North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Engelbrecht.

Iroquoians played the hoop and pole game in Historic times, but there are no descriptions of Iroquoians playing chunkey, a variant of hoop and pole that makes use of a rolled stone disk. This has led to a widespread belief that chunkey was not played by Iroquoians. However, a symmetrical stone disk was recovered from the Eaton site, a mid-sixteenth century Erie village. Other researchers report stone disks from the following groups: Neutral (Bill Fox), Erie (Joshua Kwoka), Seneca (Martha...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Creese.

A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is needed. In this paper, Northern Iroquoian longhouses are studied as sociotechnical systems. This approach allows us to appreciate how social relations were generated and contested in the very activities of building and living in houses. I examine a sample of pre-Columbian longhouses from southern Ontario, Canada. Variation in aspects of house construction, spatial layout, and ritual indicates that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Burns. Amanda Rasmussen.

This is an abstract from the "Public Lands, Public Sites: Research, Engagement, and Collaboration" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fort Halifax Township Park in Pennsylvania is home to an eponymous French and Indian War site dating to 1756. A Juniata College archaeological field school in 2021 laid the foundation to receive an American Battlefield Protection Program grant from NPS in 2022. Using a combination of geoarchaeology, controlled metal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Schwarz.

This is an abstract from the "Bayesian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The accumulation of radiocarbon dates for Scioto Valley Woodland period sites has created a palimpsest, which inhibits chronological understanding of cultural change. The project iteratively integrates temporal hygiene and Bayesian analyses of large radiocarbon datasets from multiple sites, in an attempt to clean up problematic features of such datasets and provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Seibel.

This is an abstract from the "The Middle Atlantic Regional Transect Approach to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Even the most aggressive models of sea level rise don’t predict major inundation in the Middle Atlantic for many decades. However, the time available to archaeologists for managing coastal archaeological sites and mitigating their inevitable destruction may be far shorter than that. As...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Moriarty. Matthew Moriarty.

Members of the general public often view local prehistory from an artifact-based perspective, with a limited or incomplete understanding of the people who made and used such items. This view of the past is often paired with misunderstandings about both the nature of ancient settlements and the need to protect them as vital cultural resources. Initiated in 2016, the South Champlain Historical Ecology Project (SCHEP) has two goals: to study patterns in human-environment interaction along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Micon. Jennifer Birch. Louis Lesage.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we consider how institutions of social relatedness played crucial roles in Huron-Wendat society and how categories of biological and fictive kinship (e.g., lineages, clans, nations) structured processes of social integration, political affiliation, and adoption. We argue that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph A. M. Gingerich. William Childress.

This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Paleoindian Plano or Plano-like finds are not well understood in eastern North America. When documented, the distribution or age of these point types are not as well mapped as their western counterparts. In this paper, we include some known ranges of Plano-like finds in Virginia and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathaniel Kitchel.

This is an abstract from the "Late Pleistocene Stemmed Points across North America: Continental Questions and Regional Concerns" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the northern New England, the end of the Younger Dryas was marked by rapid warming and the transition from a landscape of open tundra and spruce parklands to closed canopy forest. The human groups that first settled in the region around 12.7 ka employed distinctive stone tool...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Arnold. Marcus Key.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Robert Carter began construction of historic Christ Church (Irvington, Virginia) in 1730. Much of the original church still remains to this day, with almost all of the original stone floor pavers still intact. There is a lack of natural stone in the surrounding area and historical documentation suggests that the stone used in Christ Church may have been reused...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Dorland. Daniel Kwan.

In Güner Coşkunsu’s The Archaeology of Childhood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma, Kathryn Kamp has discussed the potential to conduct experimental archaeology to assess childhood practice. In this paper, we follow Kamp and propose the use of experimental studies to explore the relation between different social learning strategies and material interactions. We investigated the performances of youth participants making pottery. Three forms of social learning were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Kolb.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tools are frequently conceived of as finished products rather than processes in and of themselves. Studying stone tool production allows for greater insight into pre-historic social systems, particularly that of apprenticeship, due to the development of criteria for detecting skill through lithic analysis. This project looks at Herrick Hollow I, a lithic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Ingraham. Sky Heller. Brian Robinson. Kristin Sobolik.

Archaeological investigations at Holmes Point West (Maine site 62-8) on the eastern Maine coast have yielded potential indicators of cultural treatment of seal remains that vary between two primary species: harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) and gray seal (Halichoerus grypus). Analyses of these patterns required development of element-specific speciation factors for best represented elements for each species, the temporal bone of the skull, including the auditory bulla and mastoid process. Holmes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Woehlke.

