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In 2014 the District Public Schools began extensive construction and renovation of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, the former Western High School. Portions of the building date to the last decade of the 19th century, the former location of The Cedars residence, the home of the Cox family. The few photographs and descriptions of The Cedars were thought to be all that remained due to the construction of the school. Stantec and EHT Traceries undertook archaeological and archival...
"Rises in the Rice Fields", Aerial LiDAR applications on South Carolina Inland Rice Plantations (2013)
The use of remote sensing technology, such as aerial LiDAR (light detection and ranging), provides archaeologists with a significant tool to aid in research as well as digitally record sites. Inland and coastal rice plantation contexts are extremely well suited for the application of aerial LiDAR in locating potential new sites as well as providing accurate maps of the overall landscape and topography. LiDAR scans produce a more accurate map than traditional topographic maps which enables...
Rising from the Dark Marshes: Investigations of an Elite Homestead on Mulberry Island, Virginia (2017)
Mulberry Island, a peninsula on Virginia’s James River and home to Joint Base Langley-Eustis’ Fort Eustis, is a trove of cultural resources. Among its more than 230 archaeological sites are dozens of indentured, enslaved, and tenant laborers’ ephemeral homesteads. Relatively few sites associated with its economically advantaged minority have been discovered on Mulberry Island, leaving a gap in the archaeological record compounded by the loss of antebellum public records during the Civil War....
Risk Assessment of Archaeological Sites Using Lidar: Sea level Rise Modeling at Jamestown Island, VA (2017)
Jamestown Island contains low-lying terrain with archaeological sites, known and unknown, threatened by sea level rise. Using data acquired from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was created using a Light Detection and Ranging Remote Sensing technique (LIDAR) to identify cultural sites and assist in planning for cultural remediation. Four scenarios of sea level rise modeling were created based on historic trends and projected environmental events...
Risk in Collaborative Archaeologies of Place as Engaged Scholarship (2017)
Drawing on examples from my community-engaged work in post-apartheid South Africa and post-annexation New Mexico, I want to talk about the kinds of risk my community partners navigate in our collaborative archaeologies. Both communities are focused tightly on colonial-era processes that have translated into dimensions of racialized inequalities, against which we hope archaeological partnerships might be employed and produce tools that do more good than harm.
The Risks and Benefits of Working with Private Collections: Lessons from the COADS Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Privately held collections are an endangered part of the archaeological record that the SAA’s "Principles of Archaeological Ethics" directs us preserve. The Central Ohio Archaeological Digitization Survey (COADS) is undertaking the documentation of dozens of private collections in central Ohio. By September 2018 it recorded over 15,000 artifacts and added over...
The Risks and Rewards of Network Position in the Chaco World (2018)
In a previous study Peeples and Haas (2013) compared brokerage (intermediate) positions in networks of ceramic similarity to measures of settlement growth and longevity for the late pre-Hispanic western U.S. Southwest (A.D. 1200-1500). Counter to expectations from many contemporary network studies where brokerage positions are associated with long-term advantage, this work instead suggested that broker settlements tended to be small, short-lived, and that brokerage was temporary. This example...
Ritual and Feasting in the Field: The Role of Theoretically Informed Practice In Creating Resilience within the Archaeological Field Crew (2017)
Katherine Spielmann has contributed to the scholarly literature on ritual and feasting, the archaeology of sustainable and resilient societies, and long-term economic and social changes in archaeological record of the Salinas region in central New Mexico. Less well known, however, are her long-term contributions to the performance dimensions of these models. In fact, her theoretically informed archaeological practices, implemented in the context of the undergraduate field school, illustrate the...
Ritual and Resistance at Trents Cave, Barbados (2018)
An overview of religious practice and resistance reflected in the material record of Trents Cave, Barbados. The cave site is located at the bottom of a gully located between the enslaved laborer settlement and the planter’s residence at Trents Plantation. The findings suggest recurrent use of the site by persons of African descent (circa 1750s through the 1850s) for ritual, or specialized purposes, associated with iron and steel. The distinctive pattern of deposition of key artifacts...
Ritual Circuits and the Distribution of Exotic Sherds in Hopewell Contexts (2018)
The exchange of exotic goods between disparate geographic and cultural groups across the Midwest and Southeast is a hallmark of the Hopewell Period. Ceramics Are recognized by archaeologists as an important component of this interaction sphere. This exchange is usually conceptualized as whole vessels moving across the landscape. In this paper, it is posited that sherds could be the unit of exchange instead. Using ritual circuits as a theoretical framework, this preliminary paper seeks to lay a...
Ritual Closure: A Countermeasure to Witchcraft (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists routinely encounter ceremonially closed buildings and sites yet specific explanations about why this occurs and how to frame it remain murky. For the American Southwest and likely many other parts of the world, fear of witchcraft may explain these closures. We argue in this poster that ritual burning and the...
Ritual Deposition of Avifauna in the Northern Burial Cluster at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon (2018)
Birds are an important part of both modern and historic Puebloan ceremonialism: live birds, stuffed birds, and bird wings and feathers are used in prayers, in ceremonies, as sacrifices, and in the creation of ritual paraphernalia. Archaeological evidence suggests birds held a similar role in the past for some prehispanic Southwestern groups, including members of the Chaco phenomenon. Pueblo Bonito is one member of the Chaco system that might be expected to contain evidence of ritual use of...
