North America - Mid-Atlantic (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (86 Records)
This paper uses historical and archaeological evidence to which consumer goods were available to enslaved men and women in nineteenth century Virginia. At the scale of local markets and stores, supply and variable adherence to laws constrained which goods were available to slaves who were able to purchase or trade for them. By comparing purchases of enslaved African Americans with purchases of whites at the same store, I assess which goods were accessible to each group. I use archaeological data...
The Old World a Bridge to the New: Daniel Gookin Jr.’s Intercolonial and Transatlantic Connections in the Seventeenth Century. (2016)
Daniel Gookin Jr. is perhaps one of the better-known figures in colonial Massachusetts history, as an important civil servant and military leader. The third son of an English planter from Kent who settled in County Cork during the second phase of the Munster Plantation in 1611, Gookin Jr. was born in Ireland, and became involved in his father's plantation projects in Virginia, migrating to North America in 1625. This paper will outline the archaeological biography of Daniel Gookin Jr. and the...
The Other 99%: Archaeological Collections, Research, and the New Jersey State Museum (2016)
Since 2001, the Bureau of Archaeology & Ethnography began accepting interns and opened its collections to scholars and professionals conducting research. Numerous undergraduate and graduate students have completed both senior honor theses, MAs and PhDs working with the over 2.5 million objects in our collections. Numerous professionals have utilized the collections for their ongoing research interests. The Bureau itself has had to build this program from the gound up along side these...
Our Collections at Risk: Climate Change Threats to NPS Museum Property (2017)
Over the past 15 years NPS Collections from Texas to Maine have faced devastating impacts from hurricanes and other climate related events. During this time, Hurricanes such as Isabel, Ivan, Katrina and Sandy have wrought havoc on NPS museum collections. Although not subjected to direct impacts from these recent hurricanes, National Capital Region (NCR) parks have been heavily damaged by their collateral impacts, typically in the form of flooding along the Potomac Valley. It is simply a matter...
Oxen at Oxon Hill Manor: Identifying Draught Cattle from the Archaeological Record of Colonial Maryland (2015)
The methodologies for identifying and analyzing draught cattle from the archaeological record have been developed and refined over the past twenty years. However, little research has been done which applies these methodologies to faunal assemblages from the New World. This research identifies possible draught cattle from an eighteenth-century well and a possible smokehouse at Oxon Hill Manor in Prince George’s County, Maryland, using pathological and osteometric analyses. Analysis of pathologies...
Paleoindian Archaeology in the Delaware Valley: Insights from the Snyder Site Complex in New Jersey (2016)
The Snyder Site Complex consists of multicomponent prehistoric localities situated on landscapes adjacent to the Delaware River in the river basin's mid-section. Over 30 fluted Paleoindian projectile points or bifaces have been reported from plowed/surface and stratified contexts. This number of diagnostic artifacts is relatively unusual in the context of what is known about other Paleoindian sites in the Delaware River Basin. The Snyder Complex is among the approximately 110 Paleoindian sites...
Patterns of Lithic Raw Material Exploitation and Use in Western Pennsylvania (2015)
During the Late Prehistoric period, at least four major lithic raw material types were used for the manufacture of a limited variety of tool types. The major tool forms were small triangular projectile points and flake tools. The major raw material types used in this region include Onondaga, Loyalhanna, and Shriver cherts and Vanport Siliceous Shale. Workshops and quarries have been identified have been identified and are found on the north, south, east and west sides of this region. An analysis...
The PHAST Way: The PennDOT Highway Archaeological Survey Team (2016)
Since 2010, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) have cooperated in the implementation of the PHAST program. PHAST is both a small, in-house transportation archaeology program and a professional development-apprenticeship program. The team is supervised by a PennDOT staff archaeologist and is composed of a graduate student Field Director and student intern field technicians. PHAST is deployed on small to mid-sized highway...
