United States of America (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (3,817 Records)
The town of Concord, Massachusetts played a critical role in the American Revolutionary War and will forever be linked to this momentous military conflict. While this connection is understandable, Concord has a rich history of indigenous, European, and American life dating back thousands of years. The McGrath Farm site is an excellent example of this complicated and storied past. Once a portion of a farm owned by prominent Revolutionary War figure Col. James Barrett, the McGrath Farm reflects...
Archaeology in Real-time: The Use of Social Media as Part of the Excavation of Anderson’s Blacksmith Shop and Public Armoury (2013)
Web 2.0 technologies can provide the public a "behind-the-scenes" look at archaeological excavations, thereby engaging them as the research is happening, not merely after the fact. Since 2010, archaeological research has been ongoing at Anderson’s Blacksmith Shop and Public Armoury in Williamsburg as part of a project to reconstruct the site. The archaeological investigations have been featured regularly on both a webcam and reconstruction blog. The "roving" webcam, which is moved to...
Archaeology in San Antonio: An Auspicious Paradigm for the Protection of Cultural Resources (2016)
The City of San Antonio’s Unified Development Code (UDC) contains some of the strongest preservation ordinances in the country for the protection of archaeological resources. In accordance with the UDC, the Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) conducts an archaeological review of new development in the city, specifically within one of the city’s 27 local historic districts, locally designated landmark properties, public property, within the river improvement overlay district. Private...
Archaeology In The (Political) Trenches: Lessons From Charm City (2016)
This paper will cover the rise, fall, and current rise of archaeology in Baltimore. "Charm City" serves as a case-study to explore the political, social, and temporal factors that alter the levels of archaeological stewardship at the local goverment level. The establishment of the Baltimore Center for Urban Archaeology in 1983 marked Baltimore as a forerunner in urban public archaeology. This innovative program led excavations that engaged thousands of people until it closed due to city-wide...
Archaeology in the Arboretum: Exploring the Evidence of the Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters Site on Stanford University’s Campus (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Revolutionizing Approaches to Campus History - Campus Archaeology's Role in Telling Their Institutions' Stories" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Stanford’s Arboretum Chinese Labor Quarters (ACLQ) Project seeks to use archaeological evidence, alongside documentary and oral historical data, to better understand the daily lives of the Chinese workers at Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm and, later, at...
Archaeology In The Waters Of The Falls Zone (2016)
Richmond is a Fall Line city. The Falls Zone extends upstream from Tidewater for 7 miles. The second transportation canal in the USA was built to circumvent the falls and to transport international cargo upstream and to transport vital goods downstream for processing. The James River Batteau was invented for riverine transport through the falls. And then there was the activity between the riverbanks. A vibrant multi-racial and multi-ethnic community used the many "rocks, islands and shoals" in...
Archaeology is Appealing: Collaborative Approaches to Foster Public Engagement with the Past (2016)
The technology industry is rapidly transforming the social and physical landscape of San Francisco. While the city’s zeitgeist is orientated toward the future, archaeologists labor to recover and record its vanishing history. The enormous scale of construction has resulted in an unprecedented volume of artifacts and data that all too often languish on shelves and in gray literature. Budget crunches and curation crises have led to cooperation with institutions at the forefront of public...
Archaeology Non-Profits and Community Programs: The Struggle to Keep Archaeology Important in the Eyes of the Public (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Non-Profits and Community Programs: The Struggle to Keep Archaeology Important in the Eyes of the Public" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Community outreach and education is an often overlooked area in the field of archaeology. While cultural resource management and academic archaeology produce large amounts of raw and interpretive data, the dissemination of that data to the public is often over looked....
Archaeology Of "Copper Country's" Underrepresented Communities (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. The Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has a rich history of copper mining with many of its narratives celebrating the capitalists and/or the skilled and "unskilled" immigrant workers who worked in the mining industry. This poster synthesizes the archaeological evidence left behind by communities that...
An Archaeology of (Un)Capital: Hobos, The Great Depression, and a Small Pennsylvania Slate Quarrying Town Called Delta (2018)
Capitalism has always relied on the exploitation of temporary, underpaid laborers. This fact of Capital has never been more clear than during the Great Depression. When faced with joblessness and the loss of their homes, countless persons took to the rails in search of work. These persons found short-term homes in camps near labor centers across the country. Drawing on archaeological, archival, and ethnographic data on a transient laborer camp near Delta, Pennsylvania, we explore the potential...
Archaeology of 17th Century Iberian Shipwrecks: Assessment and Comparison of Excavated,Recorded and Published Hull Remains (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research and On Going Projects at the J Richard Steffy Ship Reconstruction Laboratory" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 17th century Iberian naval heritage has suffered a devastating reality. Out of 55 wrecks around the world that have been identified as Iberian, 37 have either been destroyed, looted, or salvaged by treasure hunters, and just 11 have been the subject of archaeological work. Only the San...
The Archaeology of a Late 17th to early 18th Century Plantation Servant’s Quarter in Burlington County, New Jersey. (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When Restore Lippincott, a very prominent New Jersey Quaker leader, died in 1741, he passed two enslaved people on to a son. The complex documentary history reveals the family engaged in owning black and Native American laborers as well as hiring indentured and seasonal labor. In 2018, excavations at the Restore Lippincott Homestead site (28-Bu-921) examined an out-building that...
The archaeology of a Seattle city block from 1880s squatters, Great Northern Railroad workers, and the establishment of Pike Place Market. (2017)
An inconspicuous city block near today’s Pike Place Market held the remains of a 19th century shantytown, evicted in 1902 to prepare for the Great Northern Railroad tunnel beneath Seattle. Construction monitoring of a modern development yielded the remnants of middens and privies dating as early as the 1880s. Spared from the city’s major regrade projects, photographs, maps, and artifacts demonstrate that this parcel was once part of the dense carpet of "squatter’s cabins" covering the city’s...
