United States of America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley S McCuistion.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Before, After, and In Between: Archaeological Approaches to Places (through/in) Time" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The production of black powder has driven some of the most significant events and industrial advancements in American history, yet research on the subject remains limited. The DuPont Powder Mill in Fayette County, Pennsylvania provides valuable insight into the history of the black powder...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evelyn Pickering.

The Blackfeet Reservation in northwestern Montana was established in 1855 and contains six river basins. Beginning in the early 1900s, plans for Blackfeet Irrigation Projects were developed. It was estimated that 111,000 acres of the 1.5 million acres reservation would be irrigable. From 1908 to 1920, the Bureau of Reclamation constructed a network of water works; including canals, laterals, reservoirs, and dams across six irrigation districts. Through the lens of materiality as manifested in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamra Walter.

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. The destruction of Mission San Sabá in 1757 by the Comanche and their allies marked a shift in the Texas Mission System. The attack and subsequent deaths of several soldiers and two priests foreshadowed the beginning of the end of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Willie Graham.

Jay Winston Johns restored a small house at Ash Lawn-Highland in the 1930s and created a shrine to James Monroe, the assumed builder and occupant. Now a museum house owned and run by the College of William and Mary, it seemed prudent to determine if the house was actually that which Monroe slept in. If not, the consequence would be profound for the College. The building’s dimensions loosely match a wing of the Monroe dwelling described in documents. Despite the association, many features of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelley ScudderTemple. Michael Pateman.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, researchers and educators are all aware of crucial role that archival documents play in the discovery process. Those who work in the Caribbean are painfully aware of the absence of accessible archived documents in many island nations.  During the summer of 2016, through a grant with the British Library Endangered Archives Program (EAP914), the Zemi Foundation began working with the Turks and Caicos National Museum on the development of a National Archives. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly L. Trivelpiece. Chuck Meide.

During the American Revolution, the British occupied Charleston, South Carolina from their victory at the Siege of Charleston in 1780 until they were forced to flee rebel forces at the end of the war in 1782. The evacuation of Charleston was a massive logistical effort by colonial authorities, involving more than 129 ships gathered from throughout the British Empire. Not only British, Provincial, and German troops were evacuated but thousands of Loyalist families and enslaved Africans, who were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara A Deckinga.

In mid-nineteenth century Britain, the dramatic disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his men led to a large-scale search conducted throughout the Arctic by sailing ships and steamers.  The rescue expeditions, conducted over a twelve-year span, highlight the shift from reliance on sail to the prevalence of steam during this period.  HMS Pioneer (formerly the merchant Eider), was built as a topsail schooner with oscillating steam engine, and later outfitted as part of an Arctic squadron.  The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine L Clevenger.

This paper highlights the benefits of utilizing low-cost remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to photograph and record video footage of several shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. Using such methods, data can be used to create photogrammetric models and orthomosaics of wreck sites, which can then facilitate the creation of scaled, two-dimensional digital site plans. In comparing digital site plans to those produced using traditional mapping techniques, it is possible to determine the accuracy of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barry J. Bleichner.

The Sunken Military Craft Act (SMCA) defines vessels covered under the act as any "sunken warship, naval auxiliary, or other vessel that was owned or operated by a government on military noncommercial service when it sank."   While the definition clearly covers most ships commissioned by the U.S. Navy (USN), the status of non-USN vessels under the SMCA is less certain.  This presentation concentrates on the last class of defined vessels by examining the "owned and operated" and "military...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Wagner.

Shoe-box shaped "flatboats" represented the most common vessel type on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from 1770-1900. Although  tens of thousands of these boats were built during this period, by 1915 a historian lamented that "not one of them remains" . In 2002, however, SIU archaeologists documented the remains of  an early 1800s  flatboat wreck found resting on the Illinois shoreline near the abandoned town of "America". Subsequent documentation of the 45 ft long x 12 ft wide wreck provided...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Borgens.

The first half of the 19th-century was a tumultuous period in the Gulf of Mexico as European and regional powers competed for territorial dominance. As immigration into the northern Gulf of Mexico increased, age-old rivalries erupted while new independent nations emerged. In such a climate, maritime supremacy was essential – foreign and local navies representing every major power were present, new and sometimes ad-hoc navies were created, and privateers capitalized on the unrest - often acting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Babits. Peter Norris. Gregory Stratton.

A cannon used by North Carolina Confederates was captured by the Union navy during the Civil War and placed as a trophy in Washington, DC. In 1973, a similar cannon was recovered from the Roanoke River below Fort Branch, a Confederate fortification blocking upstream navigation. The production identification numbers (136, 138) suggested they came from the same shipment. Their initial identification as Blakely rifled cannon is challenged here by connecting the two guns to specifications for cannon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer M Trunzo. Maggie Needham.

Between 1826 and 1955, the Augusta Arsenal operated on the land currently occupied by the Summerville Campus of Augusta University. As a military site, it is easy to conceptualize the Arsenal as a male gendered place and associate it almost exclusively with war-related manufacturing activities. However, most of the artifacts recovered from the Arsenal directly address the domestic lives of the people who lived there. Additionally, many artifacts from the Arsenal speak to presence of the often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helen V. Bouzon. J. Ryan Kennedy.

