New York (Other Keyword)
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The Lake George Battlefield Park is located at the southern end of Lake George, New York, where it was the setting for the Battle of Lake George between the British and the French in 1755; for an entrenched camp of British reinforcements for Fort William Henry at the time of the massacre in 1757; for Gen. James Abercromby's army in 1758 and Gen. Jeffery Amherst's army in 1759; and then for additional British and American occupations during the American Revolution. The Park thus contains the...
Bonbons in Brooklyn: The Many Lives of Candy Tongs (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Chocolate is one of very few things that can bring joy to nearly everyone and yet, little evidence of the consumption of chocolate has been documented in of New York City’s historical archaeological record. A 2016 CRM investigation documented 19th century shaft features in the rear yards of...
Coinage at French & Indian War Sites in Northern New York State (2017)
Archaeology conducted by SUNY Adirondack and Plymouth State University at British military sites located along the Hudson River and in Lake George, New York, has recovered much colonial coinage that will be summarized here. Twenty-five years of excavations at British military encampments dating to the French & Indian War in northern New York State has revealed that mid-18th-century commerce was conducted with a combination of British and Spanish currency--a mixture of low-denomination English...
A Creole Synthesis: An Archaeology of the Mixed Heritage Silas Tobias Site in Setauket, New York (2018)
Research on the Silas Tobias site in Setauket, New York has identified a small 19th century homestead with a well-preserved and stratified archaeological context. Documentation of the site establishes that the site was occupied from at least 1823 until about 1900. Based on documentary evidence, the Tobias family is considered African American, though the mixed Native American and African American heritage of the descendant community is also well-known. Excavations in 2015 exposed both...
Early New York Oyster Jars (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Specialized Ceramic Vessels, From Oyster Jars to Ornaments" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Pickled oysters were one of New York’s first and most recognizable exports. The earliest documented mention was in a mid-17th century letter that described how glass bottles containing oysters were shipped to the West Indies. Following this, it appears oysters were regularly stored and shipped in small wooden casks....
The Harlem African Burial Ground Project: Effective Collaboration Between an Archaeological Consulting Firm, a City Agency, and a Community Task Force (2018)
In the summer of 2015, the NYC Economic Development Corporation hired AKRF to conduct an archaeological survey inside a decommissioned bus depot in East Harlem, NY, the site of the c. 1665 to mid-19th century Harlem African Burial Ground. All surface signs of the burial ground were erased by more than 150 years of development and its history had been largely forgotten. However, passionate area residents, elected officials, and the leadership of the Harlem-based descendent church united to...
A "Home in the Country:" Material Life at the House of the Good Shepherd Orphanage, Tomkins Cove, New York (2016)
In 2014, the Public Archaeology Laboratory conducted archaeological excavations at the former House of the Good Shepherd orphanage in Tomkins Cove, New York. Over 4,000 domestic and structural artifacts were found at the site, offering glimpses into its nineteenth-century orphanage history as well as its use as a Fresh Air Association summer retreat during the twentieth century. Although small, the nineteenth-century artifact assemblage reflects the life of the orphans who lived there. Current...
The House of the Good Shepherd: A Late Nineteenth Century Orphanage on the Banks of the Hudson River (2016)
In 1866, Reverend Ebenezer Gay became the guardian of six orphaned children. The home he would make for these children and many others, known as the House of the Good Shepherd in Tomkins Cove, New York, was a self-sufficient, working farm that taught the children hard work and responsibility and also acted as the hub of Reverend Gay’s mission work in the community. While some of the site’s architectural history is still extant, much of its archaeology is obscured by the structural debris left on...
Irish Built Arteries: Ethnic identification along the canals and railroads of New York (2015)
This study explores the materiality of cultural boundaries manufactured around immigrant communities in industrial localities in New York State. The immigration of thousands of Irish to the United States throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was met with an intense animosity. Religious and economic differences combined with an anti-immigrant sentiment to provide the Irish-American with a continuation of the racist attitudes similar to the ones that plagued English Improvement. Using...
Mapping Contagious Abandonment and Resilience, North of New York City (2015)
The lands around New York City’s rural reservoirs contain ruins of residences, schools, churches, farms, and other businesses, displaced by watershed creation that began in the mid-nineteenth century. But even the forests around them are artifacts of the abandonment. Here, the spaces in between buildings and trash piles are the places where the region’s economy flourished before the reservoir changed everything. Treating each ruin as an individual site would ignore the interconnectedness of...
Mapping the Archaeology of Slavery in the Hudson River Valley (2016)
Recent archaeological research is producing an ever expanding literature on the material conditions of slavery in the north, particularly as it existed in New York City and Long Island. As a result, archaeologists and historians now recognize that the built environment of slavery assumed many forms in the northeast, including plantations. Yet, a rigorous archaeological scholarship in the upper Hudson valley is lagging. Archaeologists at the New York State Museum began a project in 2015 entitled...
The Ripley Site Midden: Iroquoian Refuse Disposal in Chautauqua County, Western New York (2015)
The Ripley Site is a Late Woodland through Historic period Iroquoian site overlooking Lake Erie, in the Eastern Lake section of the Central Lowlands physiographic province in western New York. In its continuing investigations of the bluff-top site, Mercyhurst University (Erie, PA) is focusing attention on a presumed refuse midden, where the village’s inhabitants cast refuse downslope toward Young’s Run, which lies to the east of the village, proper. Here, we define the boundaries of the midden,...