North America - Northeast (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (219 Records)
The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) manages over two million acres of state land. Forbes State Forest, located in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, is home to numerous cultural resources, including the Morrow Jones cabin. Given its location on state-owned property, neglect and natural decay are greater threats to this historic house than development, yet DCNR has limited funding and a finite amount of time to devote to such resources. Detailed study of this house...
Agriculture and Inter-village Space in the Ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) World (2015)
Ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) settlement patterns have been commonly presently as a series of well-spaced two acre defended agglutinated villages. Inter-village space was generally viewed as dangerous within a landscape of endemic warfare. Surveys and excavations in the Cayuga heartland (east side of Cayuga Lake) of the Finger Lakes region, central New York, are altering that vision. By at least the 15th century, agricultural complexes and stations were established between villages. These...
An Analysis of Calluna Hill (59-73): Pequot Cultural Entanglement and Complex Consumption During the Pequot War (2017)
This paper includes an overview of the Calluna Hill site (59-73) in Mystic, Connecticut, a 1637 Pequot village burned down immediately after the English siege of Mystic Fort. The site offers the opportunity to explore important methodological and theoretical questions. Here I focus on the village as the location of intense intercultural exchange and cultural entanglement. Calluna Hill offers insights into the complex ways that the Pequot consumed European-made goods and participated in...
An analysis of the Jamestown diet (2017)
Our current knowledge of the historic fort of Jamestown in Virginia has developed through interpretation of the archaeological record and historical documents. The success of all colonies in the New World depended on the integral ability to produce food. Prior to developing a stable food source, the colonists at Jamestown relied heavily on those provisions they brought with them from England. We can learn about these provisions from ship manifests, colonists’ diaries, and inventory lists....
Ancient DNA and Cranial Morphometric Analysis into Ancestry of Five Burials from Colonial Delaware (2015)
Five burials were excavated from a small Colonial cemetery at the Elkins site in New Castle County, Delaware by Hunter Research, Inc. for Delaware DOT. The remains were analyzed for mitochondrial DNA haplogroups in conjunction with a standard skeletal biological assessment. Analysis of the mtDNA demonstrated European maternal lineages for all of the individuals. Additionally, an infant and an elderly male shared a derived haplogroup T haplotype, suggesting a matrilineal relationship between...
And Then Sometimes, The Public Engages You (2015)
At Fort Drum, our responsiveness to public engagement has been a key element in creating scenarios that have benefited not only the program but the installation and the resource itself. In one example, pressure from Range Control and comments from the public resulted in the conversion of an off limits archaeological district into a training asset and further led to the site’s use in global stewardship training. In a second example, a seemingly ordinary visit from a family member of a Soldier...
Anthropogenic Landscapes in Southern New England: An Archaeological Investigation of Farming Practices on an Eighteenth Century Colonial Farmstead in Southeastern Connecticut (2017)
The now-forested New England landscape has been shaped substantially by long-term human activities. Partitioned by thousands of miles of stone walls, the young and dense woodlands visible today are a consequence of intensive clear-cutting and farming activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this study, we apply the theory and method of landscape archaeology to the study of farming practices at an eighteenth century, 49-acre colonial farmstead in southeastern Connecticut. We...
Archaeological Heritage as State Nuisance: Object Lessons From Accidental Burial Discoveries (2015)
State control of archaeology has tended to originate from the agendas of archaeologists - altruistic, capitalistic, and entirely self-serving. This has framed practice as aiding and abetting State processes and societal differentials that play out over land and resource consumption. Despite this, a chronic phenomenon of this process is the need to resolve unmarked burial discoveries. These occurrences are typically achieved within vague regulatory frameworks, and often lack direct State...
