Institutions (Other Keyword)
1-20 (20 Records)
Continuing bioarchaeological and archival research on the Milwaukee County Institution Grounds Cemetery collection is presented. As reported elsewhere, the beginning stages of a multidisciplinary analysis of this late 19th and early 20th century institutional cemetery has led to the identification of a number of the 1,649 individuals excavated. Included in this discussion will be new case studies that continue to demonstrate not only the interpretive potential of an integrated archaeological,...
Carceral Islands in Latin America: Comparing the Galapagos to Other Sites of Frontier Criminal Exile (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Frontier and Settlement Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Our excavations at the El Progreso Hacienda in the Galapagos are working towards an understanding of this remote late 19th century sugar plantation, and its use of criminals and vagrants for part of the workforce. The use of the Galapagos as islands of exile/imprisonment has been an ongoing part of the relationship of Ecuador to the Galapagos, and...
Criminal Boys in a Remote Landscape: The Archaeology of Point Puer (1834-1849), an Experimental Reform Institution in Colonial Australia (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental and Social Issues within Historical Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Criminal children formed a notable proportion of the convict population transported to colonial Australia. During a global shift in the ideology of the treatment of criminal youth, an experimental institution for the training and reform of colonial boy prisoners was established at Point Puer in...
Difference in the Archaeology of Institutions (2015)
Historical archaeology has recently been concerned with the study of a diverse range of institutions – of confinement, of education, of religion, of punishment, and of reform. Disjunctions between the social ideals on which these institutions were founded and the material realities permeate much of this literature, often interpreted through a framework of resistance to institutional power. Lu Ann De Cunzo (2006) has characterized institutions as trialectical spaces -simultaneously conceived,...
Divided Attention: The Need to Reassess the Institutionality of Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has reached a point of critical mass in term of organizational institutionality. There are simply too many organizations, groups, committees, and subcommittees within archaeology that divide our time funding. Not only does this leave us in an unsustainable cycle of competition for funding but it also creates barriers of communication between...
Dublin’s Bedford Asylum and the material legacy of the ‘Industrious Child’ (2016)
This paper will determine the extent to which the concept of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ was incorporated into the design of public institutions for the reception of children in the early-nineteenth century. The primary case study of this paper will be the Bedford Asylum for Industrious Children, a purpose built institution constructed adjacent to the North Dublin Union House of Industry in Ireland. Particular attention will be given to the frequent mention of the asylum in the records of the...
Exploring Processes of Racialization in Nineteenth Century Nantucket, Massachusetts (2018)
As Nantucket, Massachusetts became the center of a global whaling industry in the nineteenth century, the island’s Native American and Black populations formed the mixed-race community of New Guinea. The Nantucket African Meeting House played a critical role in New Guinea’s adoption of a shared African identity as it became the center of the community’s social and political activities. Using archaeological materials from the African Meeting House and the neighboring Seneca Boston-Florence...
Feeding the Confined: Faunal Analysis of Hyde Park Barracks (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Zooarchaeology, Faunal, and Foodways Studies" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Institutions today struggle with the same questions as those in previous centuries – how should we balance nutritional requirements and budget constraints? Is the diet designed to punish, reform or rehabilitate? Should there be set minimums for the quantity and quality of the food? This paper uses a combination of faunal analysis and...
Interaction Spheres or Networks of Participation? Organizing Institutional Complexity in Adena-Hopewell societies of Kentucky’s Bluegrass Region (2016)
Since the 1960’s Joseph Caldwell’s notion of the interaction sphere has endured as a global framework through which archaeologists interpret regional systems of trade and exchange. However, a tension exists in this framework between the homogeneous and heterogeneous nature of exchanges within overlapping territories. Implied in the Interaction Sphere approach is that, through their interactions, autonomous social groups engage in homogeneous religious, economic, and sociopolitical institutional...
The Invisible Institution: Archaeological Expressions of Coerced Labour Control through the Manipulation of Information. (2015)
Identifying the material expressions of torture, punishment, discipline, and imprisonment are key factors in addressing the ways in which society exerts its control over the individual; particularly the non-conformist, the criminal, and the slave. With respect to the spatial expression of coerced labour control, the emphasis has been upon the idea of the "panoptican" or the mechanism by which the labourer can never know if he is being watched. Another form of coerced labour management though, is...
