United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
951-975 (3,819 Records)
Historical Archaeology was in its early stages as Diana diZerega Wall and her cohort, lead by Bert Salwen at NYU, began to excavate in New York City. Here I will discuss how the use terms like gender, class, and race were revolutionary at the time and how they have allowed us to investigate further subtleties such as the dialectic relationship between insider and outsider communities. Wall and her cohort have taught us to work with local descendant communities, bridged the gap between academia...
Defining Historical Community Boundaries with GIS: Walla Walla’s Chinatown (2015)
In 2014 Fort Walla Walla Museum performed a cultural resource survey of the City Hall Parking Lot in downtown Walla Walla, Washington. Archival research, namely Sanborn fire insurance maps, revealed this location to be a major locus of activity including a Chinatown from 1888 and up to around 1905. While Sanborn maps indicate an area in which many Overseas and American-born Chinese lived and ran businesses, other sources like city directories and federal census records show Walla Walla's...
Defining Success in Public Archaeology Evaluation (2018)
There are few public archaeology outreach programs around the nation with concise or overarching programming standards and currently minimal data on the effectiveness of these programs (Kirkland & Carr, 2010). As organizations focus on meaningful impact with the public in terms of what are participants’ motivation for attending, perceptions of the programs, and variables affecting their appreciation, and perceptions of archaeology, they can improve their quality. Illustrations from case studies...
Defining the 1722 Presidio de Bexar: A Closer Look at the 2018 Calder Alley Data Recover Investigations, Military Plaza, San Antonio Bexar County, Texas. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plus Ultra: An examination of current research in Spanish Colonial/Iberian Underwater and Terrestrial Archaeology in the Western Hemisphere." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In summer 2018, Raba Kistner Environmental, Inc., conducted archaeological data recovery investigations along San Pedro Creek in San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas. The data recovery investigations focused on the eastern bank of the...
Defying Isolation: Pre-Civil War American Pottery Production and Marketing (2016)
Important to the study of historic pottery is removing notions of contemporary craft and dated research on potters both rural and urban being secluded to local markets. If archaeology is evidence of anything, it is evidence that potters were not isolated, even for the early vestiges of production in America. Kiln sites are also evidence of potters' interests and capability of making large quantities of pottery for a broad market, as well as often making both earthenware and stoneware in one...
The Degradation of Wooden- and Steel-Hulled Shipwrecks in the Marine Environment (2015)
A combination of oceanographic processes continuously interact with exposed shipwreck hull surfaces. Wood degradation primarily occurs when organisms break down cell structures, and marine borers and bacteria are the most common wood degraders found at shipwreck sites. Wood degradation also depends on other factors including the tree species utilized, level of microbial activity, and site-specific environmental conditions. In addition, the corrosion of steel-hulled shipwrecks does not occur...
Degrees of Freedom: Emancipated and Self-Emancipated People in Indiana and Kenya in the 19th Century (2015)
This paper uses two geographically disparate case studies to explore the roles of freedom and coercion in the lives of emancipated and self-emancipated people. Comparative archaeologies of freedom have much to teach us about the robust and enduring legacies of slavery. In mid- to late 19th-century Kenya, runaways (in Swahili, watoro) established independent settlements in the hinterlands after escaping enslavement on the coast. In 1879, hundreds of so-called "Exodusters"— African-American...
The Delfosse-Allard Site: A Middle Historic Occupation in the Potawatomi Refuge on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula (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. During the mid-to-late 17th century, Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula became a refuge for Potawatomi fleeing Iroquois predation. Consequently, sites dating to Middle Historic times should be relatively common on the peninsula. Curiously, this is not the case even though two large scale, systematic surveys have been...
"Delicious Fathers of Abiding Friendship and Fertile Reveries": Tobacco and Alcohol Consumption at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, USA, 1856-1866. (2013)
The presence of beverage alcohol containers and smoking pipes recovered from Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins is undeniable evidence for the consumption of such indulgence items at these two military posts. The historical and archival record is not only laden with evidence of this behavior but also suggests that these forts were punctuated by periods of the institutional acceptance and prohibition concerning the consumption of alcohol. The spatial distribution of the alcohol related artifacts...
Delineating Ancestral Tribal Territories in Western Washington Based on Flawed Interpretations of Historic Records and Archaeology: A Review of Contemporary Practices and Consequences (2015)
Historians and anthropologists have reviewed the history of problems associated with delineating tribes and tribal territories in Western Washington, noting often uncritical acceptance of historic records at face value, such as failure to consider the context, goals, and cultural viewpoints of those generating records. Such problems, unfortunately, persist in contemporary contexts where tribes create fictional histories to accommodate modern political and economic goals. Here I review flawed...
Democracy, Diversity, and Race: Interpreting humanities to the public through context of place at Jamestown (2018)
Jamestown Rediscovery’s museum and exhibits center on archaeological discoveries in and around 1607 James Fort, the first permanent English settlement in the new world. In addition, Jamestown is notable as the meeting place of the first representative government, the arrival of enslaved Africans, and for Virginia Indians. While the locations where these historic events took place do not change, the landscape often does, thus providing challenges to the communication of cultural concepts on the...
Dendrochronology at Ash Lawn-Highland (2016)
Over the last few decades, dendrochronology, or the science of tree-ring dating, has become a widely used tool for dating historic houses. In 2014, a comprehensive dendrochronological study was launched at Ash Lawn-Highland in order to establish a dated framework for the various phases of construction at the main house. This paper discusses the results of that study and its effect on the interpretation of the house and its surrounding landscape.
