North America - Mid-Atlantic (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Full-Text Sara Rivers Cofield. Jodi Reeves Eyre.

The Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab) and the Regional Archaeological Curation Laboratory (RACF) in Ft. Lee, Virginia are archaeological repositories that meet high professional standards for the care of artifacts and paper records. Unfortunately, neither facility has the expert technical staff and specialized infrastructure necessary to qualify as permanent repositories for digital records, despite the exponential rise in site documentation that exists in digital form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sawyer. Katelyn Coughlan.

Establishing intra-and inter-site chronologies for the dwellings and workshops at Monticello’s Mulberry Row has been a focus of study for decades. While broad temporal outlines are clear, we argue here that further progress depends on gaining better analytical control of a key issue: time averaging of archaeological assemblages. In this poster, we present our iterative process to develop methods to estimate variation in time averaging between these assemblages at different levels of aggregation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Beggen. Joseph A. M. Gingerich.

Taphonomic processes such as trampling can have a major impact on the interpretation of site formation, artifact distribution, and use-wear analyses. This poster presents a preliminary spatial and lithic analysis of artifacts from the Shawnee-Minisink Paleoindian site in Pennsylvania, USA. Using a high resolution point-provenience database of Paleoindian artifacts, possible trampling damage is mapped and analyzed in order to distinguish if high foot traffic areas exist at Shawnee-Minisink, such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theresa Kintz.

In this paper I offer personal reflections on my experiences as an anarchist archaeologist. I’ll be addressing how my perspective has shaped my interpretation of material culture and landscape; describe my experiences as a CRM field archaeologist organizing to resist exploitation, lobbying for a more egalitarian profession and recognition of our unique form of archaeological knowledge; analyze the eco-anarchist movement’s appropriation of anthropological and archaeological data and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Carl DeMuth.

This paper reviews recent archaeological research at Tams, WV – a former coal company town – which revealed a significant number of children's toys such as marbles and dolls/figurines. Artifacts such as these can offer important insights into the lives of children in company towns, an aspect that is often overlooked in labor archaeology. In terms of community involvement, these artifacts are both important as well as interesting. Most former residents interested in the project only lived in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberlee Moran.

In 2004 the first symposium dedicated to forensic archaeology was organized at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting. At that time, forensic archaeology was struggling to be defined within the archaeological community and was mostly non-existent to forensic practitioners in the USA. The events of 9/11, several domestic high profile mass casualty events, missing persons and some homicide investigations began a gradual momentum towards the recognition of archaeology’s use within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darrin Lowery.

Understanding the magnitude of sea level rise over the past century is a hot topic in the Chesapeake Bay region. The research presented in this paper combines 20th-century aerial imagery, 19th-century land use data, and geoarchaeological information associated with various coastal archaeological sites to provide a high-resolution marine transgression record spanning the past two centuries. Tide gauge models have suggested that there has been ~1 foot (30cm) to ~1.5 feet (49cm) of sea level rise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Turck. Joseph Schuldenrein.

In dynamic environmental settings, various ecological processes can affect the landscape, the people living on those landscapes, and the subsequent archaeological record. Further confounding the situation is human-induced landscape change, which evidence indicates has occurred recently, historically, and prehistorically. Our efforts at two riverine locations in northern and central New Jersey reveal the efficacy of a geoarchaeological approach to understanding the archaeological record. Through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Durante.

The Johnston site (36In002), in Blairsville, Pa, is the type site for the Johnston Phase of the Monongahela Tradition. This site was first discovered by Ralph Solecki during the River Basin Surveys carried out in preparation for flooding of the Conemaugh River Lake. Following its discovery the site was partially excavated in the 1950’s by Don Dragoo for the Carnegie Museum. The Johnston site has been revisited by archaeologists from Indiana University of Pennsylvania; however, little...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Lattanzi.

One cannot truly "source" the raw material of an artifact back to its geologic origin. One can chemically characterize an artifact's raw materia,l to a degree, to make an interpretation as to its likeliest point of origin. As we are dealing with a completely heterogeneous material - copper - archaeologists can only best guess the likely geologic source for the cultural artifacts they are testing. The chemical differentiation of distinct geologic deposits of native copper has been well...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nichole Keener.

Of the three basic necessities humans need to survive – food, clothing, and shelter – clothing is often underrepresented archaeologically as fibers do not typically survive due to environmental challenges. Although often under-analyzed, these small commonly-found artifacts are valuable parts of the archaeological record. Through decorative and utilitarian buttons and fasteners, patterns can be identified to address questions regarding daily life during an occupation of a site. Patterns in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Horton.

Hatteras island is one of the few stable landforms on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and archaeological survey and excavation over many years has located numerous sites particularly from the Middle and Late Woodland. Our research which commenced in 2009, and has continued annually since then, has added to this archaeological record, though a community based approach, that has enabled us to work on private property and conduct over 80 test pits and excavations. The results show that Hatteras...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Scholl.

