness, is through the concept of citizen science, and the evaluation measures summarized in this presentation reflect how well aspects of the program meet my needs. I intend to advocate for embracing, rather than just...
Citizens Under Arms: Archeological observations on the American Revolution (2013)
Historian Jeremy Black described the War for American Independence as a new kind of war, a transoceanic conflict between a European homeland and its descendants fighting for independence, and one where the concept of citizens under arms played a primary role. Over the last several decades archeologists have investigated the campsites, battlefields, fortifications, and supply points of this conflict. The societies which fielded the armies dictated the character of their military formations,...
City Formation in the Nineteenth Century Eastern United States: Asheville, North Carolina as an Example of Urban Formation Processes in the Margin. (2013)
Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Western North Carolina, the Asheville Basin did not see its first permanent Euro-American settlement until the 1780s. Over the following century, a relatively isolated mountain community transformed into the prosperous city of Asheville. This evolution was shaped by factors such as local climate and landscape in combination with diverse regional, national, and global influences such as increased industrialization, technological innovations, changing...
City of Today, City of the Past: Permanencies of the Acequias’ Cultural Landscape in the Urban Pattern of San Antonio, Texas (2017)
In the Southwest of United States, San Antonio, Texas is a urban center of high cultural significance characterized by a ‘historic urban landscape’, whose morphology was generated by Spanish colonial exploitation patterns, such as the 18th century agricultural irrigation system of ‘acequias’ developed along the San Antonio river. This study demonstrates how contemporary urban form can be interpreted as a palimpsest, with material memory embedded in the city, it develops mapping visualization...
A Civil War Battlefield: Conflict Archaeology at Natural Bridge, Florida (2016)
The Civil War Battle of Natural Bridge was fought within miles of Tallahassee, Florida, in March of 1865. Much of the site is now the Natural Bridge Battlefield Historic State Park and a metal detector survey was conducted of previously unsurveyed portions of the state-owned land, supplementing work previously done. KOCOA analysis and the survey results provides a new landscape-based interpretation of the placement of the battle events, which will be utilized in future interpretation of this...
Civil War Combat Trenching: What It Was and How to Find It (2016)
The last year of the Civil War witnessed a dramatic change in military tactics from open-field fighting to trench warfare as the soldiers increasingly covered themselves with fortifications on the battlefield, leading to the entrenched gridlock at Petersburg. When under fire or if combat was imminent, the soldiers used an innovative process in which they fortified progressively, starting with basic shelters and gradually building them up into complex and impregnable earth-and-wood defenses. ...
Civil War On The Rio Grande: Examples Of Blockade-Runners From Vera Cruz To Galveston (2018)
Blockade-running is neither considered an honorable enterprise nor a villainous practice, it is simply a means of trade during times of war and its occurrence during the American Civil War was no different. As the war divided our country, blockade-runners kept the borders busy with commerce. The North and South, though separated by political agendas, continued to need each other for economic survival and foreign powers were more than willing to assist in these proceedings. Blockade-running...
Claiming a House of Bondage: Examining Spatial Relationships of Domestic Slavery at Montpelier (2015)
The arrangement of domestic slavery in elite 18th and 19th century homes was built on an unsteady relationship between the enslaved laborers and the owner of the households. At Montpelier, this was amplified by a plantation landscape crafted as an entertainment space, and who's creation and maintenance relied entirely on the obedience and cooperation of enslaved laborers. These laborers lived and worked in and around the Mansion, and were integral to the performance of domesticity that James and...
Clandestine, Ephemeral, Anonymous? Myths and Actualities of the Intimate Economy of a 19th-Century Boston Brothel (2017)
Although prostitution was illegal in 19th-century Boston, it was not carried out in secret, nor did it produce so ephemeral a trace as to render it invisible in the historical and archaeological record. Study of material remains from the 27/29 Endicott Street brothel demonstrates the multi-layered realities of brothel life as the residents of the brothel developed strategies for coping with being purchased for ostensibly intimate acts that were in fact commercial transactions. These strategies...
Class and Status in the British Army at Fort Haldimand (1778–1784) (2015)
During the American Revolutionary War, the British outpost on Carleton Island was an integral connection between the cities of Montréal and Québec, and frontier military posts in the Great Lakes. Situated at the head of the St. Lawrence River, the diverse activity on Carleton Island included a military fortification, naval base, shipyard, merchant warehouses and civilian refugee settlements. In the eighteenth-century British Army, deep class and status differences existed between the officers...
A Class Apart. Shifting Attitudes about the Consumption of Fish (2018)
As a class of animals, fish have been an important food source since the dawn of time. In many parts of the world their economic and dietary importance has not wavered. However, in the New World, attitudes about the consumption of fish have varied considerably since the 17th century through the 21st century. Cultural influences have promoted fish and maligned fish at various times. Positive and negative attitudes reflect biases based on associations with religious groups and practices, ethnicity...
Class Matters: The Historical Archaeology of Class in the American Experience (2013)
Class is probably the most confused and contested concept wielded in the social sciences. Perceptions run a wide gamut: from class as the single most important aspect of the American experience, one that has seldom been seriously contemplated or explored; to ideas that class is a stale, outdated, or dead concept, irrelevant to a sustained understanding of the modern world or the past that gave rise to it. These contradictory ideas are evidence that class has been defined and utilized in...
Class, Ethnicity, and Ceramic Consumption in a Boston Tenement (2015)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House, which was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century, was repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century, becoming...
Clay Fingerprints: The Elemental Identification of Coarse Earthenwares from the Mid-Atlantic (2016)
Working with fragmentary collections, it is often difficult for archaeologists to assess potentially diagnostic vessel forms or surface treatments on utilitarian ceramics. It is therefore a challenge to identify the production origins for many of these wares. Surveying the products from 24 historic earthenware kiln sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, this paper considers the reliability of visual attributes such as paste color and inclusions for distinguishing the...
Cleaning Submerged Artillery: Tools and Methods Used to Conserve Cannon from Blackbeard’s Flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge (1718) (2017)
The conservation cleaning of concreted marine-archaeological cannon is a complex and multidimensional problem. At present, archaeologists have uncovered 30 cannon amongst the shipwreck remains of Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR). Currently, the QAR Conservation Laboratory holds 18 of these cannon in various stages of conservation. This places the QAR Lab in a unique position to develop practical treatment solutions for such a large collection of submerged artillery. Various...
Cleaning Up "A Blot On Civilization": Examining Archaeological Evidence Of The Medical And Scientific Regulation Of Midwifery During The Progressive Era (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Bodies and Persons: Health and Medicine in Historic Social Context" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Our dominant historical narrative teaches us that the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a period of sweeping reform that resulted in universal improvements to the well-being of people in the United States. Archaeological evidence has the potential to bring to light...