North America - Northeast (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (219 Records)
Archaeological and Historical Services Inc. recently excavated a rich Snook Kill phase site in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Dated features and diagnostic tools from the site indicate a radiocarbon age of 3500 years ago. Artifacts were recovered beneath a horizon of peat that had formed over the past 1500 years in this near-coastal setting. The strikingly pristine site documents a complete lithic artifact production, use and discard sequence, from the reduction of rhyolite cobbles into carefully...
A Social Perspective on Wood Remains: Rural Colonisation and Urban Growth in the Saint Lawrence Valley, 1600-1900 AD (2017)
Dendrochronology is widely used as a dating tool in archaeology. In North America, the wood record is especially associated with colonial dynamics when farmlands were cleared, rural buildings were erected and young cities drew upon timber resources from expanding hinterlands. In the Saint Lawrence Valley, colonisation began in the early seventeenth century and developed in waves, as prime agricultural lands were saturated and became launching pads for secondary colonisation into marginal regions...
A Social Perspective on Wood Remains: Rural Colonisation and Urban Growth in the Saint Lawrence Valley, 1600-1900 AD (2017)
Dendrochronology is widely used as a dating tool in archaeology. In North America, the wood record is especially associated with colonial dynamics when farmlands were cleared, rural buildings were erected and young cities drew upon timber resources from expanding hinterlands. In the Saint Lawrence Valley, colonisation began in the early seventeenth century and developed in waves, as prime agricultural lands were saturated and became launching pads for secondary colonisation into marginal regions...
Space and Architecture: Historical Archaeology at the Eastern Pequot reservation (2016)
Prior to the devastating Pequot War of 1636, the Pequot people of modern day Connecticut were one unified nation. As a result of the conflict, there now exist two separate cultural groups, the Mashantucket Pequot and the Eastern Pequot. They experienced a trajectory throughout history that remained mostly parallel until modern times. My research examines some of their historic variations, particularly their architectural practices, and the timing of their transition to English-style framed...
The Spore Conundrum: Does a Dung Fungus Decline Signal Humans’ Arrival in the Eastern US? (2015)
In pond sediments in Ohio, Indiana, and New York, Sporormiella (dung-fungus) spore declines at ca. 14,000 cal BP are followed first by charcoal particle peaks, and then dramatic shifts in tree pollen percentages. This sequence has been interpreted as the outcome of initial human predation on megafauna. New dates push "classic" Clovis back to ca. 13,500 cal BP, but this still leaves a 500-yr gap between the ecological signals and the earliest Paleoindian artifacts. How can this gap be...
Stable isotope evidence for precontact Amerindian diet in Newfoundland, Canada (2016)
For a millennium, the island of Newfoundland was home to two cultures: the Palaeoeskimo, and the Amerindians who later became known historically as the Beothuk. Evidence from site distribution patterns suggests that each culture negotiated the shared space by utilizing different resources. However, after 1500 years BP, the cultural dynamics of the island began to shift as a period of climate warming altered the resources that were available on the outer coast. While the Palaeoeskimo may have...
Staging Consumption: The Archaeology of Florida Tourism (2016)
This presentation will provide a review of current archaeological studies of historic resort and hotel sites in Florida. I will discuss insights yielded from these studies that informs on commodities acquisitions, consumption, and social status through the framework of anthropological and sociological perspectives of leisure and tourism. The major research goal of this project is to ascertain the cultural, sociological, and economic forces that have shaped Florida tourism through time by...
Stone Tool-making at Two Sixteenth Century Cayuga Sites (2015)
Cowan’s (1999, 2003) research on small Iroquoian camp sites in New York State demonstrated that analyses of stone tools and debitage assemblages enable archaeologists to investigate which type of stone tool industry was emphasized at a site (core flaking versus biface reduction) and to draw inferences about site function. This study illustrates the broader applicability of Cowan’s approach for conducting micro-scalar analyses of technological organization. We compared debitage assemblages...