This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology is an inherently materialist pursuit linking history to the production of the world in which we live. Black intellectuals have played a critical role in the development of the social theories we use to explain that productive process. This paper will briefly outline some of these historical contributions to social theory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Beatrix Dudzik. Taylor Beckmann. Michelle Donohue. Johnny Cebak. Paul Wood.

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 Arch Street Project provided desiccated brain tissue recovered from a cemetery uncovered in Philadelphia, PA to the DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine Metabolomics Unit. As the Arch Street cemetery burials predate chemical fixation funerary practices, analysis of biological soft tissue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Leslie. Sarah Sportman.

Site 21-85 is a large, multi-component site, with Archaic and Woodland period remnants, located adjacent to the Hollenbeck River, a major tributary of the Housatonic River, and Robbins Swamp, the largest freshwater swamp in Connecticut. The location of Site 21-85 would have afforded past peoples access to the fauna and flora associated with Robbins Swamp, travel routes north and south through the Housatonic River Valley, and fresh water from the adjacent Hollenbeck River. The site is also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hull. Nathan Goodale. Alissa Nauman. Colin Quinn.

Utilitarian stone tools produced from raw materials that are linked to a place or landscape of significant social, ritual, and economic importance likely still carry that importance when tools are transported away from their source. Such objects can serve as indices of social relationships, economic priorities, and ritual practices. By transporting and using these objects, communities would have daily reminders of their connections to important places and activities that take place there....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Teel. Leslie Dunaway. Billie Follensbee.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the most enigmatic ancient North American artifacts are the objects collectively known as birdstones: Small ground stone objects, usually made of banded slate, that take the generalized form of a simplified bird or a bird’s head, sometimes with protruding "popeyes." The vast majority of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Farrell. Brian Bates. Craig Rose. Walter Witschey.

Where cultural resources are increasingly threatened by the effects of a changing climate, the old model of preservation in place is no longer sustainable. For resource managers charged with the preservation of our cultural heritage, effective stewardship demands that managers are in a position to make data-driven decisions to prioritize the deployment of scarce financial resources to the most vulnerable cultural resources. Nowhere in Virginia are the effects of climate change more apparent than...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gregory Lattanzi.

This is an abstract from the "The Middle Atlantic Regional Transect Approach to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning in 2013, the office of the New Jersey State Archaeologist began receiving requests to identify artifacts found along the Atlantic shoreline and the Delaware Bay. While finding artifacts along beaches is not new, the substantial increase both in number and locations of finds can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Taylor.

In recent years, African Diaspora archaeology has become one of the most impactful means by which archaeologists supplement our current understanding of the past. Not only does this subfield have the potential to benefit descendant and local communities, but it also enables professionals to fill in the blank gaps left by the systematic disenfranchisement and intentional illiteracy of an entire group of people. One site with the potential to enhance our understanding of the African Diaspora is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zaakiyah Cua.

Unlike uplands, floodplains generally yield stratified deposits that may include deeply buried landscapes and archaeological sites. Most state specifications for cultural resources surveys require floodplains to be geomorphically evaluated in order to identify buried landscapes. This is most frequently accomplished via trenching, an effective, but timely, costly, and sometimes destructive method. This project reports on an alternative technique utilizing a multi-proxy methodology coupling...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristopher Montgomery.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Metarhyolite from the South Mountain Section of Pennsylvania has been utilized by indigenous groups in the Middle Atlantic Region since the Archaic Period. The resource has been the focus of widespread quarrying activities, spurring an entire Native American complex of quarries, which are restricted to a relatively confined geographic region where...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice R. Kelley. Bonnie Newsom. Arthur Spiess. Anne Spezia. Kate Pontbriand.

This is an abstract from the "Geoarchaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maine’s coastline hosts over 2,000 Native American shell middens. Composed of clam and/or oyster shells, faunal remains, and artifacts, these sites record over four thousand years of cultural and paleoenvironmental information. However, virtually all of these rich archives are eroding in the face of climate change-induced sea level rise and altered weather patterns. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Birch.

This is an abstract from the "Dating Iroquoia: Advancing Radiocarbon Chronologies in Northeastern North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper details the preliminary results of the Dating Iroquoia project and reviews some of the most significant implications of our revised radiocarbon chronology as they relate to current understandings of Iroquoian cultural development. First, a brief review of traditional approaches to...