Pilgrimage, Ancestors, and Commemoration in Postcolonial Indigenous Homelands (2016)
In this paper we consider ritual practices at indigenous places in the Chesapeake that are traditionally described as ‘abandoned.’ Our study involves four sites in Virginia regarded as sacred by past and contemporary Monacan and Powhatan people. From a strictly non-indigenous perspective each of these places has been viewed as abandoned at or just past the moment of European colonization. Instead, we find evidence that these locations remained active as part of indigenous homelands. The...
Prehistoric Maritime Cultural Landscapes in the New York Bight (2016)
The study of prehistoric maritime cultural landscapes (or seascapes) in the broadest sense seeks to explore the relationship between people and the water. If we are to reconstruct the nature of this relationship over time along the Atlantic coast of North America, however, we must account for environmental changes, particularly sea level rise and related shifts in ecological communities and habitats on the shore and at sea. This paper examines the coastal archaeology of the New York Bight (the...
Provenance Analysis of Pottery Sherds from an Early-19th Century Milling Village in Northeast Pennsylvania (2017)
As a cost-effective and non-destructive method for multi-element analysis, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) has the potential for broad archaeological application. Here, we employ pXRF for the compositional analysis of pottery sherds collected from Stoddartsville, an early-19th century milling village built along the upper Lehigh River in northeast Pennsylvania. Our analysis demonstrates that we can use compositional data to source pottery sherds to regional potteries, documenting...
Put ‘em to Work! The Transition from the Classroom to the Field. (2015)
Many students eager to begin a career in the forensic sciences have never been on a crime scene and it is even more unlikely that they have ever had the opportunity to process one. This paper details the unusual circumstances that enabled Towson University students to partner with law enforcement and work on both active and cold cases that have necessitated the search for human remains and associated evidence. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American...
Reexamination of a Small Prehistoric Site in Southeastern Virginia (2017)
Fort Eustis, a small military installation in southeastern Virginia, has over one hundred sites containing prehistoric components, most of which yielded no diagnostic artifacts when identified at the survey level. These sites were subsequently labeled as camps of indeterminate time period and assumed to have little research potential. A recent reinvestigation of one of these supposedly insignificant sites yielded a large quantity of debitage, along with ceramic sherds, concentrated within a very...
Reexamining the Dating and Importance of Pipe stems at the Clark-Watson Site in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. (2016)
Pipe stems are a staple in Historical Archaeology. Their study can provide considerable insight into the lives of the people who used them. In addition to the cultural importance of pipe stems, these artifacts are frequently used to date historic sites. Working with a collection of over 2,000, 17th and 18th century pipe stems from the Clark-Watson site in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, we reexamine the notion of a communal tavern pipe through experimental archaeology techniques. In addition, we will...
Research and Collections at the Virginia Museum of Natural History (2016)
The Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH) is an AAM accredited museum that serves as the state repository for natural history collections and occupies a purpose-built structure completed in 2007. As the state museum under the Secretary of Natural Resources, VMNH curates over 10 million archaeological, biological, paleontological, and geological specimens in trust for the citizens of the Commonwealth. The archaeology department currently curates over one million specimens. While the...
Revisiting a Stratified Random Sample of the 18th-Century Liberty Hall Campus of Washington and Lee University (2016)
Many of us at institutions with long-standing archaeology programs benefit greatly from the collections we inherit. However, these also present certain challenges. One such example is a stratified random sample done by Washington and Lee Archaeology in the 1970s on its 18th-century Liberty Hall Campus. Exceptional in historical archaeology at a time when many archaeologists were still stripping the plowzone from sites, a stratified random sample provides the statistical benefits of randomness,...
Revisiting Variation in Colonoware Manufacture and Use (2015)
Previous investigations (Cooper and Smith 2007, Smith and Cooper 2011) of colonoware from 33 sites occupied by enslaved peoples in South Carolina and Virginia have revealed significant inter-regional variation in vessel abundance over time. Additionally, analyses of attributes such as soot residue and vessel thickness identified intra-regional homogeneity and heterogeneity in use and manufacture. This study tests whether these trends continue when the dataset is expanded to include additional...
