Frontier (Other Keyword)
1-25 (46 Records)
This paper investigates the general health practices of lower ranking military communities at Fort Davis, Texas, a nineteenth-century U.S. Army instillation. Focusing on an assemblage of glass medicinal vessels collected from sites occupied by enlisted black troops, married soldiers’ families, and army laundresses, this study considers health management practices within the changing notions of health and disease in the context of nineteenth-century medical movements, including temperance,...
Ceramic Differences at the Household/Neighborhood Level at Cerro Mejía: Evidence of a Possible Multiethnic "Mitmaqkuna" Community on the Southern Frontier of the Wari Empire (2017)
This poster will present the results of the analysis of household ceramic assemblages from the slopes of the secondary Wari center Cerro Mejía in the Moquegua Valley. The slopes of Cerro Mejía are divided into distinct domestic neighborhoods by fieldstone walls. Based on differences between these neighborhoods observed during excavations it has been hypothesized that this site was a multiethnic community similar to Inca mitmaqkuna with local inhabitants from throughout the region and possibly...
The Children's Frontier: The Relationship Between the American Frontier Perspective and the Material Culture of Children (2016)
The cultural perspective that developed out of the American West during the expansionary period (1850-1900) is viewed as the product of adults. Characteristics of independence, self-reliance, and gender-role relaxation defined the western individual and group. While the physical and social frontier impacted the adult, their cultural perspective was closely linked to the eastern United States. In contrast, children of the frontier matured in an environment that was at odds with eastern...
Close to the Edge; 19th Century Maya refugees at Tikal, Guatemala. (2015)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the ancient Maya city of Tikal, Guatemala, was briefly re occupied by Yucatec refugees fleeing the Caste War of Yucatan. The Tikal village was poised on the confluence of the frontiers of Mexico, Guatemala and British Honduras, as well as the belligerent Santa Cruz Maya from Yucatan. Despite the limited presence of settled European diasporas in the northern Petén, colonial institutions were still able to reach indigenous communities seeking refuge...
Cultural Brokerage and Pluralism on the Silver Bluff Plantation and Trading Post on the Carolina Frontier (2015)
Irish émigré George Galphin established a trading post on the Carolina frontier in the mid-1700s. His skills working with Native Americans provided him considerable wealth through the deerskin trade. He was widely regarded among the Creek Nation, and he represented the Carolina colony on several occasions in major negotiations with Native American groups. Galphin parlayed his wealth into a considerable plantation on his trading post property, and his plantation at Silver Bluff became one of the...
The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon: Revisiting Unprovenienced Food Ways Artifacts from the Spanish Fleet Wrecks of Eighteenth Century Florida (2017)
The Spanish empire was the first European power to establish permanent settlements on several Caribbean islands and coasts of North America, that flourished as New World colonies and facilitated prosperous trade between the New and Old Worlds. The distance between Spain and the colonies led to differences in the lifestyles and customs of these frontier spaces. Archaeological investigations both on land and underwater have yielded numerous pieces of material culture, reflecting Spanish life and...
An Early 20th-Century Midden from Fort Davis, TX (2017)
This paper presents the preliminary analysis of material recovered from a 1910-1940's domestic midden. Located in Fort Davis, Texas, a former frontier military community, this assemblage dates to roughly forty years after the fort’s closure. The paper will address how the removal of army resources and personnel at the turn of the century lead to a change in community demographics and, in turn, resulted in new modes of economic production and consumption. Moreover, the removed location of the...
An English Merchant in the Maryland Frontier: Making Sense of Addison’s Plantation (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Captain John Addison’s earthfast dwelling on the frontier of colonial Maryland has remained an enigma since it was discovered almost 35 years ago. Before Addison became a militia captain and moved to a plantation on the upper Potomac river, he had been a merchant in the provincial capital of St. Mary’s City. The mundane and worldly objects found in a cellar and around the dwelling show a...
Evidence of Frontier Commerce Along the Mississippi River in Eastern Missouri and Western Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Iliniwek to Ste Genevieve: Early Commerce along the Mississippi" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Despite being in conflict with England during the late 1700s and early 1800s, French/Spainish Colonial site and early American sites reflect the improtance of English goods on the local economies. But these goods were not accepted wholesale, but altered to fit life on the frontier.
"Facilitating Frontier Trade: Supply Logistics at Fort San Marcos de Apalache, a Spanish Outpost in the Borderlands of La Florida, 1677-1796" (2015)
By the end of the eighteenth-century, the boundaries of Spain’s La Florida territory were informally defined by a series of outposts ranging west from St. Augustine to Pensacola. These outposts were strategically placed in order to secure supplies and regulate trade while maintaining Spanish-Indian relations in the territorial borderlands. Within these borderlands lay the fortified port of San Marcos de Apalache, initially established in 1677 in order to monitor the shipment of supplies from...
Fauna and Frontiersmen: Environmental Change in Historic Maine (2017)
Contemporary landscapes represent the accumulation of past human activity and changes in environmental composition. In the case of Maine, however, dense forests largely conceal the once agrarian landscape. To unravel the complex history of Maine lands, I consider how pioneer perceptions and activities (e.g., settlement, cultivation, or hunting) since the seventeenth century impacted and changed the "nature" of the frontier. Focusing on fauna in particular, I examine historical accounts to...