Stories from North of Main: Neighborhood Heritage Story Mapping (2017)
This paper discusses the use of GIS Story Map applications for discerning shared values and community capacity building in a small, diverse, deindustrialized urban neighborhood in Binghamton, New York. Most local sustainability and revitalization projects focus on homogeneous communities that have shared stories and understandings about the neighborhood’s past and present. But in the economically marginalized and diverse neighborhoods of America’s smaller rust belt cities, narratives of decline...
Strontium and oxygen isotope evidence for Maritime Archaic mobility patterns at the site of Port au Choix-3, Newfoundland (2017)
Recent archaeological and biomolecular investigations of the burial assemblage from the Maritime Archaic cemetery at Port au Choix-3, Newfoundland, reveal intriguing patterns of variability. New bone collagen stable isotope evidence supports significant dietary variation between individuals, and artifact-based analyses appear to indicate the site functioned as a meeting ground for different Maritime Archaic ethnic groups from within Newfoundland and the Atlantic region. When combined with...
Studying Debitage, Analyzing Behavior (2015)
There is little evidence to support widespread changes in subsistence and settlement practices from the Late Archaic through the Mid-Late Woodland in Eastern New York. Analysis of lithic assemblages from a multitude of sites suggests a gradual settling in of past populations. Specifically, it does not appear that methods of procurement, manufacture, or use differed in any significant way. The question, then, is what forces were driving those cultural changes apparent throughout the Eastern...
Style Versus Occupation II: A Broader View of the Narrow Stemmed Tradition in Southern New England (2017)
Artifact types are often used as markers of social boundedness or "ethnicity" although the relationship between typology and culture remains a very complex and poorly understood issue. Projectile points from the Narrow-stemmed Tradition (also called the Small Stemmed Tradition) are ubiquitous in southern New England and can rarely be attributed to a single component Native American archaeological site. Attempts have been made to seriate this style of point with varying success, given its style...
Susquetonscut Brook 5 Site: Residential Base Camp in an Upland Interior Setting? (2016)
The Susquetonscut Brook 5 Site located in Lebanon, Connecticut consists of Archaic to Woodland Period deposits within an upland interior setting. Such upland interior sites are typically associated with small campsites of a temporary nature. Data recovery excavations at the site in 2015 revealed numerous, large and complex features, such as storage pits, postmolds, and roasting pits, that are more typically associated with larger, more residential campsites located within lower-lying floodplain...
Tackling Ethnicity from Anthropological, Archaeological, and Indigenous Perspectives: The Case of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians (2016)
Cultural anthropologists’ and archaeologists’ interest in theorizing identity has a long history. Anthropologists have generally focused on emic perspectives to gain insight into contemporary individual and group identity, while archaeologists have relied mainly on material culture to discern identity in the past, with relatively little attention paid to the views of contemporary peoples. When archaeological interpretations conflict with those of contemporary peoples, serious concerns arise....
Taking and Giving: Finding the Balance in Community Archaeology (2015)
One of archaeology’s seemingly inescapable practices is the act of taking, and it remains one of the hardest aspects to manage for communities that work with archaeologists because of its appropriative nature and colonial legacies. A way to balance this "taking" is to emphasize at least as much "giving" in the process, which requires a level of sharing and dialogue that are only now becoming part of archaeologists’ conceptual and methodological toolkits. This paper considers these issues in the...
Taking Archaeology to Heart: Reflections on Passions and Politics (2017)
Talking about "heart-centered archaeology" is not necessarily easy, but it is easily necessary. Those of us who work with descendant communities know the power of the personal in making those projects possible, desirable, and enjoyable. As analytical as we must be, we must also have open hearts to those who experience the past(s) in more palpable, less academic, more heart-centered ways already. These can be profoundly transformative and positive, as they require more emotional and personal...
Taking Their Water for Our City: Archaeology and Water Rights in New York and Beyond (2016)
Water rights is a social issue of growing importance. Recently, the United Nations declared access to clean drinking water to be a basic human right. Yet financial groups are predicting that water is the next major commodity, to be bought and sold like oil. What few are talking about is the long history of water flowing towards political and social centers, and away from rural populations. As Leith Mullings stated in her presidential address, anthropology pays attention to not only that which is...
