North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Plekhov.

While New England is today a mostly forested landscape, up to 80% of this region was deforested during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for agricultural land-use. As the rural economy of New England shifted to a more urban and industrial one, much of this agricultural land was abandoned and subsequently reforested. The vestiges of this once rural landscape can now best be seen in LiDAR imagery, in which features such as stonewalls are particularly well discernible. Though the spatial and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Telep.

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. In partnership with the South Mountain Research Corps, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) has had a unique opportunity to highlight archaeological resources on public lands. Amanda Telep, a second-year graduate student at IUP, received a grant from the South Mountain Research program to conduct an archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Swisher. Jonathan Burns.

In 2017, the coupling of a Federally funded transportation project with an undergraduate archaeological field school, and Applied Archaeology thesis research, produced an innovative approach to archaeological mitigation. The project funded a Phase III investigation of a lithic workshop site—the James W. Hatch Site. The site was occupied during the Early Archaic Period, and attracted occupations focused on jasper reduction at a location 1.2 kilometers from a quarry. The site produced over 9,000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Griswold. Joel Dukes. Margaret Wilkes.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Geophysical and Geospatial Research in the National Parks" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Battlefield archaeology was conducted in the Barber Wheatfields at Saratoga National Historical Park for two seasons in 2019 and 2021. This battlefield was the catalyst for the second battle of Saratoga, colloquially known as the Battle for Bemis Heights, and ultimately led to an American victory over the British...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siobhan Hart.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While many of New England’s memorials contribute to the false narrative of Native American disappearance, a growing number of heritage sites create and promote public memories that counter these myths. In some instances, Native American communities and heritage professionals work collaboratively to use objects and landscapes to challenge erasures and re-shape...

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 John Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Democratizing Heritage Creation: How-To and When" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Delaware Department of Transportation has a project that will have an adverse effect on two National Register-eligible bridges in south Wilmington through their demolition. This location is within a disadvantaged and predominantly Black community with proud history, as one of the bridges is named for a state legislator from the...

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 Katherine Wagner. Aaron Lovejoy.

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. Excavations at the First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, VA, revealed 62 burials on the west half of the lot behind the early nineteenth-century church. While three burials were chosen by the descendant community to be excavated, they also elected to leave the remaining 59 burials undisturbed,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dianna Doucette.

This is an abstract from the "Power to the People: Cultural Resource Investigations along Utility Lines Giving a Voice to Past and Present Communities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several large-scale cultural resource management surveys conducted ahead of utility line construction in Massachusetts have shed new light on the history of Native American subsistence procurement practices and settlement patterning along two of the most significant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Riccio. Erin A. Steinwachs.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will present the field methods, analyses, and results of recent Phase II archaeological investigations of a precontact-period site located on Sicily Island (36LA69) within the Pennsylvania side of the Lower Susquehanna River. A discussion of research themes – including lithic sourcing and technology, chronology, settlement patterns, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carter Clinton.

This is an abstract from the "Community Engaged Bioarchaeology: Centering Descendants" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on redefining ethical frameworks in bioarchaeology and anthropological genetics, particularly when working with African American communities. Utilizing a “shared authority” approach, the talk argues for the community’s role as not merely subjects but active collaborators and decision-makers. Case studies...

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...