In this paper we present analysis of faunal remains recovered from a mid-19th century privy at 936 St. Peter Street, an archaeological site in New Orleans’ historic French Quarter. Although the faunal assemblage includes domestic trash related to meals eaten by the site occupants, it is dominated by a tremendous number of caprine cranial elements. These cranial bones show a consistent butchery pattern indicating that site occupants were harvesting caprine brains in large numbers, presumably for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Willard. Dorothy Rowland.

This paper discusses the artifacts found during the 2017 summer field excavation of the Highbourne Cay Shipwreck, excluding any hull remains. The wreck is well-known and located in an area that has a low sediment level, as a result, the artifact assemblage is expected to be small. The artifacts found and being discussed will be those that were not recovered by salvagers in the 1960s, and were not in the section excavated in the 1980s. Although, there is a possibility of duplicates of previous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua T. Harden.

This paper is a preliminary analysis of the artifacts recovered from the Warwick shipwreck. Over the course of three field seasons from 2010 to 2012, numerous artifacts were recovered from the site. Artifact types will be described briefly and a historical context given. Basic groups will be created to categorize the artifacts and will include cargo, armament, and rigging. Statistics will be compiled for each category and for individual artifact types within the groups. The ultimate goal is to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea R. Freeland.

This paper analyzes the salvage of artifacts from Modern Greece, a Civil War blockade-runner off Wilmington, NC. The NC Underwater Archaeology Branch brought up over 10,000 artifacts in 1962-63. Parts of the collection underwent conservation, while others remained in storage at Fort Fisher. Recently, students from ECU completed a re-housing project to allow for identification of conservation targets and prevent degradation. This paper discusses the retrieval and housing as related to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John R. Bratten.

Artifact conservation is a necessary step for most archaeology projects, especially those involving the recovery of objects from underwater sites. In addition to stabilization, laboratory treatment often aids in the interpretations of artifacts.  Based on two decades of laboratory work, this paper will discuss conservation lessons learned in terms of equipment and techniques.  Information will be provided related to the choice of an x-ray machine, the fabrication of electrolysis tanks, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sabrina Ta'ala.

Artifact collection and analysis is a foundation of all archaeological research, and the methods used to record and draw meaning from the material culture we encounter on archaeological sites are generally standardized across subdisciplines.  But field decisions about what to keep, what to disregard, and how to record and quantify it all are invariably informed, to some extent, by our research goals.  When it comes to war-related sites excavated by U.S. Department of Defense teams with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clare M Votaw. Brianna Patterson.

The Guthrie family first came to America from Ireland around 1720 and settled in St. Charles County, Missouri in 1816. The family owned many acres of land, which they passed down through the generations.  Archaeological work on the Guthrie Farmstead commenced due to impending impact on the property for housing development. A cultural resource management company conducted thorough and extensive work on the farmstead, which revealed a homestead site (23SC1041) on the property. The site was a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Swords.

This is an abstract from the "Exploring the Recent Past" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Often historical archaeologists are left with only a few pieces of the historical puzzle of the past.  Using archaeological artifacts, historic advertisements, and news articles- I hope to illuminate part of the history of the Hotel Pend d’Oreille.  The Hotel Pend d’Oreille operated in the early 1900s in the railroad town of Sandpoint, Idaho.  There were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John R. Bratten. Janet R. Lloyd.

  Thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the two shipwrecks associated with Tristán de Luna y Arellano’s 1559 settlement attempt and recently hundreds of artifacts have now been recovered from the associated land site. Even at this early stage in the terrestrial work, we have the unique opportunity to make many interesting comparisons between the two assemblages regarding the relative proportions of different functional categories and the presence/absence of fasteners, armor, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristine Madsen. Elizabeth Harman. Ray von Wandruszka. Chelsea Rose.

Analytical chemistry is a valuable tool in the identification of historical artifacts for which visual inspection is inconclusive. This is often the case with bottles and jars holding unknown materials, especially when the containers themselves provide little or no evidence. Several of the artifacts recovered from the historical Chinese Quarter of Jacksonville, OR, were of this type. They included a variety of medicine bottles and vials with contents that could only be identified through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George W. Calfas.

Collections allow archaeologists and other scholars the opportunity a means to view past lifeways. Those lifeways are connected to past histories that are situated in a time and place. Context is everything! However, what happens when artifacts are lost misplaced, or mis-catalogued? Archaeologists across the globe are working on shoe-string budgets and are being asked to do more with less. Due to these shrinking budgets the collections that we painstakingly curate often are given less care and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke L. Drew.

Historical archaeologists expect to encounter artifacts in the field or lab, but may not anticipate uncovering them in the library. While conducting research on individuals buried in the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery, the author came across a diverse assortment of material culture associated with the coroner’s inquests curated at the Milwaukee County Historical Society Research Library.  This paper will describe the various items uncovered including photographs, clothing samples, personal...