North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)
276-300 (385 Records)
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. Fifty new, high-precision AMS radiocarbon dates have been obtained on maize, faunal remains and ceramic residues from 18 pre-contact Iroquoian village sites in northern New York. These dates add significant new information to the chronology of the Iroquoian occupation of the region. Once thought to span AD...
Raw Material Quality and Spatial Patterning at Shawnee-Minisink (2018)
The Shawnee-Minisink Site is one of the most spatially intact Paleoindian sites in eastern North America. Located in the Upper Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania, the site includes an occupation area spanning 60 x 95m which dates to circa 12,900 CalBP. Over 18,000 point-provenienced lithics have been excavated from a 360 meter-squared area. The lithic artifacts consist primarily of the local black flint as well as of various exotic cherts. Because it is well dated, spatially intact, and likely...
Re-discovery of the Jackson Street "Dog’s Nest" in Waterbury, Connecticut: The First-Generation European Immigrant Experience in New England’s Brass City (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Byways to the Past: An American Highway Archaeology Symposium" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Section 106-mandated review associated with two recent transportation projects—one a City-driven US Department of Transportation TIGER grant program designed to stimulate economic development through local road improvements, and the other a Connecticut State Department of Transportation (CTDOT) undertaking involving...
Re-evaluating Butchery Marks from a Mastodon Assemblage Using 3D Geometric Morphometrics and Experimental Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Geometric Morphometrics in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the end of the Pleistocene, North America experienced a mass extinction of megafauna, including proboscideans—mammoths and mastodons. Archaeologists and other scientists continue to debate the role of human predation in these extinctions. Some point to traces of human butchery, such as cut marks and other bone surface modifications (BSM), as...
Re-evaluating Wampum: Wearing Wealth in Native Southern New England (2018)
For more than fifty years, scholars have been debating the role of the shell "currency" known as wampum (wampampeag), which began to circulate among the Native societies of New England in the seventeenth century, stimulated by the Dutch and English fur trade in the region. Following an assessment of current scholarship on the Dutch in New England in the early contact era, this paper further explores the role that wampum played within Native societies as a symbol of wealth, as well as its...
Rebirth of the Schooner Royal Savage: Documenting and Interpreting Disarticulated Ship Remains from the American Revolutionary War (2018)
The 70-ton schooner Royal Savage played a pivotal role as the flagship of Benedict Arnold’s squadron in the American Continental Army’s defense of Lake Champlain during the first year of the American Revolution. Misfortune led to her sinking during the Battle of Valcour Island in 1776, and the wreck was left largely undisturbed in shallow waters for over a century and a half until, in 1935, her remains were rediscovered and salvaged for exhibit in a museum that never materialized. Instead, the...
Recent Archaeology at Fort Necessity National Battlefield: A Cooperative Approach to Cultural Resource Management (2018)
A series of archaeological projects have recently been conducted at Fort Necessity National Battlefield through a Cooperative Agreement between the National Park Service and Indiana University of Pennsylvania. These projects have incorporated geophysical survey, metal detection, systematic shovel testing, and test unit excavation, as well as artifact curation and reporting. Through this partnership, the National Park Service has received an avenue for cost-effective cultural resource...
The Recipes of Disaster in Northern Iroquoia: Integrating Digital Image Analysis into Petrographic Practice (2018)
European contact with Northern Iroquoian communities brought about a series of direct and indirect consequences. These involved European-disease epidemics and a series of migrations that moved people across the landscape as refugees, captives, or conquerors. Ceramic petrography offers a way for archaeologists to understand the impacts such demographic upheavals can have on technological systems. Iroquoian potters often use a recurrent set of rock and sand types that homogenize the paste-type...
Reconstructing the Childhood Diet of an Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century North Carolina Land-Owning Family (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Breastfeeding and weaning practices can impact a child’s immune system development and nutritional status and cause long-term health effects. Here we explore the potential relationship between the weaning process and childhood frailty in a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century land-owning family in coastal North Carolina. The 10 individuals recovered...
Red Metal, Domestic God: Prehistoric Copper Use in the Middle Atlantic Region (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raw metals have been used by prehistoric peoples throughout the world. In the Middle Atlantic region of the United States, the most favored metal was copper. Copper objects of all kinds were seen as holding major religious and ceremonial significance. While there is evidence of...
Refining the Projectile Point Chronology of Western Pennsylvania during the Transitional Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Periods and typologies are artificial boxes that archaeologist use to classify cultures and the artifacts that they used, consequently there is a need to re-evaluate old paradigms as new data become available, particularly when these paradigms are internally inconsistent. This paper looks at the Transitional period in western Pennsylvania and analyzes both the...
Regular Irregularity: Archaeological Evidence at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest for Intersecting Garden Traditions (2018)
The geometric structure of 17th through 19th century designed landscapes in Virginia has been well documented archaeologically. The composition of elements in these landscapes shows how their designers manipulated geometric forms, architectural conventions, and standardized measurements to impose order in the garden. By the end of the 18th century fashionable American gardens tended towards irregular picturesque compositions, however the arrangement of individual garden elements to achieve that...