Fertility, water and rock art on the Inka imperial fringes: The valley of Mariana and Samaipata (2017)
Samaipata was one of the largest centers of the Southeastern Inka frontier. Multifunctional in nature, it was an important advance point toward the tropical lowlands. Despite the intrusions of the Guaraní-Chiriguanos, this region witnessed complex processes of settlement reorganization. This was particularly the case of the fertile valley of Mairana, an important breadbasket of this frontier outpost. Occupied by the Mojocoya and Gray Ware archaeological cultures, their inhabitants produced...
Food and a Frontier Community: History and Faunal Analysis on Samuel H. Smith Site in Nauvoo, Illinois (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontier and Settlement Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Nauvoo, Illinois is a small town, known today as a summer tourist destination because of rich religious history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and the splintering factions such as the Restoration Branches and Community of Christ churches. Archaeological excavations in Nauvoo began in the 1970s and continues today as a...
Freedom in Florida: Maroons Making Do in the Colonial Borderland (2018)
We define Maroons by their overt resistance; theirs was one of the most extreme forms of anti-slavery resistance in the Americas and for many scholars is representative of the human desire to be free. Maroons removed themselves from the places in which they were enslaved and created new places apart from this brutal existence. However, reducing our understanding of Maroon life to a history of domination and resistance limits the scope of Maroon agency and values certain forms of action, such as...
Freedom on the Frontier: The Archaeology of the Black Regulars of Fort Davis (2017)
In the late 1860s, the frontier army provided opportunities for black Civil War veterans, displaced northern black workers and formerly enslaved men to develop careers. During the Civil War, black soldiers had successfully won the fight for equal pay, and the military was a rare space that offered regular pay, educational opportunities, and limited opportunity for upward mobility. The segregated cavalry and infantry units of the black regulars, however, quickly became posted in some of the...
From Seafaring to Settling Downeast: Town Formation and the Eastern Frontier Landscape (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The primary goal of settlement ecology is to understand how and why people decide to settle a particular landscape. Although often applied to farming communities, this approach can be applied to any society because all settlement patterns are produced through human decision-making. Adopting a settlement ecology lens, I examine how...
A Frontier River Town: Preliminary Results from Newport Site (36IN188) (2022)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Newport village was founded circa 1787 to facilitate movement of people and goods from Pennsylvania’s early road system to its riverine highways. The town was largely abandoned by 1840, but contained several taverns, residences, and blacksmith shops, as well as infrastructure for loading boats on, and crossing over, the adjacent Conemaugh River. At its height, approximately 30 families...
Gender And Adaptation On The Texas Frontier (2017)
The Biry House in Castroville, Texas is an archaeological site which presents a unique perspective on frontier life through the eyes of Alsatian immigrants who were thrust into a strange and sometimes hostile new environment. This study examines the ways in which the frontier setting may have affected gender roles and daily responsibilities. It will also examine how these might have changed over time as the residents of the Biry House adapted and settled into their surroundings over successive...
Hanna’s Town: The Site, Its History, and Its Archaeology (2016)
Hanna’s Town, the first English court west of the Allegheny Mountains, was an important political and economic center in western Pennsylvania from 1769 until it was burned by a party of Seneca and English in 1782. After its destruction, the site was farmed for 150 years before it was acquired by Westmoreland County and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Over the past four decades a variety of professional, academic, and amateur archaeologists have excavated the site, generating...
Identities in Flux at an American Frontier Fort: A Study of 19th Century Army Laundresses at Fort Davis, Texas (2016)
As spaces of translation, frontiers and boundaries are the ideal location to study personhood and identity as inhabitants of these landscapes constantly experience and actively negotiate between the multiple live realities that are shaped by often conflicting ideologies. I propose the use of third-space as a framework for understanding the fragmentation and fluidity of experience in the American frontier during the 19th century. Using materials related daily life at a multi-ethnoracial, western...
Improving Their Lot: Cultivating Communities & Landscape Change in Maine, 1760-1820 (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Frontier landscapes are often portrayed either as ripe for settlement and replete with resources, or as dangerous, harsh peripheries that pioneers adapted to. Given factors like harsh winters and warfare, the latter portrayal dominates narratives of the Eastern Frontier during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To interrogate notions of a largely intractable frontier...
Inka Frontier Political Economy: The Kallawayas and Yampara (2016)
In this paper I will evaluate the political economy of the ancient Inka imperial frontier in order to understand the ways in which competing border lords affiliated themselves to the empire, including associated processes of social competition, specialized production and changes in the indigenous local trajectories . In doing so, I will explore two Inka frontier segments. The first is located in the Yampara territory in the Southeastern region, and the second, in the central frontier in the...
Insights into Nineteenth Century US Westward Expansion from the River Basin Surveys Collections. (2015)
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Louisiana Purchase significantly expanded the United States. For decades thereafter, the Missouri River was the main transportation route for US interests in the new northwestern regions of its territory. Consequently, many sites related to US colonialist expansion in the form of fur trade posts, military forts, Indian Agencies, and early US settlement, were located along the Missouri River. Several of these sites were investigated during the River...
Island Improvement: Cultivating Change in the Eastern Frontier Landscape of Deer Isle, Maine (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Islands of Time (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological studies have long highlighted rapid and radical human transformation of island ecosystems through colonization. Given their generally more limited biodiversity and size, the impact of human activity is often easier to discern on islands than on the mainland. In this paper, I examine human interaction with the island ecosystem...
Landscapes Of Liminality: Trail Of Tears Disbandment Sites In Indian Territory (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes Above and Below in Southern Contexts (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During the 19th century, the U.S. government enacted a program of forced removal of Native Americans from their southeastern homelands to an area west of the Mississippi River known as Indian Territory. The end-points of the migration trails were known as Disbandment Sites where the tribes temporarily camped...