North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (385 Records)
When John Elwell died in the late nineteenth century, newspapers characterized him as the "last of the Lighthouse tribe." When Sol Webster died in 1900, newspapers said he was the "last of the Lighthouse tribe." Before Mary Matilda Elwell died in 1928, she called herself the "last of the Lighthouse tribe." In fact, however, hundreds of descendants of the founding couple, the Narragansett Indian James Chaugham and his white wife Molly Barber, survive and, as historian Lewis Mills phrased it, have...
An Evidence-based Reinterpretation of the Brafferton Indian School (2018)
The 1693 Charter establishing the College of William & Mary in Virginia, includes a mandate to educate the "Western Indians." After securing funding for the Indian school from the estate of the scientist Robert Boyle, a magnificent Georgian-style structure was built to house the "Indian boys." The received history about this endeavor maintains that the Indian school at William & Mary was unsuccessful. Documentary evidence from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as archaeological evidence,...
Evolving Narratives of Mother Washington (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ideal gender roles feature prominently in biographies written about George Washington. Once his father passed away, a young Washington was raised by his single mother, Mary Ball Washington. The narratives of Washington’s life, and his mother’s influence upon him, are dynamic, reflecting prevailing gender ideologies of the times in which they were written....
The Excavations at Frost Town: Public Archaeology at a 19th Century Logging Settlement (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cumming Nature Center of Naples, New York contains a significant portion of the remains of a 19th century logging settlement, once known as Frost Town. The site, home to many Euro-American settlers throughout the 19th century, saw the rapid rise of a logging-based economy associated with the growing industrialization of Western New York, following the...
Excavations at the Springfield Furnace, Mercer Co., PA, and the Euro-British Charcoal Iron Technological Tradition in America (2018)
An archaeological field investigation, inaugurated by John R. White of Youngstown State University in 2007, ultimately revealed the remains of an antebellum, single tuyere, charcoal iron blast furnace located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. The facility, originally called the Seth and Hill Furnace, is presently known as the Springfield Furnace by locals. The configuration, constructed generally of heavy ashlar and rubble detritus, is listed historically as utilizing heated air, or 'hot blast'...
An Experimental and Ethnographic Approach to the Analysis of Fire-Cracked Rock at Three Monongahela Sites in Southwestern PA: The Case for a Middle Monongahela Stone Boiling Technology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite being a ubiquitous artifact class, fire-cracked rock (FCR) has been largely overlooked in traditional archaeological studies. Due in part to its shear abundance and cumbersome nature, FCR is often more cursed for its space consumption than embraced for its interpretive potential. As a result, the archaeological...
An Experimental Approach to Understanding Paleoindian Bipolar Lithic Artifacts (2018)
Bipolar lithic artifacts can be challenging for researchers to understand in the archaeological record. Although these artifacts were first noted in North American literature half a century ago, archaeologists continue to debate over terminology and considerations of morphological and functional distinctions of bipolar objects. This experimental approach aims to shed light on these disparities whilst re-examining morphological and functional characteristics attributed to manufacture and...
A Faunal Analysis of the Kirshner Site (36WM213) (2018)
The Kirshner Site (36WM213) is a multi-component site in South Huntington township, Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania that contains two Middle Monongahela villages. Relatively little is known about Monongahela use of animals. Fortunately, good faunal preservation has made zooarchaeological analyses of materials from this site possible. Identifying and analyzing these faunal remains with respect to taxa and skeletal elements, as well as human and animal modifications, provides important new...
Fire and Vegetation Dynamics: Blazing the Trail in Pre-contact Southern New England (2018)
The concept that Native Americans were using fire for wide spread vegetation control and subsistence procurement during the pre-contact period in Southern New England has long been excepted as common practice, leading to changes in the landscape and then settlement patterns. However, save for the accounts of early explorers and colonists, whose goal was to solicit the "new land" as a familiar landscape and not an unknown wilderness, there is little supporting scientific evidence. This paper...
The First Baptist Church of Philadelphia’s Burial Ground: "moved" in 1860; "excavated" in 2017. (2018)
In November of 2016, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about bones found at a construction site at 218 Arch Street. As a private project, no city office would take charge of the human remains despite the fact that construction equipment was exposing and damaging them. The Mutter Institute, as a collaborative research organization associated with the study of historic human remains, approached the property developer with an interest to learn more about the bones found at the site....
Fishing at the Beach: The Great Neck Site and an Examination of Subsistence Strategies on the Chesapeake Bay (2018)
Excavations conducted in 2015-2016 at the Great Neck site (44VB7) in Virginia Beach yielded evidence of a Middle Woodland occupation dating to AD 400. Located on Wolfsnare Creek approximately one mile from the Chesapeake Bay, the site contained a postmold pattern from a small structure, many small and shallow basin-shaped features, and several large pit features. Two of the larger pit features exhibited excellent bone preservation and were densely filled with a mix of aquatic and terrestrial...
Fluted Point Variation in Glaciated Northeastern North America (2018)
Recent syntheses for the adjacent glaciated regions of the eastern Great Lakes (EGL) and New England-Maritimes (NEM) document similar fluted point sequences associated with early and middle Paleoindian populations. Current consensus holds that these fluted biface sequences fall within a time range of 13,000-11,600 calendar years before present, and probably derive from Clovis populations (or their immediate descendants) that colonized the glaciated landscapes of the Northeast from west and...
