North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)
176-200 (500 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community outreach has played a major role in the Castleton Hidden History Project, which highlights a diverse and inclusive history of the Castleton, VT area from the end of the ice age through the present day. Grounded in interdisciplinary research and public participation, current archaeological work centers around Granger House, a historically...
Graves in the Forest: Mapping Lost Colonial Cemeteries in the Oyster River Watershed (2018)
The Oyster River watershed in New Hampshire was home to some of the earliest English colonial occupation outside of Boston with settlements starting in the early 1630s. This early colonial occupation as well as subsequent historic settlement of the area has left an extensive array of archaeological features in the landscape. Currently, however, this landscape is heavily forested making identification of even remnant built sites difficult. The forested setting makes it particularly hard to find...
Ground Penetrating Radar and Photogrammetry Survey of Laurel Hill Cemetery; An African American Cemetery in Western Pennsylvania (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Laurel Hill Settlement was a small, mountaintop African American settlement that was located in what is now Laurel Ridge State Park west of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The settlement was formed sometime before 1825 and may date back as far as the late 1700s. It is unclear how large the settlement was and how many families lived there at any given time...
Ground-Penetrating Radar as a Rapid Cultural Resource Management Technique for Shell Midden Delineation (2018)
The analysis of shell midden extent and thickness typically requires expensive and time-consuming excavation. Additionally, widely spaced test units provide limited and discontinuous stratigraphic information. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey, in combination with stratigraphic information from limited excavation, can serve as a powerful tool for making rapid cultural resource management decisions. Although processing and correlating the data requires several days of additional time, this...
“Half-way up a hill, at the foot of which we camped”: Archaeological Investigations of the 1781 Rochambeau Camp #5, Bolton, Connecticut (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2023, the Connecticut Office of State Archaeology directed a new archaeological investigation of the 1781 Rochambeau Camp #5, in Bolton, Connecticut, as part of the Connecticut State Library’s Digging into History Program for high school students. Camp #5 is one of several stops along the route taken by French forces under the command of Jean-Baptiste...
The Hand Site, Revisited: A Collections-Focused Approach to Recentering Deep History in the Lower Middle Atlantic (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reviews the Hand Site (44SN22) Reassessment Project, and broadly explores the reevaluation of existing collections as an avenue for decolonization. The Hand site is a complex, multicomponent site located on the Nottoway River in southeastern Virginia. Intensive excavations in the 1960s revealed...
Health and Mortality During the Transition to Commercial Dairy Farming in Nineteenth Century Upstate New York (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine the relationship between farm production and strategy and the health and mortality patterns of farm families during the late nineteenth century in upstate New York. This was a time when farmers were transitioning from subsistence to commercial farming and when dairy farming was becoming the preferred strategy to increase profits. Here, we focus...
Hearth, Home, and Colonialism: Cultural Entanglement at Calluna Hill, a 1630s Pequot War Household (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the nature of cultural change and continuity during the early colonial period (ca. 1615–1637), an understudied period in southern New England. The earliest years of intercultural exchange between Europeans and Native people in the region is believed to have brought sweeping disturbances to Native American lifeways; however,...
Heat Alteration of Red Munsungun Chert (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Red chert from the Munsungun Lake formation in northern Maine is found in late Pleistocene Fluted-Point period archaeological sites across northeastern North America. Despite its prevalence, there is no literature detailing the effects of heat alteration on red Munsungun chert. Here we report the effects of experimental heat alteration on red Munsungun...
Heating Stones: An Experimental and Ethnographic Analysis of Fire Cracked Rock at Two Monongahela Sites in Southwestern PA (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of heated stones in both cookery and social rituals is an important technology in the repertoire of human food and lifeways. Archaeological assemblages often contain high percentages of these heated stones, or fire cracked rock (FCR). Yet despite its relative frequency in archaeological collections, the full diagnostic potential of FCR for determining...
Here Not Be Dragons from the End Times: Exploring Virginia Archaeology Using the 3D Printed Past (2018)
What to do when a museum visitor asks you if your dinosaurs are dragons from the end times? At their invitation, the Virtual Curation Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) teamed with the Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH) to create an exhibit entitled Exploring Virginia to use archaeology as a way of encouraging critical thinking. This exhibit drew on over 120 3D printed artifacts from archaeological sites across Virginia and the globe. VCU students in the inaugural...
Heritage, Pragmatism, and Indigenous Collaboration (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. Over the past 20 years, I have worked with the Hassanamisco Nipmuc of Massachusetts with the express goal of seeing how archaeology can aid the Nipmuc with their own heritage initiatives. In all these efforts, the centrality of pragmatic philosophy has been paramount. Given that North American pragmatic philosophy...
Hidden Beneath the Asphalt: Urban Archaeology in Parking Lots (2018)
Historic maps provide tangible visual evidence of how cities evolve over time. Buildings are erected and demolished, roads are constructed, and streams are diverted or filled. To an untrained eye, the built environment of a typical city block may look like an unlikely place to find archaeological remains but to an archaeologist it is a time capsule waiting to be opened. To this end, urban archaeology often requires peeking beneath parking lots, which often provide temporary protection to buried...
