18th-19th century (Temporal Keyword)
1-25 (25 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plantation Archaeology as Slow Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Several decades of zooarchaeological research at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier provide an opportunity to compare the food experiences of the enslaved communities at these Virginia Piedmont plantations. These observations are key to understanding the African-American roots of American cuisine. In this...
An Archaeological Perspective On The Transition From Enslavement To Freedom In The Colony Of Bermuda (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Comparative Perspectives on European Colonization in the Americas: Papers in Honor of Réginald Auger" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The archaeological study of enslavement within the plantation economies of the West Indies has also documented the period of transition to freedom through "amelioration" and actual emancipation. Though not parts of plantations, domestic sites where enslaved people lived on...
Between Slavery and Indenture: Spatial practices, Materiality, and the Memory of Coercion on Sugar Plantations in Mauritius (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in the Indian Ocean" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The archaeology of Trianon and Bras d’Eau sugar estates in Mauritius are case studies of the multi-vocal practices – both at the household and regional scale – that shaped landscapes around the plantation industry in the Indian Ocean. In this paper we examine material evidence and archival documentation that reveals a long process...
Beyond the Overseer’s House: Centering the Stories of the Enslaved Community at White Hill Plantation (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Northeast Region National Park Service Archeological Landscapes and the Stories They Tell" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Of the larger 18th century plantations overlooking the Appomattox River, White Hill was positioned on the edge of the city of Petersburg, Virginia. The preservation and interpretation of White Hill Plantation is on the fringes of the enabling legislation that established Petersburg...
Biographies of Things, People, and Space at Jesuit Missions: The St. Inigoes Manor Weaver’s House (2018)
A biographical framework for archaeological studies of Jesuit missions in the Americas guides enquiry toward histories of specific artifacts, especially religious objects that were implicated in efforts to gain converts, as well as mission space including manor houses and churches. Additionally, narrative accounts of Jesuit missions lend themselves to biographies, either for the lives of influential missionaries or the missions, that were disseminated through texts such as the Relations. This...
Charlottes, Commies, and China Dishes: The Abundance of Children’s Toys from The Hermitage (2018)
The lives of children enslaved on American plantations are poorly documented and often overlooked in the archaeological record. Excavations at the Hermitage have produced a large number of toys that can provide valuable insights into the lives of this understudied population. Over half of the toys in the DAACS database are from the Hermitage. This paper looks to compare the toys from the Hermitage to those from the other North American sites in DAACS to better understand why the Hermitage has...
Excavations in the carriage house basement of the Sorrel-Weed House (2018)
The Sorrel-Weed House in Savannah is one of only a handful of antebellum homes in the city's tourism industry to undergo archaeological studies. In spring 2017, excavations were conducted in the basement of the carriage house, where a depression in the floor was thought to be caused by the remains of a former enslaved woman. Completed in ca. 1841, the Sorrel-Weed House was built for merchant Francis Sorrel and is now the focus of a public interpretation program that involves infidelity,...
Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina Site Survey Record 38BK1687 (1994)
This document is a site form for site 38BK1687 recorded by the University of South Carolina.
Integrating pollen and macrobotanical evidence to understand change in African-American lifeways at Monticello (2018)
The transition from tobacco to wheat cultivation in the late-18th century at Monticello radically altered agricultural ecology, as swidden plots gave way to permanent fields. We use macrobotanical remains and pollen as complementary evidence to assess how this shift affected plants use strategies employed by enslaved field hands and the botanical environments they maintained adjacent to their houses. The identified shift in pollen taxa does not match the pattern we previously identified for...
Introduction to a local ceramic culture: the tableware used in colonial Guadeloupe, French West Indies (2013)
In colonial Guadeloupe, tableware was essential to the local ceramic culture. Tableware and beverage services tend to numerically dominate eighteenth-century ceramic assemblages and can shed a unique light on French colonial Creole culture. Although local potteries existed, Guadeloupeans imported the bulk of these vessels from France, and used many of the same faiences as French families. Yet when these French imports did not fit the bill, they also resorted to other strategies to procure the...
Jacalitos de Tule: Weaving Stories of Domestic Life at San Gabriel Mission (2018)
Archaeological research at San Gabriel Mission over the last decade has greatly increased our understanding of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish mission enterprise in Southern California at a grand scale, illuminating the interplay between its key communities and industries. The archaeological discovery of a rare domestic context—the floor of a Native American house—allows us to explore issues of identity and production at a household scale. We examine material evidence related to...
Meaningful Choices: An Archaeology of Selective Engagement on the 19th Century Irish Coast (2016)
This research explores the nature of marginality on the periphery of the British Empire. The edges of empires are shifting, culturally-negotiated borders with the capacity to disclose important information about social networks and cultural change. Households in these places are subject to transnational processes and make choices which demonstrate the presence and connections with broader global networks of economic and social access. This project focuses on the ramifications of national...
Military and Commercial use of Fort Amsterdam, Sint Eustatius, Dutch Caribbean (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Military Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean: Studies of Colonialism, Globalization, and Multicultural Communities" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Fort Amsterdam was a small military and commercial fort on the west coast of the Dutch island of Sint Eustatius in the northern Lesser Antilles. The fort’s primary purpose was to protect Oranje Bay, where ships anchored to bring goods to the Lower Town...