Searching for King Opessa's Shawnee Town in the Mountains of Maryland (2015)
In 1688, a band of Shawnee left Fort St. Louis on the Illinois River and headed east. Eventually, some of them settled at King Opessa's Town on the upper Potomac River, circa 1722, in the vicinity of Oldtown, Maryland. In 1975, a National Retister Nomination was prepared identifying a 122 x 213 m surface scatter of prehistoric artifacts as the site of King Opessa's Town, which also corresponds to the location of "Shawno Indian Fields Deserted" on Benjamin Winslow's 1736 map. Subsequent test...
Section 106, FCC Guidelines, and Small Project Area Archaeology: Little Footprints can Find Significant Sites (2016)
This paper explores the role of Section 106 compliance in small projects, such as telecommunications facilities, city parks, and fiber routes. Often thought of as less significant by regulatory agencies, state historic preservation offices, and CRM firms themselves, small scale archaeology is capable of identifying national register eligible sites, and can play a critical role in examining areas that have been heavily developed by the private sector and therefore not previously subjected to the...
A Seedy Affair: An Archaeobotanical Study of the Johnston Site (36In2) (2015)
Archaeobotanical research can provide archaeologists with insights into what plant resources past peoples were consuming and utilizing as well as the spatial organization of resource use and other activities within a site. Investigations at the Johnston Site, a large ring village located in Western Pennsylvania date back to the 1950s, yet until recently, relatively little research has been completed with archaeobotanical samples. This Late Prehistoric site is categorized in literature as...
Settlement Archaeology and the Role of Persistent Places among Forager Societies in Eastern New York (2016)
The settlement system used by the prehistoric populations of Eastern New York is one in which forager societies often reoccupied the same landscape creating persistent places. Evidence of this can be seen in a variety of single and multi-component occupations that span the Late Archaic and Transitional (4,000-1,500 B.C.) and Early Woodland Periods (1,000 B.C.-A.D. 200). Artifact assemblages found at these sites suggest that the site’s occupants used a diverse array of tools manufactured from...
Shell Middens and Sea Level Rise: Learning from the Past and Preparing for the Future (2017)
Shell middens, like other forms of coastal cultural heritage, are heavily threatened by sea level rise, climate change, and human land use. These sites, however, store information about these same challenges in the past. We present results from recent research near the mouth of the Rhode River, a small sub-estuary of Chesapeake Bay in eastern North America. We chose an area we knew well, having worked on the 31 previously recorded shell middens, to test the importance of more specialized...
Snake Chaps and Shapefiles: Public LiDAR as a Tool for Archaeological Exploration in Mid-Atlantic Wetlands (2017)
The Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was home to disenfranchised Native Americans, enslaved canal company laborers and maroons who lived in the wetlands temporarily and long term ca. 1660-1860. In the past decade, the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study (GDSLS) has intensively investigated only a few maroon and enslaved labor sites, leaving vast swaths of inhospitable and challenging swampland archaeologically unexplored. Current research seeks to identify new sites in remote...
The Snyder Paleoindian Complex in New Jersey : Interpreting Intra/Inter-site Spatial Patterning (2017)
The Snyder Site Complex consists of stratified, multicomponent prehistoric localities at Carpentersville, New Jersey, situated on a series of terraces adjacent to the Delaware River. The Paleoindian components of the complex stand out because of the extensive landscapes involved, the number of fluted bifaces and diagnostic tool types that can be associated with occupations, and the fact that it is revisited throughout the Paleoindian period. Research that has been completed at the complex has...
Spatial Analysis of the DuPont Powder Mill in Southwestern Pennsylvania (2016)
Western Pennsylvania has long been recognized as a center for industrial development in the United States. While the region is best known for coal mining and steel production, numerous industries have developed and prospered in the area for centuries. The DuPont Powder Mill, located in Forbes State Forest in southwestern Pennsylvania, is a valuable resource for information on the black powder industry in Western Pennsylvania and the individuals who worked in the mills during the late 19th and...