Food Production in the Borderlands: Paleoethnobotanical Investigations of the Western Basin Tradition in Ontario (2018)
This paper presents the results of a paleoethnobotanical analysis of the early Late Woodland (A.D. 1000–1300) Western Basin Tradition (WBT) sites informally known as the Arkona Cluster. Relatively little is known about WBT human-plant interaction as compared to their maize-bean-squash cultivating Iroquoian neighbors. Culture-historical models of the WBT are proving to be outdated, overemphasizing the supposed difference between WBT ‘hunter-gatherer’ subsistence strategies and Iroquoian farming....
Forest and Farm, River and Sea: Food and Diet at Three 17th-Century Sites in Connecticut (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research in Connecticut has focused on the 17th century and archaeological investigations at several significant sites are ongoing. Extensive work at three sites, an early 17th-century (ca.1615-1640) coastal Native American trading fort in Norwalk, a first period (ca. 1630-1640s) domestic site in Wethersfield, and a mid-late 17th -century (ca....
Forest, Frost, and Agriculture: Measuring Three Centuries of Environmental Change at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (2018)
This paper highlights ecological discoveries made during a survey of natural and cultural resources along a new 2.2 mile parkway at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. Poplar Forest is Thomas Jefferson’s former retreat home and plantation located in Bedford County, Virginia. In addition to locating archaeological sites and mapping aboveground features, 10 forest plots were established within stands of increasing age adjacent to the proposed path of the parkway. By measuring tree diameter,...
Fort Halifax Park: A Shared Heritage (2018)
Fort Halifax Park, located in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, contains archaeological potential for both prehistoric and historic resources alike. The local community is proud of its heritage but lacks the resources and expertise to properly care and manage the property. Future development, which once seemed only a dream for the community, is now a possibility through a joint partnership involving The Friends of Fort Halifax, the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Historic and...
Fox Farm, a Large Fort Ancient Village in Mason County, Kentucky: Evidence of Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Management? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations of wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) remains from archaeological sites in Central America and the American Southwest have generated new data about the management and domestication of this species. We applied the methods used in those studies to our analysis...
“Fresh” from the Field: Utilizing Legacy Collections for Undergraduate Research and Training (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although legacy collections are rarely discussed explicitly in research and are often portrayed as subpar due to the lack of publication or the outdated excavation methods, we argue that legacy data is an important resource in archaeology. Legacy collections provide unique datasets that are both easily accessible and readily available. The Archaeology Lab...
From "Gray Literature" to "Big Data": Synthesizing Archaeological Data in Washington, DC (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Spatial Archaeometry: A Survey of Recent High-Resolution Survey and Measurement Applications" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The vast array of technical reports produced through cultural resources management (CRM) archaeology are sometimes referred to as “gray literature,” due to their limited reuse after the project is completed. However, archaeologists working in CRM excavate the majority of sites in...
From Field School to Graduate School: How One Public Archaeology Program Has Made It All Possible (2018)
The Paleoindian Period of New Hampshire has been studied extensively, particularly in the White Mountains. Volunteers and avocational archaeologists from the summer field school known as the State Conservation And Rescue Archaeology Program (SCRAP) have excavated several of the known Paleoindian sites in northern New Hampshire. Accessibility to the data recovered by SCRAP is an important aspect of this program, allowing many scholars to complete theses and dissertations using existing...
From Frontier to Farm Town: Subsistence and Diet in Old Wethersfield, Connecticut, 1636-1750 (2018)
Recent excavations at the Webb-Deane-Stevens (WDS) museum in Wethersfield, CT, resulted in the discovery of deeply-buried portions of the 17th- and early 18th-century landscapes. The stratified deposits contain a rich assemblage of domestic artifacts, personal items, architectural materials, food remains, and cultural features. The preservation of these deposits is excellent and the faunal assemblages include large and medium mammal bones, as well as small mammals, birds, fish, and eggshell....
From the Unknown to the Known: Reexamination of a Small Prehistoric Site in Southeastern Virginia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 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. Reinvestigation of one of...
Frost Town Archaeology 2019-2020: Pedagogy and Public Practice (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Frost Town Archaeology (FTA) is a historical archaeological project through SUNY Brockport and the Rochester Museum and Science Center that explores the site of Frost Town, a once thriving logging area that was gradually abandoned during the early 20th century. FTA examines the environmental devastation of the Euro-American presence in the Finger Lakes region,...
Funerary Hardware in 18th and 19th Century Philadelphia: What Can Be Used as an Indication of Wealth from the Arch Street Site? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cemetery of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (ca. 1702-1859) was excavated in 2017. Almost 500 remains and associated material culture highlight the lives of Philadelphia’s early citizens during pre and post-colonial eras. Individual graves offer multiple lines of evidence from which to...
The Geochemical Profile of the Woman in the Iron Coffin, a Mid-19th C. Burial in Queens, New York City (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Illegal construction excavation in Queens (NYC) unearthed a mid-19th C. iron coffin and exposed the burial interred within. Known as the Woman in the Iron Coffin, the well-preserved burial was a young adult female of African ancestry who died of small pox. Here we provide stable isotopic (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O, 87Sr/86Sr, 206Pb/207Pb) and elemental (Pb, As)...