North America: Northeast and Midatlantic (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (385 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science Outside the Ivory Tower: Perspectives from CRM" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tuners Falls Gorge region of the Connecticut River Valley is composed of a dynamic post-glacial alluvial landscape which contains extensive Pleistocene and Holocene deposits as well as an abundance of Pre-Contact archaeological sites spanning the last 12,000 years before present. This paper presents a new...
Tutelo Resettlement in the Cayuga Heartland: Haudenosaunee Approach to Refugees (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tutelos were driven out of their homelands in North Carolina and Virginia by land-grabbing Europeans. The Tutelos fled to refugee settlements in Pennsylvania along with other displaced Native Americans from diverse Indian nations. In 1753, the Tutelos were offered sanctuary with the Cayugas, one of the Six Nations of the...
A Twitch or a Wink: A Search for Meaning in Coins, Cuffs, and Pottery from a Rural Virginia Assemblage (2018)
There are countless ways to interpret archaeological assemblages. One can take a purely functionalist approach. Plates are for eating and cups for drinking; fasteners keep clothing from falling. However, confronted with a range of symbolically charged artifacts from a Late Colonial through Early Republic period site in Northern Virginia, one is tempted to draw upon our anthropological origins to find meaning. A cuff link commemorating the fox hunt as well as coins and pottery bearing classical...
Unbounding the Land: Reinterpreting Late Woodland Lenape Villages in the Upper Delaware Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The traditional definition of Indigenous villages in the Eastern Woodlands can be considered synonymous with the archaeological site. Villages are bounded discrete entities that often curiously mirror historic or current property lines. While presumed agricultural field areas may be considered in these conceptions, villages, hamlets, farmsteads, camps, and...
Understanding Early Archaic Stone Tool Production Practices: A Pilot Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through Funk’s (1993) research into the Upper Susquehanna Valley Region in New York, several important Early Archaic (10,000-8,000BP) archaeological sites were uncovered from Wells Bridge, New York. One of these Early Archaic sites named the Johnsen #3 site contains multiple Kirk horizon occupations in stratified deposits. Early Archaic sites are still rare in...
Unearthing the Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Irish Immigrants in the "City of Homes": A Case Study from Elfreth’s Alley, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2018)
In contrast to many other American cities, which developed distinctive ethnic neighborhoods during the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s European immigrant populations were largely dispersed throughout the city during this period. Irish immigrants lived in every ward of Philadelphia as newcomers from various European countries settled along alleyways and courtyards throughout the city. Using Elfreth’s Alley National Historic Landmark as a case study, this paper argues that the dispersion,...
Urban Archaeology at the Harrison Avenue Residences: A “Glimpse” into Immigrant Communities in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Massachusetts (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intact cultural deposits providing a “glimpse” into domestic life in rapidly transitioning urban communities, such as Boston, are rare archaeologically. The constant, natural movement of people in city landscapes complicates results of excavations at these urban archaeological sites. Investigations in 2020 and 2021 by SWCA Environmental Consultants at the...
Urban Renewal, Historic Preservation, and Indigenous Erasure (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban renewal and historical preservation are implicated in Indigenous erasure. Focusing on Providence, Rhode Island, I argue that the geographies of race and class of mid-20th century urban renewal have a longer-term history in 19th century land clearance projects. Among the disproportionate number of nonwhites affected were the city’s Indigenous people...
Using ArcMap to Create a Database for an Historic Cemetery in Northeast Pennsylvania (2018)
As a program designed to integrate and analyze geospatial data, ArcMap has the potential for broad archaeological application. Here we employ ArcMap to create a database for research and management of the historic cemetery at Stoddartsville, a 19th century milling village built along the upper Lehigh River in northeast Pennsylvania. Specifically, we use ArcMap to integrate: (1) spatial data from a total station survey of individual grave markers and cemetery boundaries; (2) descriptive data from...
Using Debitage Analysis, MANA, and Landscape Utilization to Illuminate the Archaic-Early Woodland Transition in Western New York (2018)
Recent CRM fieldwork in western New York by SUNY Buffalo Archaeological Survey has afforded the opportunity to address questions of how people, technology, and the environment related from newly discovered sites which span thousands of years. One of the most fruitful avenues of research is in the examination of the transition from the Late and Transitional Archaic to the Early Woodland, a period in which it is suggested there was dramatic linked cultural and environmental change, where multiple...
Using Historical African American Scholars’ Writings to Understand the Materiality of Nineteenth-Century African America Communities in Annapolis, Maryland (2023)
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. In exploring how archaeologists can apply concepts and practices from Black Studies in our investigations of the materiality of daily life in the past, the easiest theories to see archaeologically may be those promoted by theorists who were contemporary to the people we are studying. The forerunners of Black Studies today, scholars...
VAMPing Up Stewardship in the National Parks: Preliminary Lessons from the Volunteer Archeological Monitoring Program (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2021–2022, the Northeast Archeological Resources Program (NARP) began partnering with five National Park units to pilot a new initiative: the design and facilitation of a region-wide volunteer archeological site monitoring program. Working with park staff and stakeholders at the...
