North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)
1-25 (500 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Capturing and Sharing Vermont’s Past: 3D Imaging as a Tool for Undergraduate Research and Community Engagement" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2019, the Castleton Hidden History Project has conducted excavations around Granger House, a nineteenth-century home on the campus of Vermont State University-Castleton that will become a local history museum. Ongoing interdisciplinary work centers on investigating the...
The Abbott Farm National Historic Landmark: A Look into the Future (2018)
When the Abbott Farm site was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1976, it had already been well-known for a hundred years as a significant archaeological site. Now over 40 years later, the Abbott Farm continues to baffle archaeological scholars as to the precise meaning of its importance to prehistoric and historic native peoples of the region. Past research, present trends, and future analysis are discussed providing a myriad of evidence showing that this site continues to provide and...
An Accounting of the Dead: Historical Epidemiology and Big Data in the Arch Street Project (2018)
As of the beginning of September 2017, the remains of over 250 individuals were recovered from the building site at 218 Arch Street. While the presence of bodies in what was once the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia burial ground should not surprise us, contemporary documents and written histories of the congregation state that all burials had been moved to the Mount Mariah Cemetery in the mid-nineteenth century. The abundance of human remains left on the original site raises questions for...
“An Acre of Land to Plant or A Stick of Wood to Make a Fence or Fire”: A Heritage of Mohegan Allotment (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Allotment was a world-changing institution that forever altered the course of North American history; through this process, Indigenous lands were broken up into lots, “owned” by individuals and families rather than collectively held. Allotment placed an unprecedented amount of stress on Indigenous traditions of...
The Afterlife of Feasts: Feasting and Ritualized Deposition in the Middle Woodland Tidewater (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I consider the Middle Woodland period (500 BC-AD 900), a time in which forager-fishers moved across the central Atlantic seaboard in seasonal rounds, regularly returning to particular locales for large-scale feasting events. By analyzing the ceramic characteristics and feature distributions...
Against the Alienability of Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Working with marginalized Black and Indigenous communities shines a light on the use of archaeological research to support struggles for heritage, recognition, and well-being in settler colonial states. We highlight archaeology’s potential to alienate, whether alienating heritage as...
The Agency of Flowing Water in Human Mobility and Interaction (2018)
Water is one of the most powerful agents of change on the planet. Flowing water can build and destroy landscapes rapidly in dramatic fashion as with flash flooding or gradually through incremental natural processes, shaping the terrain through sedimentation, erosion, and seasonal fluctuations in water flow. Within human societies, these waterways may be perceived as a source of danger, but also provide subsistence and non-subsistence resources, and serve as landscape features that alter how...
Algonquian Landscapes and Multispecies Archaeology in the Chesapeake (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. Archaeological and ethnohistorical studies have begun to trace the ritualized practices of Native groups as they returned to places with deep histories throughout the Southeast during the colonial era. In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Algonquian groups traveled across contested territories to bury ancestors, animals, and...
Alliance Formation & Social Signaling: Village Interaction among the Monongahela (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A general trend among many societies has been the growth of political complexes, and thereby alliance formation. New studies on the Monongahela culture, such as those undertaken by Dr. William Johnson and David Anderson (2002), seek to define the growing political complexity of the Monongahela during the Late Monongahela period (A.D. 1580-1635). This research...
Always Changed But Never Gone: A Century of Farming in Southeastern Massachusetts. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Changes in the Land: Archaeological Data from the Northeast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Anthony Farmstead historic site (SOM.HA.4) in Somerset, Bristol County, Massachusetts, was excavated through the data recovery level in anticipation of the construction of an electrical substation on the property. The site included remnants of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farmstead, including a cellar hole, well,...
Always Halfway There: Keeping Up with Digital Archaeological Data in Virginia (2018)
Since being one of the first State Historic Preservation Offices to adopt electronic records management in the late ‘80s, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources has worked through several iterations of databases and web applications. These systems manage basic site information, details about physical collections, and now digital media and datasets themselves. Over time, the agency’s priorities and objectives surrounding digital records and data have evolved in ways common to other...
An Analysis of Fetal Remains Discovered in a New York Privy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The remains of a thirty-six week old fetus were uncovered during the excavation of a privy on the Sargent Street site located in Cohoes, New York. Discovered in a 19th century town inhabited with textiles mill workers and their families, the skeleton was fragmentary and consisted of only four long bones. The context of these remains are unique and represents...
Analysis of Sturgeon Fishing Encampments from Block Island, Rhode Island (2018)
Several archaeological deposits along the shores of Block Island, RI were exposed by the destructive wave action of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Once exposed, these deposits were threatened by continual coastal erosion and excavated by the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center as part of the 2013 Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief Grant (P13AF00176); several of the excavated sites contained significant faunal assemblages. Faunal analyses of these sites included relative abundance and Number of...