Ritual Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi Valley: The Marksville Archaeological Project (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) has a long history of monumentality, with early examples of monumental earthworks confidently dated to the Middle Archaic (6000 – 3000 BC) and Late Archaic (3000 – 1000 BC) periods, and other mounds dating to Woodland (after 1000 BC) and Mississippi (after AD 1200) periods. The Middle Woodland-period Marksville mound site...
The Ritual Lives of Southwest Dogs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs, as the first domesticated species, have held a wide range of roles in human societies including hunting assistants, guardians, companions, and food sources. In this poster we will explore their ceremonial roles through a comparative analysis of the life histories of ritually deposited dogs. Specifically, we will compare Southwest dog burials to a late...
Ritual Movement on Chacoan Roads: Insights from Recent Fieldwork, Ethnography, and Cross-Cultural Comparison (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper highlights some results of my four year fieldwork project to document monumental roads throughout the Greater Chaco Landscape and on Navajo Nation in particular. I place particular emphasis on the question of why and how people moved along Chacoan roads as a dimension of ritual practice. Using a combination of LiDAR, drone-based SfM...
The Ritual of Return: Mounded Landscapes in Colonial California (2017)
In the United States, prehistoric and historical archaeology subfields are characterized by distinct intellectual histories, methods, and theoretical frameworks that continue to guide where archaeologists apply their craft. For California prehistorians, deeply layered shellmounds long represented ideal sites for chronology building. Until recently, shellmounds were also unlikely places for historical archaeologists to investigate interactions between Native Americans and colonial institutions....
Ritual Smoking: Evidence from Archaeological Smoking Pipes (2017)
Answering the question of what was smoked in prehistoric pipes benefits from a multi-proxy approach. Partially charred residue (dottle) provides more answers than does the black carbon that often lines the interior of archaeological pipes. Pipes examined from the American Southwest and Great Basin attest to use of a variety of plants, sometimes including ground maize, as smoking mixtures. Remains within the partially burned dottle are identified by pollen, phytolith, starch, macrofloral, and...
Ritual Space and Ritual Place in California Rock Art (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Art and Archaeology of the West: Papers in Honor of Lawrence L. Loendorf" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Larry Loendorf has always emphasized that rock art research is nothing if it is not also archaeology. Much of his research has accordingly considered the importance of the (dirt) archaeological context of rock art sites, and what this can tell us about the art. In the spirit of this concern, the archaeological...
Ritual Traces and the Challenges of Detecting Late Precontact Rituals at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, IL (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic accounts of indigenous communities throughout the United States illustrate the many ways that ritual activities were deeply embedded into everyday life. However, moving to the American Midwestern archaeological record, treatments of ritual are typically limited to large, ceremonial sites and these everyday rituals...
The River Basin Surveys: Studying Twentieth Century Archaeological Investigations and their Nineteenth Century Subjects (2017)
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase included most of the present-day states of North and South Dakota. I study the US colonization of this area, particularly the Upper Missouri Basin. During the mid-twentieth century the Smithsonian’s River Basin Surveys (RBS) program investigated several nineteenth century historic sites associated with the earliest US presence in the area including fur trade posts, US military and government establishments, and sites associated with US settlement. I study RBS...
River cane fishing gear (2012)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
The River Overlook Fortifications on Bemus Heights at Saratoga NHP (2016)
The fortification of Bemus Heights at Saratoga by the Americans during the Revolutionary War was engineered by Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish military engineer who had taken up the American cause at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Kosciusko designed the fortifications on Bemus Heights at the River Overlook to oppose the British plan to advance to Albany along the River Road. In 2009, a geophysical study was conducted on one of the River Fortification elements in Kosciusko’s defense...
A River Runs through It: Placing Vicksburg in Context through an Analysis of Late Coles Creek Culture (1000–1200 CE) Land Use in the Lower Mississippi Valley (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Vicksburg Is the Key: Recent Archaeological Investigations and New Perspectives from the Gibraltar of the South" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. HDR’s recent investigations in Vicksburg National Military Park (VNMP) identified multiple precontact sites composed of extensive ceramic scatters. A typological analysis of nearly 300 sherds suggests these occupations are associated with the transitional Coles Creek culture...
The River Street Digital History Project (2015)
Race relations remains a central issue in American politics, economics, and culture. Interactions between African Americans and Euroamericans has been a focal point of historical archaeology for the last 30 years. The River Street Digital History Project is centered on the River Street Neighborhood in Boise, Idaho, which was the historical home for most of the town’s non-white population. This research asks: what role did race play in the lives of River Street Neighborhood residents; how did the...
River, Rain, or Ruin: Intermittent Prehistoric Land Use Along the Middle Colorado River (1994)
This report presents the results of archaeological data recovery and analysis for the Archer site, AZ P:4:22 (ASM), located on the north bank of the Little Colorado River, near Holbrook, Arizona. The work was conducted by Statistical Research, Inc. (SRI), to mitigate the adverse impacts of building an earthen levee on and adjacent to the site. The proposed levee is a water-control feature that is intended to protect the residents of Holbrook from periodic flooding of the Little Colorado River....