Archaeological Histories of Urban Indians and Why They Matter (2016)
Social archaeology today takes research far beyond questions of “subsistence and dating.” It pushes inquiries into historic and recent pasts and is unapologetic in its embrace of anthropologically-informed, hybrid methodologies. Not in the least, it maintains a keen awareness of the role that socially-engaged research can play in the contemporary world. Since the 1990s, multifaceted and collaborative archaeological studies of Native Americans have systematically challenged dominant, and...
Archaeological Project pipeline Chihuahua -Durango " (preliminary results) (2016)
This paper is a preliminary result of the archaeological survey and recording surface of the "Project Pipeline Chihuahua and Durango". The relevance and importance of the identified sites lies in being unique in the area, located in places of possible transit that allowed to humans groups moved from one camp to another camp and one workstation to another, according to the plain and sometimes even stay overnight at the site. The transit zone of small bands of hunter-gatherers has been recognized...
Archaeology of British Military Logistics in the French and Indian War (2017)
The Hudson River in upstate New York formed a strategic military corridor between the North American British and French colonies for centuries. In the 1750s, it was the setting for multiple British expeditions moving north to contest the French coming south out of Lake Champlain and Canada. Because the fighting was seasonal, as were the garrisons of the forts and storage depots, the facilities had to be frequently rebuilt, and the entire supply chain had to be renewed annually to move tons of...
An Archaeology of Illegal Garbage Dumping in the Twenty-First Century (2017)
A boon to the archaeological study of American lifeways in the past and present, the massive assemblages of discarded objects at landfills poignantly speak to an era of unrivaled consumption and waste. Aggregated through municipally sanctioned collection services, these assemblages, however, are rarely representative of the full range of household-level discard behaviors. Illegal dump sites, in contrast, comprise assemblages that cannot be easily or quickly discarded through regular garbage...
The Archaeology of Souls: A Foundation through Systematic Survey of Historic Woodland and Plains Native American Soul Concepts (2016)
The potential for accurately reconstructing prehistoric Woodland and Plains Indian societies’ notions of human soul-like essences using symbolically rich mortuary remains and art can be improved when analogous, comparative ethnohistorical information is collected systematically and with sensitivity to tribal and regional variations. Literature on 49 historic Woodland-Plains tribes produced 643 cases informing on nine selected subjects: number and locations of souls in an individual, number of...
Archaeology Underfoot on College Hill: Education, Outreach, and Historical Archaeology at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) (2015)
Since 2012, a course on the Archaeology of College Hill at Brown University has undertaken a program of research and education – including pedestrian survey, geophysical survey, and excavation – to investigate the historic Quiet Green in the heart of the university campus. This class serves the dual purposes of promoting the material history of Brown during the university’s 250th anniversary celebration and educating undergraduates in the methods, theories, and practices of historical...
Archaic Estuarine Resource Use in the Lower Hudson Valley: New Information from the Old Place Neck Site, Staten Island, New York. (2015)
Models of estuarine resource use in the Lower Hudson Valley, particularly fishing, have typically been based on a limited set of archaeological materials and ethnohistoric information. Key issues include early evidence of estuarine resource use, the range of resources exploited, and their role in settlement and subsistence patterns. Recent investigations at the Old Place Neck Site involved using various residue analyses that contributed important new information beyond what artifacts and...
The Battlefield Archaeology of Domestic Sites: Wartime Production during the Pequot War (1636- 1637) (2016)
The Calluna Hill Site (59-73) is a small Pequot Village burned down by the English allied forces during their withdrawal from the Battle of Mystic Fort. Recent excavations and metal detector surveys indicate the site was occupied for only a few weeks prior to its destruction on May 26, 1637. The site’s setting and faunal assemblage suggests the site was re-located away from the coast in anticipation of an English attack on Pequot territory. The artifact assemblage of re-processed brass and iron...
Battlefields of the Pequot War (1636-1637) (2016)
Conflict archaeology can offer a unique perspective into the nature and evolution of warfare in Native American and Euro-American societies in colonial contexts and how these societies shaped warfare and were in turn shaped by them. The Battlefields of the Pequot War Project, funded by the National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program, seeks to move beyond documentation of battle-related objects associated with Pequot War battlefields and place the conflict in a broader cultural...