Analysis of the Faunal Remains at the Arch Street Cemetery Site (2018)
Prior to moving the burials within the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia cemetery to a new location in 1860, a local newspaper of the time documented that the neighboring tenement houses used the open space as a dumping ground. Artifacts recovered from this deposit include pottery sherds, pieces of glass bottles, leather shoe soles, metal objects, and the remains of shellfish and domesticated animals. Many of the animal bones show signs of butchery, indicating that the remains are from food...
Ancestral Ohiyo Haudenosaunee Ceramic Styles and Technology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing investigations at the Bockmier One Site in southwestern New York State are providing new insights into the lives of the Ancestral Ohiyo Haudenosaunee, who lived in the upper Allegheny Valley from around AD 800 to around AD 1350. This paper will focus on ceramics thus far recovered from the site, which indicate at least two temporally distinct...
Ancient DNA Analysis of Orton Quarry (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Orton Quarry site is a Late Prehistoric ossuary along the coast of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania. In March 1991, heavy-equipment operators accidentally destroyed a majority of the site before archeologists arrived. Since the excavation very little had been published on the Orton Quarry site, it’s importance or its original inhabitants. One of the...
Ancient DNA Perspectives on Kinship and Racialized Labor at a 17th century Delaware Frontier Site (2018)
The Avery’s Rest archaeological site near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, represents an early phase of European colonization in North America. Previous archaeological and osteological analysis conducted by the Archaeological Society of Delaware and the Smithsonian Institution, respectively, indicated the presence of two burial clusters containing 11 excellently preserved individuals, one containing individuals of European ancestry and the other individuals of African ancestry. Ancient DNA (aDNA)...
Animal Use among the Monongahela: Insights from the Analysis of the Johnston Site Faunal Assemblage (2018)
Excavations at the Johnston site (36IN2), a Middle Monongahela village located in western Pennsylvania, have generated a large, generally well-preserved assemblage of faunal remains. Between excavations in the 1950s and those conducted since 2005 by IUP, a significant portion of this large ring village has been sampled. Thus, this assemblage provides a rare opportunity to document the use of animals by the Monongahela. Initial faunal analysis was undertaken by John Guilday of the Carnegie Museum...
Applying Circuit Theory to Colonial Expansion Modeling in the Great Bay Estuary, New England. (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the early 1600s, the Great Bay Estuary was a frontier colonial settlement that rapidly became an economic hub for the extraction and export of natural resources into the West Indies trade network. Being directly accessible from the Atlantic coast of modern-day New Hampshire, the Great Bay Estuary provided a logical point of entry for water vessels and...
Applying Glass Bead Chemistry to Examine Wendat Village Intrasite Organization (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum: Celebrating 20 Years Serving the Archaeological Community " session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass bead compositions and typologies from late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Wendat villages in Ontario have been used to examine chronological differences and regional exchange networks; these artifacts may also be useful for investigating patterns of interaction and...
The Arch Street Project in the Classroom: The Multifaceted Benefits to the Student (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has become clear that current students thrive with a hands-on approach to learning. This type of engagement leads to an increase in achievement and interest among students (Erickson et al. 2020), as well as an increase of knowledge. The human remains that were unearthed as part of the Arch Street Project...
Arch Street Project: Sustainable Collaboration and Learning after Reburial Using Digitized Remains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Arch Street Project: Multidisciplinary Research of a Philadelphia Cemetery" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The highly collaborative nature of the Arch Street Project allowed for hands-on learning opportunities for university students. This was an especially valuable experience at universities that traditionally rely on replica human remains for teaching as it increased student access to taphonomic conditions,...
Archaeo-rover: A Low-Cost Robotic System for the Collection of Geophysical Data (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conventional methods for collection of ground penetrating radar (GPR), magnetic gradiometry, and other archaeo-geophysical data generally require precise grid layout ahead of surveys and significant labor to set up and move survey ropes, slowing data collection and creating a hurdle to larger, landscape-scale investigations. Although some commercial systems...
Archaeological Collecting in Cultural Context: A Localized Study of Looting and the News (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many field archaeologists have firsthand experience encountering locals who practice site looting and artifact collection. These globally widespread problems are addressed in professional ethics statements and legislature at international, federal, state, and local levels. Publications in archaeological journals and heritage-related news sources have...
Archaeological Remote Sensing at Damariscove Island and Colonial Pemaquid, Coastal Maine (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The region around modern Boothbay Harbor, Maine, is home to some of the earliest English colonial settlement in North America, with the establishment of a fishery in 1604 at Damariscove Island, and the subsequent growth of a town and fort on the mainland at nearby Pemaquid. Despite a long history of eighteenth and nineteenth century settlement and much...