Frontier (Other Keyword)
26-46 (46 Records)
The physical landscape of the Florida Keys and its associated reef tract has forced a series of unique adaptations to manage the risk of utilizing the area. The study of human adaptation and modification of the area through the progress of systematic survey, the establishment of an Aids to Navigation (ATON) network, and the further development of maritime infrastructure could be interpreted as a means to measure human exploration and utilization of the maritime frontier. Furthermore, it...
Miner’s Delight: An Investigation into the Material Culture of Social Drugs on the Frontier (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The early 19th century saw an influx of settlers, miners, and profiteers from both the established United States and foreign nations into the western frontier in search of wealth through the mining and smelting of lead. What they brought with them were consumption...
"Monarchs of All They See": Identity and the Afterlives of the Frontier in Fort Davis, Texas (2018)
Fort Davis, a frontier fort in far west Texas tasked with protecting the Overland Trail to California and fighting Comanche, closed in 1891, leaving behind the ethnically and financially diverse town that had grown up around it. This community struggled to redefine itself economically in the years following the fort’s closure, only to find a new lease on life in the first decades of the 20th century as a tourist destination. In this paper, I examine manifestations of intersectional identity in...
Moving beyond Cowboys and Indians: Rethinking Colonial Dichotomies into Messy "Frontiers" (2017)
As part of its etymological "baggage," the term "frontier" evokes thoughts of action and excitement, conquering the unknown, and transforming the untamed and uncivilized into the managed and controlled. In North American colonial contexts this perspective privileges the experiences of European, colonizers at the interpretive expense of the multitude of other social actors (e.g., enslaved Africans, women, Native Americans) whose practices equally constituted the colonial project. In our paper, we...
Neutral Ground and Contraband: Trade and Identity on the Frontier (2017)
Béxar’s location on the frontier coupled with stifling colonial economic policies prompted Tejanos to look to the east for economic opportunities and initiated an active contraband market during the colonial period that became a robust import economy during the Mexican period. While many have focused on the implications of the relationships created through these frontier markets, there has been less of an effort to examine the goods that formed the basis of this trade and the roles that the...
Parasols, Picnics, and Pavillions: Feminization of the Florida Frontier (2020)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This poster analyzes how the Federal army and its camp followers imposed a white American identity, specifically a feminine identity, on the Florida frontier in the early 19th century. To answer this question, I used archival and archaeological data from Fort Brooke, Tampa to better understand the ways that women contributed to the drive to civilize the borders of the new United States....
Preserving the Peripheries and Excavating at the Edges: An Examination of the Drinking Spaces at Two Protected Frontier Sites (2016)
Frontier spaces are busy, dynamic zones of meeting, and change, yet often in the realm of research and preservation, these locales are given peripheral attention in favor of more well-established metropoles. I examine two sites: Smuttynose Island, in the Isles of Shoals, Maine, and Highland City, Montana. Thanks to the efforts of the Smuttynose Island Steward Program and the United States Forest Service (especially the Passport in Time Program), these two frontier resource-extraction communities...
Provenience Versus Richness in Collection Analysis, An Example from Historic Hanna’s Town (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Historic Hanna’s Town collection consists of artifacts from an 18th-centruy town in western Pennsylvania excavated both 40 years ago by amateurs and two years ago by closely supervised field schools. The earlier collections often lack precise provenience information but represent a...
Reconsidering the First Generations of Colonial Encounters in the Lower Delaware Valley of the North American Middle Atlantic (2017)
The Middle Atlantic region is drawing renewed interest among historians, especially during the era of first colonial settlement in the 17th century. Some are reassessing the prominent role of the Lenape and Susquehannock peoples in the course and outcomes of the encounters. Others are challenging previous interpretations of the contests among Dutch, Swedish, and English imperial actors for control over this borderland. Although these scholars are rethinking the concept of frontier, the spatial,...
Rediscovering Pend Oreille City, a Forgotten Town in Northern Idaho (2018)
Pend Oreille City was a steamboat landing town and one of the earliest settlements in North Idaho. From roughly 1866 to 1880, it served as a waypoint through the Idaho panhandle for travelers during early Euroamerican settlement of the region. As with many frontier towns, Pend Oreille City faded. In recent years, local interests have driven efforts to rediscover the site and appreciate its role in Idaho territorial history. The CLG grant offered the opportunity to collaborate with the University...