A Bayesian Approach to the Paleoindian Colonization of the Northeastern US (2016)
Research on the Paleoindian colonization of the northeastern US suffers from numerous chronological problems. These problems are exacerbated by the use of summed probability distributions, which do not take into account the unique sampling issues and specific probability distributions of individual dates and their particular relationships to archaeological contexts. This paper introduces a Bayesian statistical approach to clarify some of these problems and raise new questions about early...
Bayesian Modelling and Refinement of Iroquoian Regional Settlement Histories (2016)
An oft-cited problem in Iroquoian archaeology is that radiocarbon dating offers weak support for chronological estimates. These concerns focus on short durations of site occupation and multiple intercepts in the radiocarbon calibration curve. This logic has led researchers to rely on relative dating methods such as ceramic seriation—overlooking the assumptions and unverified step-wise logic transfers involved in these methods. Refinement in laboratory procedures and the application of Bayesian...
Being and Becoming in Huron-Wendat Worlds (2016)
Seventeenth century accounts of Huron-Wendat life, like those of myriad other Eastern Woodlands groups, underscore a relational ontology wherein the media which separate humans from non-humans, as well as the organic from the inorganic, is principally porous and naturally given to communion. These same accounts, however, also suggest that the Huron-Wendat possessed an intricate soul schema that, while variegated and capable of metamorphosis, was nonetheless primary and essentialist in nature. In...
Beyond Fort Walls: Geophysical and Archaeological Investigations of Fort Haldimand, Carleton Island, New York (2016)
During the American Revolutionary War, Carleton Island was home to the British naval base Fort Haldimand. Located on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, the base served as an important connection between Québec and British interior forts. The Thousand Island Land Trust protects Fort Haldimand, but the area immediately outside the fort is privately owned. During June 2015, archaeologists from Indiana University of Pennsylvania implemented a variety of geophysical and archaeological...
Binghamton University and the NYSDOT: A Focus on Research and Outreach (2016)
For over 40 years, the Public Archaeology Facility, Binghamton University (SUNY) has benefited from an uninterrupted relationship with the New York Department of Transportation through projects administered by the NYS Education Department & New York State Museum. This started out as a non-competitive partnership with some SUNY campuses but became a competitive bidding situation about 20 years ago. The underlying principles of the contract call for a research focus that makes archaeological...
Bone versus Stone Arrows and the Movement of the St. Lawence Iroquoians (2016)
In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries St. Lawrence Iroquoian populations gradually decline and disappear from their homeland at the same period that the Wendat and Iroquois Confederacies are evolving. One of the most striking differences between St. Lawrence Iroquoian assemblages and those of surrounding groups is the general absence of stone arrow points on the former. This paper considers the advantages and disadvantages of bone or antler versus stone tipped arrows. We argue that...
Bottom-Up Heritage Management in Ithaca, New York: Community Initiatives and Collaborations with University Archaeologists (2015)
Discovering Enfield Falls is dramatically different from academic managed heritage projects that are top-down projects initiated by archaeologists. In our project, the heritage planning originated with stakeholders who were determine to preserve the history of a community that was demolished in the early twentieth century to create a state park. This 19th century hamlet was both a commercial center for farmers and a regional scenic tourist destination. The stakeholders did not need...
Campfire Stories: Defining Features at the Susquetonscut Brook Site 11 in Eastern Connecticut (2017)
The Susquetonscut Brook Site 11 (SB-11) is a Native American campsite occupied primarily during the Archaic Period and again briefly in the Woodland Period. Data recovery excavations conducted by The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. (PAL) in the summer of 2015 resulted in the recovery of thousands of artifacts and the exposure of 14 cultural features, including post-molds, pit features, fire hearths, and a roasting platform. Feature definition was attained through a variety of analyses,...