Learning To Live: Gender And Labor At Indian Boarding Schools (2016)
In 1879, the first federally funded off-reservation boarding school for Native American children was opened at the site of a former army barracks in Pennsylvania. Several additional facilities were soon established throughout the United States. Guided by official policies of assimilation and goals of fundamentally transforming the identities of their pupils, these institutions enrolled thousands of individuals from a multitude of tribal communities, sometimes forcibly. Once at school, students...
Lost Buildings, Vanished Institutions: Making Sense Of Nineteenth-Century Soup Kitchens (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Soup kitchens, the charitable provision of food, principally soup (often accompanied by bread), became widespread in late-eighteenth century Britain. During the following century, soup kitchens fed between 10 and 30% of the population during wintertime. They were a vital resource in the survival strategy of the poor. Almost all of the thousands of...
Madness, Architecture and Constraint: The role of the built environment in the mental institutions of New South Wales (2013)
The mental asylums of the nineteenth century, influenced by the concepts of moral therapy and non-restraint, were intended to be curative environments capable of reforming the mad. The architecture and built environment of these institutions was in essence the treatment, making the asylums both highly ideological and also inextricably physical. Through a comparative analysis of four such institutions in New South Wales, this paper will examine the tensions between the social and material...
Mapping Spaces of Care, Resistance, and Resiliency at Tuberculosis Sanatorium Sites (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores how archaeological mapping of institutions intersects with experiences of sanatorium spaces described in oral histories and historical documents, and the relationship between landscape, memory, practice, and performance at former tuberculosis sanatorium sites in California. The Weimar Joint Sanatorium for tuberculosis in Placer County, California, was a...
The Material and Symbolic Production of Insanity at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1813-1900 (2017)
The Royal Edinburgh Asylum was one of the leading institutions in psychiatric research and treatment in 19th-century Scotland and one of the first to institute programs of moral management. While derived from French and English models, the implementation of moral management followed a distinct trajectory at the REA and other Scottish asylums, reflecting their particular cultural and political context. My paper will examine how the material practices of 19th-century institutions emerged from...
Places for Others: Archaeological Perspectives on the Carceral Society (2013)
According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, by December 2009 approximately 7.25 million American adults were under some form of correctional supervision – a category that includes probation, parole, jail and prison. This population represented 724 people per 100,000 – or 3.1% of adult US residents. The evolution of our carceral society was neither inevitable nor accidental. This paper explores archaeological perspectives on institutional confinement to question why a leading modern state...
"A Refuge of Cure or of Care": The Sensory Dimensions of Confinement at the Worcester State Hospital for the Insane (2018)
American asylum medicine, the precursor to psychiatry, was predicated on an environmental approach to the treatment of mental illness: specifically, upon the creation of a curative environment that would rigorously organize patients’ exposure to sensory stimuli. This paper combines documentary records, evidence from surviving architecture, and geospatial renderings of the landscape in order to access those stimuli – consisting of the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile qualities of the natural...
Spirits And Spirituality: Drinking, Smoking, And Racial Uplift In 19th Century 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. Boston University and UMass Boston excavations at the Nantucket African Meeting House and neighboring Boston-Higginbotham House provide a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between institutions and individual materiality. Throughout the 19th century, African...
Subverting Forced Confinement? Methodological Approaches to Re-peopling Archaeological Studies of Institutions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of institutions have had varying degrees of success in moving beyond the intentions of their builders - and their often-imposed material culture - to understand how the inhabitants lived in and experienced them. Our overarching interest in analyzing, recording and interpreting material remains can sometimes prevent us from moving beyond...
We Might Be Mad Here: An Archaeological Investigation of Institutional Life in the Northeast (2016)
The establishment of almshouses in the United States provided a way for states to offer housing to their poor and destitute populations. Throughout the 20th century, most of these establishments changed their function, with many of them morphing into asylums for the mentally insane. Grave assemblages have been collected through archaeological excavations, typically when significant changes are expected to be made to what was once property of the almshouse. This study compares the artifact...