Dentistry as Social Discourse: Aspects of Oral Health and Consumer Choice using a Bioarchaeological Perspective (2016)
This study examines the presence (or absence) of professional dental restorative work in the form of fillings, crowns, bridges, or even full sets of dentures, using an integrative biocultural approach. The dataset is derived from an intensive survey of historic cemeteries subjected to bioarchaeological analyses, and include differences in geography (urban versus rural), gender, race/ethnicity, age, and commensurate socioeconomic levels. Since restorative dental work was both expensive and...
Depicting the Slow Violence of Colonialism in Rural Yucatán, Mexico (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence helps to explain the impact of colonialism on rural livelihoods in Yucatán, Mexico. However, is a violence framework useful to those who face colonialism’s long-term consequences? This paper considers the resources and tools that residents of a Yucatecan town have at their disposal when advocating for their...
Describing and Attributing Early Oyster Jars (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Oyster jars represent a unique form of ceramic storage vessel that was commonly used in Manhattan to store and transport oysters during the late 18th and early 19th century. In 2018 I initiated a study to better understand this form and attempt to attribute extant jars to specific potters or potteries. The basis of the study was a detailed analysis of physical characteristics for all...
Designing a Collaborative Website for Inter-Site Research: The Colonial Encounters Project (2016)
The Colonial Encounters project is a multi-institution collaboration intended to provide on-line and downloadable access to some 35 important archaeological assemblages from sites in the Potomac River valley dated between 1500 and 1720. Part of a larger project intended to provoke inter-site studies by standardizing and organizing previous archaeological projects, the website described in this paper was designed to deliver site summary documents, historical data, images, and a database...
A Detailed Analysis of the Dentition of Jamestown’s First Settlers (2017)
Archaeologists and an interdisciplinary team of researchers are studying the skull and dentition of a 15-year-old boy (1225B) who appears to have been the victim of a battle with Native Americans during the initial settlement at Jamestown in 1607. Specimens recovered from the boy’s teeth and jaws yield clues about diet and other aspects of daily life in the 17th century.Detailed study of the remains began with the morphological and temporal study of the skull and teeth using Cone-Beam computed...
Detecting Dutchness: Global Identities in the 17th Century Dutch Atlantic (2018)
This paper discusses the development of a Dutch national identity in the 17th century Dutch Republic, as evidenced in both the archaeological and historical records, and how this identity persisted with some variation in the West India Company colonies of New Netherland and St. Eustatius. By the early 1600s, a common Dutch identity rooted in the shared values of pragmatism, cleanliness, self-interest, Calvinist morality tempered by an appreciation for material comforts, and a conviction in the...
Deterioration of Historic Structures on Barbuda, West Indies (2015)
Three and a half decades have passed since the author first observed the historic structures of Barbuda, a low-lying limestone island in the northern Lesser Antilles. Natural and cultural processes, ranging from hurricanes to stone-robbing, have transformed these buildings, resulting in their structural integrity being compromised. In many cases, architectural features that were observed as recently as twenty years ago no longer are extant because of the degree of deterioration. Preserving...
Determining Battle Lines: a pXRF study of lead shot from the Battle of Palo Alto. (2016)
In 2012-2013, the Southeast Archeological Center undertook a project to analyze the chemical composition of the lead shot recovered from their recent archaeological surveys at Palo Alto National Historical Park, site of the first battle of the U.S.-Mexican War. Using a portable x-ray fluorescence machine, 771 lead shot samples were analyzed in order to ascertain whether there was a difference in the chemical makeup between the lead shot that had been previously identified, using traditional...
Determining German Ethnic Identity in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri: Study of the Janis-Ziegler Site (23G272) (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. My Graduate research examined the ways in which German immigrants constructed their ethnic identity in a town dominated by French colonial descendants. The analysis is based on material culture recovered from excavations at the Janis-Ziegler/Green Tree Tavern site (23G272) in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and historical...
Detroit vs. Slow Archaeology: Blight Removal and its Obstacles to Local and Community-based Practices (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. In 2014 one-third of Detroit’s 380,000 parcels were designated as blight. On these vacated lots 40,000 neglected, decaying buildings were slated for demolition. The Detroit Land Bank's demolition campaign, partly financed by federal Hardest Hit Funds, has had disproportionate...
Developing a Geotrail: Utilizing Geocaching and Letterboxing in Public Archaeology (2013)
Geocaching is a world-wide scavenger hunt game where players try to find hidden containers by using GPS coordinates of their location posted online. Activities like geocaching offer organizations a great opportunity to promote cultural resources and provide interpretation to players. In 2011 the Florida Public Archaeology Network created a geocaching trail, or geotrail, highlighting historic and archaeological sites in Northwest Florida as a way to promote heritage tourism in the region....
Developing an Ecological Interpretation of Land Use in Virginia’s Piedmont: The Montpelier Example (2016)
Human Behavioral Ecology (HBE) provides an intriguing opportunity for the interpretation of plantation management strategies. HBE has been applied with some interesting results to interpretations of past human behavior, but many claim it is inappropriate to interpret past life through the application of economic theory developed in the modern era. This approach is also criticized as a reductionist analytical approach based in conservative microeconomic theory. In light of these...
Developing Digital Identity and Student Opportunities in a Public Archaeology Degree Program (2018)
At the beginning of the Masters Program in Public Archaeology (MAPA) at Binghamton University, we worked with the Director to create a digital identity, write a social media strategy, and develop a student blogging group for the program. Student blog posts on contemporary political events and scholarly debates have garnered attention from the archaeological community for the two years since. In this paper, we evaluate the public response to the MAPA blog by analyzing social media posts that link...