New England (Other Keyword)
1-21 (21 Records)
In 1919, the production of intoxicating beverages was legally prohibited in the United States. However, excavations in the 1970s at the John Bradford House in Kingston, MA indicate that its inhabitants at the turn-of-the-century were consuming large quantities of wine, champagne, and hard liquor. These bottles were consumed and then discarded at a time when the consumption of alcohol was considered immoral by the American middle class. This paper will explore the meaning behind the presence of...
Ancient Vermont (1977)
The authors of this paper were invited to attend a conference on 'Ancient Vermont' held at Castleton in Vermont in October 1977,and to examine and comment upon the 'evidence' for the extensive occupation of New England by Celts and others in the first or second millennium BC as propounded by Professor L. B. Fell of Harvard University. The 'evidence' consists broadly of supposed 'Ogam' and 'proto-Ogam' inscriptions on rocks and stones and megalithic stone structures, some of the structures...
Archaeology Underfoot on College Hill: Education, Outreach, and Historical Archaeology at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) (2015)
Since 2012, a course on the Archaeology of College Hill at Brown University has undertaken a program of research and education – including pedestrian survey, geophysical survey, and excavation – to investigate the historic Quiet Green in the heart of the university campus. This class serves the dual purposes of promoting the material history of Brown during the university’s 250th anniversary celebration and educating undergraduates in the methods, theories, and practices of historical...
A Bayesian Approach to the Paleoindian Colonization of the Northeastern US (2016)
Research on the Paleoindian colonization of the northeastern US suffers from numerous chronological problems. These problems are exacerbated by the use of summed probability distributions, which do not take into account the unique sampling issues and specific probability distributions of individual dates and their particular relationships to archaeological contexts. This paper introduces a Bayesian statistical approach to clarify some of these problems and raise new questions about early...
Beyond a Stone’s Throw from the Lithic Source: New Investigations of the Paleoindian Component at the Templeton Site in Western Connecticut (2018)
2017 marks the 40th anniversary of Roger Moeller’s initial excavation of Templeton, the first Paleoindian site systematically studied in Connecticut. New excavations at Templeton were conducted in 2016 and 2017 to further document the Paleoindian component of the site. This presentation reports on the results of the new excavations and the reanalysis of the Paleoindian materials recovered Moeller.
A Bibliography of Northeast Historical Archaeology, 1987–2006 (2006)
Twenty years have passed since the first CNEHA bibliography (Starbuck 1986), which included nearly all historical archaeology literature published within the area served by CNEHA up through the fall of 1987. The original CNEHA bibliography consisted of 1,884 citations, reflecting at least 60 years of research in the 7 provinces, 13 states, and the District of Columbia that are represented by CNEHA. In 1987 it may have appeared that traditional publishing would decline and be replaced by the...
Chebacco: The Boat that Built Essex (2018)
Built to save a struggling New England fishing industry, the Chebacco boats were an amalgamation of ship features that rose to prominence after the time American Revolution. This is the boat that gave Chebacco Parish of Masschusettes, the power and influence to become the famous shipbuilding town of Essex. This talk will briefly cover the history and development, the features that make Chebacco boats unique, and finally, we will look at the Coffin's Beach site which shows the example of a...
Documenting Variability Among a Geographic Cluster of Paleoindian Sites on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation in Southeastern Connecticut (2015)
Over the past thirty years, many Paleoindian sites have been identified near the Great Cedar Swamp on the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation in Southeastern Connecticut. Examination of isolated Paleoindian lithics and three excavated sites, Hidden Creek, Ohomowauke, and Raspberry Trail highlights Paleoindian site variability on the local landscape. The comparison of the lithic technological organization, intra-site patterning, and age of occupations among the sites provides insight into the...
Domesticity Through Decoration: An Analysis of Early 19th-Century Ceramic Decorative Motifs from the Boston-Higginbotham House, Nantucket, MA. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "An Archaeology Of Freedom: Exploring 19th-Century Black Communities And Households In New England." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Boston’s of Nantucket, a family of African and Native American descent, greatly impacted the development of the free black community of New Guinea during the late 18th-19th centuries. During the 1820s-1830s, Mary Boston-Douglass, a woman who married into the Boston family,...
An Illustrative Case Study for an Archaic House Structure in Southern New England: Insights from the Halls Swamp Site and Beyond (2016)
The Halls Swamp Site represents an Archaic and Woodland Period multi-component Native American occupation in Kingston, Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Excavation of just two percent of the Halls Swamp Site yielded over 24,000 artifacts and 78 cultural features, including evidence of an Archaic Period house structure. Archaic Period dwellings have largely gone unnoticed in southern New England due to poor preservation conditions and the ephemeral nature of these features. However, a concentration...
