Identity (Other Keyword)
226-233 (233 Records)
The towns of Colfax and Weimar in Placer County, California, were once the location of seven different tuberculosis sanatoriums, both privately-operated and government-operated. The Weimar Joint Sanatorium had patients from fifteen counties in California, and operated in collaboration with six nearby, privately owned sanatoriums. During the Vietnam War, the buildings and landscape housed Vietnamese refugees, and today it is used is a religious health institute. This paper explores memory and...
What Trash Tells Us: A Look at Fort Davis's 20th-Century Population (2017)
Following closure of the military post in 1891, the racially and socially diverse community that had grown around Fort Davis lost one of its main economic resources. In the decades after, the civilian population saw a shift of resources from predominately military issued goods to items brought in by rail through the neighboring communities of Alpine and Marfa. This paper analyzes a select assemblage of metal, ceramic, and faunal materials excavated from an early twentieth-century domestic trash...
When All You Have are Artifacts: Reassessing Intrinsic Issues in Assigning Cultural Identity to Artifact Assemblages in Colonial South Carolina (2016)
Just several years after the 1670 founding of Charles Towne, occupants of Barbados, England, and France seized opportunities for land and prosperity. By the 1680s, English settlers from Barbados began to settle the area along the Wando River, encroaching on land designated for the remaining indigenous population. Researchers and investigators examining archaeological sites do so with the aim to reconstruct the history about past landscapes. Inherently, archaeologists assign cultural identity to...
‘When the King breaks a town, he builds another’: Space, Politics, and Gerrymandered Identities in Precolonial Dahomey (2015)
Scholars have long argued that sub-Saharan Africa in the era of the slave trade was dominated by ethnically distinct communities whose members underwent the process of creolization after being displaced to the New World. Archaeological research across West Africa, however, is challenging this notion, revealing how West African cultural identity transformed in response to intersecting economic, political, and cultural forces unleashed by trans-Atlantic commerce. This paper examines the political...
Who was Maria Grann? Balancing Archives of Narratives and Facts of a Contested Sámi(?) Skull (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper Bodies: Excavating Archival Tissues and Traces", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. One of the late nineteenth-century skulls in the anatomical collection at Lund University (Sweden) belongs to a middle adult woman (28-45 years of age); according to the archival documentation (including writing on the skull) she was a 28-year-old Sámi woman named Maria Grann. Media reports in Sweden have generally...
With This Bone I Thee Make (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "More than Pots and Pipes: New Netherland and a World Made by Trade" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Invisible yet famous, a small number of enslaved Africans were brought to Fort Orange in the seventeenth century. Their presence is known yet no objects have been tied to them. This paper explores the possibility that some worked bone objects made from domesticated mammals were crafted by enslaved Africans....
Women weaving individual and collective identities in Kosrae, Micronesia (1824-1924) (2017)
In Oceania, archaeologists have examined perishable ethnographic items to gain fresh insights into past people’s identities. This paper presents a new analysis of 19th and 20th century Micronesian loincloths from European and American museums, explaining how their construction offers insights into islanders’ socio-political identities during a period of rapidly intensifying global interconnectivity. On the island Kosrae, Micronesia, tol (loincloths) were the primary garment of every polity...
You Wanna Take This Outside?: Porches, Parkitecture, and the Creation of an American Identity (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Outdoor space in mid-to-late 19th-century America grew into a force that drove recreation and tourism across the United States. From porch spaces to parks, Americans began spending increasing amounts of time outside. Following common 19th-century themes, Americans used these spaces to boost a Nationalist agenda meant to express and reify class, gender, and racial divisions. These...