New Directions for Horse Hardware at James Madison’s Montpelier (2018)
As an often overlooked artifact class, horse hardware has the potential to answer a variety of research questions on the functionality of plantation work spaces. Ongoing archaeological research at James Madison’s Montpelier has examined the dynamics of a late 18th to mid-19th century working plantation in central Virginia. Through the survey and excavations of several areas that made up Madison’s plantation, various horse hardware has been recovered in several labor contexts and styles. As part...
Old Pots on New Plates: Understanding Ancient Vases on 19th Century Transfer-Printed Ceramics (2013)
The discovery of sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum in the early 18th century fueled an international mania for classical antiquities, especially ancient vases. Through a process of translation in multiple media, these ancient pots soon became featured on transfer-printed ceramics mass-produced at the Staffordshire potteries. These ceramics were then exported globally, transporting classical visions to consumers of multiple socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Using an assemblage of...
Puerto Rico’s Cook Books: Recipes of a History (2016)
Puerto Rico’s history is a blend of the different ethnicities that settled in the island after the Spanish Conquest. This ethnogenesis can be studied through the culinary traditions that conform what we now refer to as criollo. Using the works of Mary C. Beaudry and Elizabeth M. Scott as a sounding board, this research consists of two parts. First, an analysis of cooking books available in Puerto Rico during the 19th century in order to establish the different methods and tools available at the...
Recovering the Landscape of an Abandoned Town in Port Tobacco, Maryland (2017)
During the eighteenth century, Port Tobacco was a bustling port town located along the Port Tobacco River in Charles County, Maryland. Today it is a small village with few surviving structures and no commercial establishments. Between 2008 and 2011, systematic archaeological survey of the town defined the locations of many of the town’s early buildings. We recently began a new phase of research within the remains of a print shop. Our current excavation builds on earlier work and allows us to...
Ritual and Resistance at Trents Cave, Barbados (2018)
An overview of religious practice and resistance reflected in the material record of Trents Cave, Barbados. The cave site is located at the bottom of a gully located between the enslaved laborer settlement and the planter’s residence at Trents Plantation. The findings suggest recurrent use of the site by persons of African descent (circa 1750s through the 1850s) for ritual, or specialized purposes, associated with iron and steel. The distinctive pattern of deposition of key artifacts...
Sawed Bones - Archaeological History of Autopsies in Finland (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Burial, Space, and Memory of Unusual Death" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The 18-19th century laws and regulations in Sweden and Finland stated that an autopsy should be carried out in suspected criminal cases to determine cause of death. According to contemporary sources, non-anatomical autopsies were quite rare, and only performed to a distinct group of people: those who had committed suicide, died in hospital or...
So Many Shipwrecks, So Little Time (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Citizen Science in Maritime Archaeology: The Power of Public Engagement for Heritage Monitoring and Protection" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Charged with protecting nearly 100 shipwrecks that lie in the cold, fresh waters of Lake Huron, Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary embraces an open philosophy in engaging diverse user groups to assist in the documentation of maritime heritage resources. Whether...
St. Patrick’s Day and Sugar Plantations: Articulating Landscape Archaeology with Conceptions of Montserrat’s Historical Narratives and Cultural Geography (2013)
Montserrat’s nickname, "the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean", points to the island’s 17th-century Irish connection, sustained today by the annual national commemoration of a failed St. Patrick’s Day uprising by African slaves in 1768. Rooted in this event, the Anglo-Irish narrative is foregrounded in many historical studies of Montserrat’s plantations, slavery, geography, and heritage. Despite the power of this narrative in shaping Montserratian cultural identity, the archaeological record offers...
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...
Trash is Treasure: Understanding the Enslaved Landscape in Southern Maryland through Artifact Distribution (2018)
This research will present the findings of an archaeological evaluation focusing on the manipulation of the enslaved landscape throughout Southern Maryland in the 18th and 19th centuries. By analyzing the landscape of slave quarters at Bowens Road II (18CV151) and Smith’s St. Leonard’s (18CV91) more information of Maryland’s plantation landscape can be understood and compared throughout the Middle-Atlantic region. An analysis of artifact distribution focusing on several artifact types throughout...
Working on the Edge, Dealing with the Core: Emic and Etic perspectives on Island Heritage (2016)
Heritage is a relative concept. Perceptions of the value and importance of heritage, both tangible and intangible, is fluid, changing and contextually dependent. Stakeholders have various views on definitions of the past, the cultural and historical relevance of people places and objects, and the extent to which this should be shared when creating multivocal histories. Research on Inishark and Inishbofin, Co. Galway, Ireland, two islands five miles into the Atlantic Ocean, explain the...
Writing the Archaeology of America's Modern Cities (2013)
Over the last few decades, archaeologists have contributed a great deal to our understanding of contemporary American cities. We have just finished writing a book about the work these colleagues have done, based on material they have provided from all over the country, mostly from the grey literature. Their archaeological investigations are informative at two scales of analysis. Some studies, on the macro scale, have encompassed the whole city, and reveal patterns of urban development, ...