Intra-Site Spatial Patterning of the Templeton Paleoindian Site in Northwestern Connecticut (2017)
The Paleoindian occupation at Templeton is reconsidered based on research conducted since the site’s initial study by Dr. Roger Moeller in the late 1970s. This poster describes the intra-site spatial patterning at Templeton gleaned from the 2016 excavations at the site and the reanalysis of the Paleoindian materials recovered by Moeller. Aspects of intra-site spatial patterning ascertained via ground penetrating radar surveys of the landform, lithic microwear analyses, micromorphological...
The Mystic Schooners of the 20th Century: The Legacy of the Last Sailing Merchant Vessels (2016)
At the dawn of the 20th century, a revival swept the ports of New England ushering in an era of wooden shipbuilding not seen on the Atlantic coast since the Civil War. These vessels, schooner rigged for the coastal trade, were built for bulk, ferrying cargo from southern ports and the Caribbean to the industrial powerhouses of Boston and New York. A builder, based in Mystic, Connecticut, joined in and produced a number of vessels that shared more than the same port of origin; nearly half met...
Native Interactions and Economic Exchange: A Re-evaluation of Plymouth Colony Collections (2016)
This research furthers our understanding of colonial-Native relations by identifying and analyzing artifacts that indicate interaction between Native Americans and English settlers in Plymouth Colony collections. This project explores the nature of these interactions, exposing material culture’s role in both social and economic exchanges. Selected 17th-century collections were excavated in modern Plymouth, Massachusetts, and nearby Marshfield and Kingston. My examination includes identifying...
New Directions for Pollen and Phytolith Analysis in Historic New England (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Avenues in the Study of Plant Remains from Historical Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Microbotanical analysis has been historically underutilized at colonial-era sites in New England. This talk will discuss the use of pollen and phytolith at three historic sites in coastal Massachusetts: Brewster Gardens and Burial Hill Plymouth; the Doane Family Homestead in Eastham; and Ben Luce Pond on...
On Manitou and Consanguineal Respect between Human and Animal Societies in Southern New England (2017)
By definition, hunter-gatherer societies rely upon few, if any, domesticated animals. Domestication is counter to many hunter-gatherer worldviews, where human and non-human animals are seen as sharing a literal biological connection. From here, in essence, domestication is akin to slavery. Examples from the ethnohistoric and archaeological records will be used to illustrate how local Native groups in southern New England treated wild and domestic animals and animal remains in culturally...
The Paleoindian Period At Mashantucket (2016)
Multiple Paleoindian sites have been identified during the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center’s (MPMRC) long-term study of Paleoindian occupations around the Mashantucket Pequot Reservation. The recovery of multiple Paleoindian sites affords the opportunity to study Paleoindian lifeways around the Great Cedar Swamp at Mashantucket. This paper provides an overview of the Paleoindian research conducted by the MPMRC and attempts to reconstruct Paleoindian land use of the Mashantucket...
Shifting Sands: Evolving Educational Programming to Support Maritime Archaeological Research in Massachusetts (2018)
In 2015, the first accredited maritime archaeological field school took place under a partnership between Salem State University, NPS, NAS, the PAST Foundation, SEAMAHP, and the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Resources. Examining a 19th-century schooner on the North Shore of Massachusetts, this field school launched two successive years of educational programs that spring boarded deeper research into historical, environmental, and methodological questions, for collaborating scholars. This...
Small Stemmed in the Northeast: Technology and Cultural Continuity in the Late Archaic (2015)
Small Stemmed projectile points were made and utilized across a wide area of eastern North America, and are one of the most frequent point types found in Archaic contexts in New England. Recent excavations have shed new light on associations with features, dated contexts, and other artifact types. This paper looks at radiocarbon dating of Small Stemmed features across southern New England to document the connections between this point type and others during this complex time period. These...
A Snook Kill Phase Site in Marshfield, Massachusetts (2015)
Archaeological and Historical Services Inc. recently excavated a rich Snook Kill phase site in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Dated features and diagnostic tools from the site indicate a radiocarbon age of 3500 years ago. Artifacts were recovered beneath a horizon of peat that had formed over the past 1500 years in this near-coastal setting. The strikingly pristine site documents a complete lithic artifact production, use and discard sequence, from the reduction of rhyolite cobbles into carefully...
Style Versus Occupation II: A Broader View of the Narrow Stemmed Tradition in Southern New England (2017)
Artifact types are often used as markers of social boundedness or "ethnicity" although the relationship between typology and culture remains a very complex and poorly understood issue. Projectile points from the Narrow-stemmed Tradition (also called the Small Stemmed Tradition) are ubiquitous in southern New England and can rarely be attributed to a single component Native American archaeological site. Attempts have been made to seriate this style of point with varying success, given its style...
Two-Spirits or Changing Gender Roles? An Investigation of Mortuary Remains in Southern New England (2017)
Funerary objects from three seventeenth century burial grounds were statistically associated with biological sex categories to discern what, if any, burial items were related to the sex of an individual. A handful of material objects proved to be almost exclusively associated with either sex; what also appeared from this analysis was the discovery of two burial assemblages that possessed a mixture of what are believed to be solely male or female burial goods. Utilizing archaeological and...