Testing the effectiveness of 2D morphometric data for identifying species in Galliformes (2017)
Galliformes, or game birds, are one group of birds commonly utilized by prehistoric people that are particularly difficult to classify beyond family. In addition, bird bone assemblages are often fragmentary and poorly preserved, making avifauna notoriously difficult to identify to species, even by trained specialists. Non-identified bones lead to a decrease in information available about taxa present at the site, hunting preferences of the site inhabitants, environmental conditions, and other...
A theory on cultural inversion: resistance, resilience and agency within the archaeology of colonialism (2016)
Colonial studies have progressed exponentially in archaeology, but such studies can suffer from contextual limitations. Analyzing colonialism in many different social contexts adds to its potential as a lens through which to study the archaeological record. Diverse applicability would allow archaeologists an opportunity to make sense of colonialism’s profuse influence on the people it affects. Throughout the 19th-century, the Nipmuc from eastern Massachusetts faced many of the common processes...
Think Small: What charcoal fragments and tiny sites teach us about indigenous land modifications and farming around Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. (2015)
Are eye-witness descriptions in 1524 of extensive farming and intensive habitat modifications around Narragansett Bay by indigenous people just fantasies? Pollen evidence in now urban industrial Rhode Island remains unconvincing. To date, less than a dozen pre-Contact Rhode Island sites containing Zea maize have been found. This paper examines ongoing experiments with charcoal, particularly from RI 1898 – a tiny intact spot with a remarkably preserved stone tool manufacturing assemblage on...
The Thirty-Three Year History of Cultural Resource Management at the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation (2016)
The Mashantucket Pequot Reservation is today one of the best-researched heritage landscapes in New England. Cooperation between the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and UConn archaeologists has been positive and ongoing since the early 1980s. Initial heritage management work on the Reservation focused on ethnohistorical research and the documentation of Pequot homesteads as well as important off-reservation historical sites such as Mystic Fort. Archaeological work was largely limited to extensive...
This Way to the Sacrificial Table: The Mystification of the Mundane in the Archaeological Record (2017)
In the Martian Chronicles, author Ray Bradbury describes the ruins of an ancient Martian city in this way: "Perfect, faultless, in ruins, yes, but perfect, nonetheless." The notion that archaeological sites are perfect, precisely because of an appearance of decay, resides at the center of a worldview in which the archaeological record is inherently mysterious, removed from any connection to the mundane world of hunting camps, farmsteads, and industrial complexes of ordinary human beings. In this...
Tool manufacture and bone breakage patterns at a Haudenosaunee site in New York (2016)
The Myers Farm site is located on a hill ten miles east of Cayuga Lake, central New York. It is a small mid-15th century Cayuga farmstead and feasting ground identified by a midden approximately ten meters in diameter. A large roasting pit, hearth features, and storage pits contained animal bone, including worked tools and food debris. This paper describes a preliminary faunal analysis of selected features. Recovered fauna include a generous range of local species, including mammals, birds,...
Toponymical indices to the past landscape and resource extraction along the Wolastoq and its environs (2017)
Previous studies in New Brunswick have described traditional terminology and place-names (Blair, nd.; Ganong 1896; Rayburn 1975) as well as traditional lifeways and practice (Perley et al. 2000) along the Saint John River, or, the Wolastoq. These studies recognize the intimate relationship between the river and its people, and the language that describes the connection to the river and its dynamic landscape. Certainly, this applies to a perception of resource locales along the river, from where...
Toward a Theory of Dispersal as an Adaptive Strategy: Adoption, Migration, and Cultural Survival in the Archaeological Record (2015)
Dispersal of human populations is often perceived as synonymous with abandonment and collapse. Alternatively, cross-cultural studies of historic and contemporary dispersal suggest it should instead be considered a strategic adaptation to external pressures. I argue that strategic dispersal represents a conscious, purposeful transformation of social and cultural structures in the face of bifurcation, resulting in cultural continuity and the selective adoption of external cultural traits and...