An Archaeology of Aesthetics: the Socio-Economic and Ideological Elements of Coffin Plate Selection at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church (2013)
Material shifts among decorative coffin fittings reflect how past populations conceptualized death, memory, and social status. Coffin plates recovered during the excavation of four burial vaults (ca. 1820-1843) associated with the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, New York City, were simple and uniform in design, inscribed only with the names, ages, and death dates of the individuals with whom they were interred. This paper examines the socio-economic and ideological elements that may have...
The Archaeology of an Early Resource-Extraction Industry: The Cod Fishery, 1600-1713 (2016)
As much as popular histories overlook it, the cod fishery of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the first significant numbers of Europeans to North American shores and provided the earliest colonists in the northeast with an economic foundation from which to build new societies. As an industry which was an important staple for two regions the cod fisheries deserve careful study, but it has only been in the last decades that archaeologists and historians have undertaken critical...
The Archaeology of Art in Berlin (2015)
The city of Berlin, Germany is known for its art and for its community of practicing artists, amidst a city described as a living ruin. This paper focuses on the physicality, ephemerality, and durability of the art community and its engagement with the built environment. The physical spaces in Berlin and the artists that occupy those spaces are the focus, particularly in the ways that artists use and reuse of the physical environment of the post-Wall city and the surrounding environs in...
The Archaeology of Asymmetric Warfare in the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, Woodlake Battlefield Minnesota (2018)
Investigation of the patterns of asymmetric warfare at the Wood Lake Battlefield, the location of the last armed conflict between the Oceti Sakowin and the U.S. Military, revealed evidence of tactics used in asymmetric warfare in 1862 Minnesota. Conflict archaeology provides a new way of understanding the complexity of the cultural conflict as it played out in battle. Dakota traditional warfare, which relied on knowledge of the landscape and avoided loss of life, was adapted to fight against the...
An Archaeology of Care in the Bakken Oil Patch (North Dakota, USA) (2017)
The University of North Dakota Man Camp Project has used archaeology to engage seriously the issues of workforce housing and industrial landscapes in the Bakken. Our work proceeds with a focus not on the ebullience (or catastrophe) of the Bakken, but rather on the material culture of housing in a dynamic extractive landscape. We do not advocate, nor do we analyze or make policy recommendations. Our work in the field epitomizes, however, an archaeology of care for the communities in which we...
The Archaeology of Cassipora Creek: Exploratory Investigations of a 17th-Century Jewish Settlement in Suriname (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Contact and Colonialism" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the 17th-century, Jewish migrants from Europe began settling in Suriname, where they were granted unprecedented autonomy in governing their community and openly practicing their religion. In 1665, these Jewish settlers established their first synagogue and cemetery along the Cassipora Creek, which would become the namesake of their...
Archaeology of Chinese Woodchoppers and the Forests of the Lake Tahoe Basin: Exploring the Intersections of Extractive Industries, Transportation, and Labor (2015)
During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Chinese "woodchoppers" lived and worked in the vast forests of the South Lake Tahoe Basin in the eastern Sierra Nevada, near Genoa, Nevada, leaving distinctive archaeological signatures wherever they worked and lived. The laborers in these isolated camps supplied Nevada’s Comstock mines with forest products, as the Comstock had already depleted its own local sources of lumber, approximately 30 miles away. This relatively well-preserved local cultural...
The Archaeology of Citizenship (2013)
This paper examines how a wide variety of communities and individuals have constituted and articulated what it means to be an American using material culture as a medium of social action. I oscillate back and forth from the institutions imparting ideals about American citizenship to the individuals on the receiving end of such ideological instruction. The vantage point historical archaeology affords permits a reading of citizenship that is multiscaler in methodology, nuancing previous studies of...
The Archaeology of Class, Status and Authority Within Mid-19th Century U. S. Army Commissioned Officers: Examples from Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon 1856-1866 (2015)
In 1856 Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins were established to guard the newly established Oregon Coast Reservation. Charged with controlling traffic in and out of the northern part of the reservation these posts served as "post-graduate schools" for several officers who would later become high ranking generals during the American Civil War. During their service these men, often affluent and well educated, held the highest social, economic and military ranks at these frontier military posts. This...
The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America: A Case Study from 18th-century Spanish Texas (2013)
Dress matters. More than purely functional, the color, fabric, and fit of clothing, along with adornments, posture, and manners, convey information on status, gender, bodily health, religious beliefs, and even sexual preferences. Colonial peoples created a language of appearance to express their bodies and identities through unique combinations of locally-made and imported clothing and adornment. In this paper, I discuss the active manipulations and combinations of clothing and adornment in...
The Archaeology of Cowboy Island: The Santa Rosa Historic Archaeology Project (SRHAP) (2016)
This paper presents the findings from the first year of a new historic archaeology research project on Santa Rosa Island, one of the five islands of Channel Islands National Park off the coast of southern California. A new, multi-year project dedicated to recording the extant historic structures and sites related to the 19th- and 20th-century ranching complex was started in 2014, instigated by the recent opening of the Santa Rosa Island Research Station. Since May 2014, four CSU Channel Islands...
The Archaeology of Enslaved Labor: Identifying Work and Domestic Spaces in the South Yard (2016)
While the domestic lives of enslaved families and communities are a critical element of understanding enslaved life, the majority of each day was spent carrying out work for their masters. Recent excavations at Montpelier have begun to examine structures related to the work of James Madison's domestic slaves. These excavations include work on the extant kitchen and two smokehouses, buildings clearly designed for the support of the Montpelier Mansion. However, the proximity of these structures to...