The Venture Smith Site: An Eighteenth-Century African American Homestead in Haddam, Connecticut (2018)
The Venture Smith homestead is an important eighteenth-century rural black archaeological site with a remarkable level of integrity, associated with a person significant to American history. Born about 1729, Broteer Furro was an African prince abducted and sold into slavery when only six years old. Thirty years a slave, he purchased his and his family’s freedom and became a prosperous mariner-merchant-farmer and benefactor to fellow blacks. At his death in 1805, he owned over 100 acres of...
The VerHage Site: A Late Archaic Seasonal Village located in Wallkill Drainage of Southeastern New York. (2018)
In summer 2017 Landmark Archaeology, Inc. conducted data recovery excavations at four Late Archaic sites in southeastern New York within the Wallkill drainage near the town of Goshen. Excavations at the VerHage Site, a Late Archaic Lamoka Phase (ca. 3000-2500 BC) site and the largest of the four investigated sites, identified pit features, post-molds and house patterns, yielded a large lithic assemblage, and found glacial erratics used for food processing and tool production. The recovery of a...
Walking a Trail Like Reading a Book (2023)
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. Histories are typically drawn up linearly, with events laid out in chronological order and often separated into periods of Early, Middle, and Late to illustrate the processes that make one event lead to another. But when you walk through your hometown, the landscape is a text written with the stories of one’s life, and...
Walking the Line: Settlement Patterning in Interior Southern New England as Identified by Utility Corridor Survey (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although restricted to confined, linear study corridors, archaeological surveys of new and existing utility easements provide an opportunity to take a closer look at Pre-Contact settlement patterning across the interior regions of Southern New England. Cultural Resource Management (CRM) identification surveys and site evaluations within these linear project...
The Walter Landgraf Soapstone Quarry State Archaeological Preserve: Honoring a Man and Preserving a Site (2018)
Soapstone was a valuable raw material for the production of items used in food preparation, including cooking vessels, in eastern North America before the development and spread of ceramic technology. Durable, waterproof, fireproof, nearly impervious to thermal shock and, at the same time, soft and very easy to extract and then sculpt into a desired shape the demand for this raw material was high but supply was geographically constrained. Designated a Connecticut State Archaeological Preserve in...
Warehousing the Past: Are We Doing the Right Thing? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The cultural resource management (CRM) industry, emerging from the passage of landmark national and subsequent state-level legislation, is arguably one of the largest generators of archaeological collections in North America. Project-specific deadlines, budgetary constraints, variations in state agency guidelines,...
Warren Grove Survey and Evaluation Project: A Study Of Historic Charcoal Production Within The Pine Barrens Of New Jersey. (2018)
Throughout two field seasons (2015-2017), the University of Montana and GAI Consultants (UM-GAI) conducted a Section 110 archaeological survey and evaluation project at Warren Grove Gunnery Range (WGGR), Burlington County, New Jersey (9,911 acres). The UM-GAI team completed archaeological survey of all accessible areas of the range making it one of the most expansive survey projects within the New Jersey Outer Coastal Plain. The study identified and evaluated a total of ten sites and recommended...
Washington's Board of Public Works and the Burial of Black Georgetown (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. Cultural resource management projects in and around Washington, DC, have documented the episodic and nearly complete displacement of the city’s first exurban Black communities in areas that would become metropolitan suburbs. This recurring theme illuminates a posture of...
The Water and the Land: How the Private Sector and Government Work Together to Plan for Climate Change Impacts to Cultural Resources (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Triage: Prioritizing Responses to Climate Change Impacts on Archaeological Resources" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Government, inclusive of the local, state, and national levels, is the largest aggregate landholder in the United States and has under its direct jurisdiction the largest array of cultural resources in the country, not to mention the cultural resources under jurisdictional oversight. As such,...
Wealth, Status, and Agricultural Production at a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Farmstead in Upstate 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. We examine a sample of surface-survey-collected ceramics from the Cook Farmstead, which was in operation in Fenner, NY, during the second half of the nineteenth century. After the farm stopped operation around the turn of the century, the house remained in that location until the late 1930s, when it was moved a mile down the road. Since that time, the area...
A Well-Travelled Route: 7,500 Years of Occupation along the Missisquoi River, Northwestern Vermont—The Vermont Agency of Transportation Route 78 Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vermont Route 78 follows the Missisquoi River into its floodplain and out to Lake Champlain, and in doing so crosses a rich archaeological landscape. Since 1999, archaeological excavations have been undertaken in advance of safety upgrades to this major east-west route, and although necessarily a narrow slice along the road corridor, the results document...
The Western Gateway: Identification and Recommendation of the Hoosac Tunnel National Register Historic District (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 Hoosac Tunnel is a 7.6 km long railroad tunnel within Hoosac Mountain located in northwestern Massachusetts, extending between the towns of Florida and North Adams. The project was deemed of utmost value to encourage efficient trade between opposite sides of the Hudson River, which is why, regardless of its obstacles, the...
What a Pain in the Ash….Traveling that Bumpy Road (2018)
How did man, horse and wagon traverse the muck and marshes that so often surrounded America’s earliest coastal towns? Without the benefit of iron, steel, and concrete, the 18th century road builder could span muddy stretches with a corduroy road. This road type was made by placing whole, sand-covered logs perpendicular to the direction of the road in low or swampy areas. The corduroy road was an essential technique for establishing networks between communities and critical resources. The Ash...