High Above the River: Points, Pottery and a Pithouse in Southern New Hampshire (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the results of a targeted data recovery conducted at the Amoskeag West Bank site (27-HB-079) in Manchester, New Hampshire. First identified in 1933, a 2022 archaeological investigation established that the site encompasses a large but as-yet-undefined Native American cultural resource in the heart of New Hampshire’s largest city. IAC’s...
"His Beloved Aunt Polly": The Aunt Polly Archaeological Preserve and the Life of the First Sherlock Holmes (2018)
The most renowned stage portrayer of Sherlock Holmes, it was William Gillette who brought Conan Doyle’s detective to life for audiences as well as for every actor that followed in his footsteps. Most importantly, he originated the Holmes "look": the deerstalker hat, the curved pipe, and the Inverness cape. In his day, Gillette was the wealthiest actor in the country. He spared no expense in building his eccentric stone "Castle," perched high above the Connecticut River, and in the creation his...
Historic Genome from the First Baptist Church on Nassau Street: Reflections on Process and Product (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Individuals Known and Unknown: Case Studies from Two Burial Contexts at Colonial Williamsburg" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Community members, stakeholders, and congregation members expressed interest in pursuing DNA testing of the Ancestral Individuals from the Historic First Baptist Church. In collaboration with the Let Freedom Ring! Foundation, successive community engagement meetings were held to explain the...
Historical Ecologies of Botanical Gardens: Archaeobotany at Bartram’s Garden (Philadelphia, PA) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The collection and transport of natural specimens during the long eighteenth century had political, intellectual, and ecological effects. Botanical gardens are key loci to examine the material histories of these processes. Bartram’s Garden, the most prominent botanical garden in North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,...
Historical Palimpsests: Animal-Accumulated Plant Remains in Aboveground Structures (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists periodically encounter concentrations of uncharred plant remains in standing structures. Whether excavated or never actually buried, they are a challenge for interpretation. In addition to identification, the archaeobotanical tasks include determining the agent of deposition and the source and date of the material. This paper considers how...
The History and Archaeology of Burials Excavated from the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg and the Powder Magazine (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Individuals Known and Unknown: Case Studies from Two Burial Contexts at Colonial Williamsburg" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent archaeological discovery of two different burial contexts within Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area has provided the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Department of Archaeology opportunities to employ new strategies for the study and treatment of human remains. Methodologically...
History of Home Health Care: Shifting Practices of Hygiene, Wellness, and Medicine in Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Central New York (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the early colonial context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, understanding wellness practices include a dynamic view of what constitutes medicine, personal hygiene, and healthcare. At this time, European colonizers arrived in central New York, occupying traditional Oneida Land, and brought with them their views on...
History on the Edge: Loss of the Ocean State's Past (2018)
Hurricane Sandy impacted Rhode Island’s south coast on October 29, 2012. Storm surge and wind-driven waves eroded considerable sections of the shore damaging historical and archaeological sites located at the contact between the land and sea. Emergency response and preservation planning archaeological surveys conducted in response to Hurricane Sandy represent the first large scale, systematic attempts to identify and evaluate vulnerable archaeological sites situated along the Rhode Island coast....
Home Is Where the Hearth Is: Narragansett Indian Houses and Homes on the Eve of European Contact (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Site RI 110 on the southern Rhode Island coast has yielded evidence of a large Narragansett Indian settlement occupied between AD 1000 and 1500. Archaeological investigations exposed more than 20 individual *wetus (house sites) within an approximate 0.81 ha (2-acre) portion of the larger site. This paper will describe precontact Narragansett...
Horizons of Color, Shape, and Size: A Stratigraphic Analysis of Glass Beads in Fur Trade-Era Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca) Towns (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. George Hamell’s 1992 paper “The Iroquois and the World’s Rim: Speculations on Color, Culture, and Contact” considers color symbolism in the Seneca (Onöndowa’ga:’) context to contemplate the metaphysics of the colors red, black, and white in Seneca cosmology and material culture. While widely cited within archaeological...
A House Divided: John Brown’s Birthplace and the Path to Freedom (2018)
On December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged following his conviction for murder, slave insurrection, and treason resulting from his raid on a federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia two months prior. Brown anticipated and hoped that his actions might spur a rebellion that would spread throughout the South bringing freedom to all enslaved persons. To some people he was a murderous lunatic; to others he was a martyr for the abolitionist cause; and, to many he was a hero whose actions sparked...
Household Archaeology of a Late Archaic Pit-house in Southern New England (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The focus of this paper is the Warner Site, a Late Archaic Pit-house in Southern New England. The research combines traditional and modern perspectives of household archaeology. Traditionally, archaeologists relied on spatial analysis of activity areas, and ethno-archaeological comparison. However, more recently their has been a concern for overcoming...