Carole L. Crumley has long advocated broadly inclusive studies that reach across disciplines to bring together social and environmental data from multiple geographic and temporal scales in order to draw lessons from the past. This work reports the use of those approaches to map the changes in colonial American agriculture and on-going research into 19th century westward expansion. What is becoming clear is that U.S. has a long-term trajectory which continues to move away from the sustaining...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cheryl Frankum.

Can XRF accurately detect the chemical composition of ceramics using non-destructive sample preparation techniques? This study looks at the reliability of the Innov-X Delta XRF unit in detecting the chemical composition of earthenware ceramics through three different sample preparation methods. While there are growing interests in using XRF analysis for various ceramic studies, this research question examines whether different testing strategies will produce different results. This experiment...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mia Carey.

Millennials are hailed as one of the most racially progressive generations in America’s history. African Americans and other people of color are becoming consciously aware of the challenges that they face in navigating America as a minority. White millennials, who describe themselves as being racially progressive, typically lack awareness or understanding of discrimination and racism and use colorblindness as a way of coping with fear and ignorance. Their colorblindness invalidates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Bloch. Erik Bolling.

Lead glazing was a significant technological innovation to pottery production, increasing the strength and imperviousness of earthenwares. These ceramics are common components of archaeological assemblages in many parts of the world. They are known to have traveled long distances, thus determining their provenience has great interpretive potential. While studies analyzing archaeological ceramics with non-destructive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) have multiplied rapidly in recent years,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Schwartz.

What can intersectionality offer to a study of an all-male antebellum dormitory? While this approach has typically been used to identify and combat race- and gender-based discrimination, this paper argues that intersectional theory can also illuminate subtle class- and age-based inequalities among historic individuals of the same gender and race. Archaeological investigation of Graham Hall, a combined dormitory/classroom space/chapel located on the campus of Washington and Lee University in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

Archaeology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland began looking for the former homestead of West Ashcom in the Spring of 2012. West Ashcom was established on the south bank of the Patuxent River in what is now St. Mary’s County, MD by John Ashcom in 1651. At its height in the early 18th century it contained a manor house, kitchen, dairy, orchard, port, haberdashery, and various other barns and dependencies. Using traditional sources such as archives and methods like pedestrian surveys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Lee.

This presentation explores intersectionality in the context of health consumerism in antebellum central Virginia. Health consumerism incorporates the modern sense of patients’ involvement in their own health care decisions and the degree of access enslaved African Americans had to resources that shaped their health and well-being experiences. To emphasize the multilayered nature of health and illness, this analysis engages Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes "three bodies model." The three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Galke.

During the antebellum period the town of Manassas, Virginia, was composed of free whites, and both free and enslaved black people. In this small community material culture played a crucial role in broadcasting status amongst its anxious constituents. They lived in an atmosphere where “whiteness” connoted cleanliness, order, freedom, and privilege. An individual’s proximity to, or distance from, whiteness yielded either powerful benefits or humiliating consequences. This was a community in which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Atkins Spivey.

Colonoware is an important object of the colonial era that continues to invoke debate surrounding the ethnic identity of its makers. However, attempts to tie an “exact” ethnicity to colonoware production dismiss the deep structure of social processes tied to these objects created, used, and sold by both enslaved African American and Indigenous communities. This paper combines archaeological, oral history and documentary research conducted on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation located in tidewater...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Wholey.

In the Mid-Atlantic, steatite outcrops within the eastern talc belt, which runs from Alabama, through New England to Labrador. It is a porous, carvable stone with a mineralogical and chemical makeup that inhibits soil formation, resulting in scrub or barren landscapes that host rare grasses and wildflowers. In their natural state, these would be striking landscape features. While an array of items, such as plummets, bannerstones and pipes, were produced from steatite throughout pre-colonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Reeder-Myers.

Accurate estimates of past shoreline locations are important for archaeologist interested in the complex relationships between sea level rise and human ecology. However, shoreline reconstructions require careful consideration of highly variable eustatic, isostatic, tectonic, and sedimentary processes. In the Chesapeake Bay, records from marsh cores have produced high resolution models of relative sea level rise since the Bay first emerged between 8000-7000 BP, influenced by both global sea level...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherilyn Gilligan.

Moravian missionaries in the New World built towns in close proximity to Native American village sites in order to gain and house new converts. Although these Moravian town sites have received some archaeological attention, faunal remains have seldom been studied. A comparative faunal analysis between frontier-settled Moravian mission towns during the mid to late 18th century may reveal important information about the use of animals among the diverse ethnic groups inhabiting Moravian towns....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Boyd. Donna Boyd.

In 2015, the Physical Anthropology section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) officially became the "Anthropology" section of AAFS. This reflected not simply a name change, but an acknowledgement of the importance of archaeology to forensic anthropology and forensic science. This has heralded a new age of forensic anthropology based on increasing reliance on archaeological methods and theoretical principles. The interaction between forensic archaeology, anthropology, and...