Rethinking "Frontiers" from a French Colonial Perspective (2017)
A societal "frontier" is always a relational concept. What looks like a periphery, whether imagined as a line or a zone, from one vantage point may from another look like an invaded heartland. The diverse nature of French colonialism in North America suggests the complexity of frontiers it induced. I review my 1981 article, "Frontiers and Archaeology," with perspective gained across thirty-five years, to consider whether the frontier concept has any current utility for the archaeology of French...
Shell Bead Production at a Southern Appalachian Mississippian Frontier (2017)
Frontier areas differ from non-frontier areas in multiple ways; one is by a more intense degree of interaction with other cultures. To successfully settle a frontier area, frontier groups must not just interact but also socially integrate with other groups. Craft production is one way social integration occurs. At the Middle Mississippian-period Carter Robinson site, there is evidence for the production of shell beads. This paper presents this evidence, which includes all stages of shell bead...
Shells, Drills, and Lithic Tools: Indirect Evidence of Textile Production at a Mississippian Frontier (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textiles served as symbols of status and ideological belief systems in Southeastern Mississippian chiefdoms. They also were markers of identity. Remains of fabric are not often found in the Southeast, due to poor preservation in the region. Those that have been analyzed reveal that a range of colors...
Slave Quarters, Stand, or Trash Dump? Determining Site Function at the Food Plot Site. (2013)
The Food Plot Site is located on the Tombigbee National Forest in Mississippi. It was discovered in a 2006 survey. Initially, only whiteware and amethyst glass were found at the site and it was determined to be ineligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The site was revisited in 2008, shortly after it had been plowed. During this visit hundreds of early English ceramics were discovered. In fact, these were some of the earliest ceramics ever found on the Tombigbee...
The Squire Homestead: A Look into Early American Settlement and Trade in the Greater St. Louis Area (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. The Squire Homestead site (11Ms2244), located in the Six Mile Prairie area of Madison County, Illinois, is the home of an influential, early American family. The home also appeared to function as a local trading post and fort, providing goods and protection during raids. This site provides a rare look at life...
The St. Paul’s Parish Parsonage: Early Colonial Life and Community Development on South Carolina’s Frontier (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Emergence and Development of South Carolina Lowcountry Studies: Papers in Honor of Martha Zierden" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Occupied from 1707-1715, the St. Paul’s Parish parsonage served as the residence of Anglican missionaries assigned to nearby St. Paul’s Parish Church. Due to its short occupation time and sudden destruction due to a fire, the site offers a snapshot of early colonial life in...
Stephen Potter's Vision for Potomac Valley Archaeology (2016)
Between 1999 and 2011 the Louis Berger Group carried out a series of archaeological investigations in the Potomac Valley for the National Capital Region of the NPS. These investigations were planned by Dr. Potter as a connected series of studies, working westward up the river. The work included four years in the Prince William Forest Park, followed by four years in Rock Creek Park and then three years for each of three sections of the C&O Canal National Historic Park, culminating at Oldtown,...
"Swinging Doors": The Allure & Artifacts of Nineteenth-Century Saloons (2018)
The saloon is a fixture of the oft-romanticized ‘Wild’ American West. Featured in stories, movies, and television, it hosted some of the region’s most colorful characters. While many romantic notions of the West fall apart under scrutiny, a grain of truth exists where the saloon is concerned: it was a key institution on the nineteenth-century American frontier. Like the frontier itself, the saloon came about as a result of new influences mixing with old patterns. In the eighteenth...
Taming the Wild Through Enclosure: Boundaries within the Pioneer Landscape (2016)
Frontiers are often perceived as dangerous and harsh peripheries pioneers adapted to, or replete with resources and ripe for settlement. Based on accounts of environmental stress and warfare in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the former perception pervades depictions of the Eastern frontier. To distinguish notions of frontier life from actual lived experiences of pioneers, I analyze enclosure – the continuous bounding and cultivation of the landscape – which structured frontier...
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...
You Can't Keep a Workin' Man Down: Black Masculinity, Labor, and the Frontier (2016)
Historical archaeologists have long examined changing structures of labor in the context of modern global capitalism. This paper will focus on rural sites in the Midwest, challenging normative notions of labor structures. I will examine how, in the face of changing labor economies, Black men on the frontier deployed specific types of skilled labor to create social networks, familial bonds, and to subvert economic inequalities. I will examine shifts from agrarian economies to wage economies,...