Reimagining “Archaeological Field Methods”: Insights on Integrating Campus Excavation, Classroom Instruction, and Critical Discussion (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reflects on an archaeological field methods course designed for Gettysburg College and taught in fall 2021. This course, which we will continue to teach in coming years, represents a new offering at the college and meets a growing need to train anthropology majors who wish to focus on archaeology as a career. Students...
Representing Historical Culture on the Big and Small Screen: Success and Challenges from the Algonquian Chesapeake (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tomb Raider to Indiana Jones: Pitfalls and Potential Promise of Archaeology in Pop Culture" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In what ways can archaeology and historical anthropology contribute to popular media representations of the past, and what responsibility do consultants have to ensure accurate portrayals of the peoples and cultures they study? For projects that combine dramatic performance, scholars and...
Resurrecting Mother Washington: The Dissonance of Washington’s Youth (2018)
Powerful messages concerning ideal gender roles feature prominently, if latently, in Washington biographies. Most contemporary narratives suggest that George succeeded despite the "selfish" efforts of his widowed mother. Archaeological investigations at Washington’s childhood home underscore the dissonance between the material culture of his youth and popular stories about his upbringing. This site was wrested from strip mall development thanks to the persistent efforts of preservationists....
Retracing Reconstruction: America’s Second Founding in Archaeological Perspective (2018)
The National Park Service’s release of a theme study on Reconstruction and the creation of Reconstruction National Monument in Beaufort, SC, mark the agency’s commitment to scholarly and public engagement with the complex and continuing legacies of the post-Civil War period. The National Capital Region and the Organization of American Historians are conducting a historic resource study of Reconstruction sites in the region, including urban sites in Washington, DC, and small town and rural sites...
A Return to Wolf Creek, PA (2018)
The Wolf Creek Site (36BT82) in Slippery Rock, PA was last excavated in the early 1990s as part of Slippery Rock University’s (SRU) Field School Program in Archaeology. In this poster, current SRU students evaluate the hypothesis that the site was an historic Kuskuski indigenous camp through a re-analysis of existing collections and additional research at the site.
The Rhode Island Archaeological and Historical Geographic Information System (GIS) Development Project (2018)
In 2017 the Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission teamed up with the University of Rhode Island’s Applied History Laboratory to develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) incorporating the state’s complex assortment of archaeological and historical sites. With support from the National Park Service, their objective is to collect and share the stories of Rhode Island by creating a fully operational and sustainable geospatial database of known archaeological sites and...
“A River Runs through It”: Reinterpreting Late Woodland Settlement Patterns in the Upper Delaware Valley (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rivers are important natural boundary markers that, in modern contexts, commonly form political boundaries and, in archaeological contexts, are commonly used to delineate culture areas. In eastern North America, river drainages are often used for both purposes, which has impacted how archaeologists interpret the archaeological record. In the history of the...
Riverside 2: Urban Archaeology, Landscape Reconstruction, and Public Engagement (2018)
The Riverside 2 site, situated along the original shoreline of the island of Manhattan, presents a unique opportunity for landscape reconstruction within an urban archaeological context. Drawing upon geoarchaeological borings, excavation units, and historical sources, we created a 3D GIS model of the site highlighting its role in the development and transformation of the emerging neighborhood of the Upper West Side in the 19th century. The results of these research efforts have recently been put...
Rocks and A Box: Data Recovery of a Rural Domestic Complex (2018)
Patriot Park North, located in the western side of Fairfax County, is a 67-acre park in which the Fairfax County Park Authority is planning to construct a baseball complex. Fairfax County Park Authority Archaeology and Collections Branch (ACB) conducted a comprehensive Phase I and II survey in Summer 2016, and began Phase III excavation in Fall 2016. An area in the northeastern section of project area contained artifacts from the late third quarter of the eighteenth century. A large feature,...
The Role of Infrastructures in the Production of Multigenerational Inequality in a Historic Black Community: The case of North Brentwood, Maryland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North Brentwood is a historic Black community on the outskirts of Washington, DC. It is the second Black town incorporated in Maryland, and the first suburban one in the state. Its founding is steeped in the exploitation of social and environmental infrastructures to turn a profit...
The Role of Radiographer as a Member of the Arch Street Project Team (2018)
The value of a radiographic examination of skeletal remains is unquestionable. Over the past several decades, technical innovations have resulted in more compact equipment making it easier to set up radiography in the field. Digital imaging receptors have replaced film and software has enabled post-processing image manipulation, further simplifying the logistics and efficiency of field imaging studies. Radiography systems are designed to minimize radiation dose in living patients leading to a...
Sacred Places and Contested Spaces in Maine: the Long Shadow of Colonialist Science in the Light of Repatriation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Nevin site in Maine has become a contested space as Wabanaki people, seeking to repatriate their ancestors, confront archaeologists who adhere to the antiquated postulates of their predecessors. From 1912-1920, Warren K. Moorehead of Phillips Academy’s archaeology department, focused field work on Maine’s...
Safe as Houses: Considerations of Domestic Arrangements and Power Structures (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. In this presentation we each draw on our research in diverse societies to illustrate how house structure, layout, and use all participate in creating, signaling, and reinforcing power structures and relationships, both within and between households, and even between communities. Our geographical areas of research encompass southern Ontario’s...