The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Smith.

In 2004, Michael Nassaney told me of his plans for a thematic series in historical archaeology with the University Press of Florida. Since that time the series has emerged and resulted in the publication of a dozen books that provide important insights for archaeologists exploring key issues shaping life in the modern era. Given my work on alcohol studies in the Caribbean, I saw the series as an opportunity to present my particular alcohol-related findings from Barbados. Moreover, while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherene Baugher. Richard Veit.

This paper provides a brief overview of our forthcoming book on the archaeology of American cemeteries and gravestones. Over the last fifty years archaeologists have analyzed how cemeteries and gravestones reflect and embody changing ideas regarding commemoration and remembrance from the 17th to the 21st centuries. Cemeteries are important repositories of cultural information and gravestones are essentially documents in stone. Moreover the human remains buried in the cemeteries can provide...

DOCUMENT Citation Only terrancw weik.

Archaeologists have explored self-liberated Africans ("Maroons") in the Americas and proponents of collaborative resistance movements (for instance, the Underground Railroad or African-Native American alliances), especially material aspects of them that fall within the period 1600–1865.  Despite this focus, researchers working in the Americas have much to gain from considering the global dimensions of antislavery resistance, a term that will be used to signify any form of defiance against...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp.

This paper examines how a wide variety of communities and individuals have constituted and articulated what it means to be an American using material culture as a medium of social action. I oscillate back and forth from the institutions imparting ideals about American citizenship to the individuals on the receiving end of such ideological instruction. The vantage point historical archaeology affords permits a reading of citizenship that is multiscaler in methodology, nuancing previous studies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Loren.

Dress matters. More than purely functional, the color, fabric, and fit of clothing, along with adornments, posture, and manners, convey information on status, gender, bodily health, religious beliefs, and even sexual preferences. Colonial peoples created a language of appearance to express their bodies and identities through unique combinations of locally-made and imported clothing and adornment. In this paper, I discuss the active manipulations and combinations of clothing and adornment in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David R. Starbuck.

Forts and battlefields embody the conflicts between nations.  Victory or defeat in past wars has helped determine the shape of modern society.  This paper discusses some of the most dynamic and exciting archaeological projects ever conducted at sites of military conflict throughout the United States.  Using case studies from all of the major conflicts fought on American soil, this paper discusses how archaeologists use modern scientific techniques to discover the remains of forts, battlefields,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deb Rotman.

Gendered social relations are fundamental to human experience. The ways in which individuals understand their roles as gendered beings and their relationships to other gendered beings is constantly pushed and pulled by forces both internal and external to the individual and the family/social/economic unit to which they belong at multiple scales from the household to the community to the nation. Identity, sexuality, cultural prescriptions for social roles, socioeconomic class, ethnic heritage,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Veit. Sherene Baugher.

This paper provides a brief overview of our forthcoming book on the historical archaeology of religious beliefs and practices in America.  The archaeology of religion has included traditional fieldwork, as well as aboveground archaeology.  Many archaeologists have focused their attention on religious communities and places of worship: churches, Quaker meeting houses, Jewish synagogues, Buddhist temples, Pueblo kivas and Mormon temples.  In California, the Southwest, Southeast, and Northeast,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Nassaney.

The fur trade was a multi-faceted, global phenomenon that had a formative influence on the history and cultures of post-Contact North America. Archaeological investigations of fur trade-related sites coincide with the inception of historical archaeology. This paper begins with a brief historical overview of the fur trades and summarizes some of the interpretive frameworks that have been employed to impose spatial and temporal order on this large-scale process. It also discusses the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only LouAnn Wurst.

Class is probably the most confused and contested concept wielded in the social sciences.  Perceptions run a wide gamut: from class as the single most important aspect of the American experience, one that has seldom been seriously contemplated or explored; to ideas that class is a stale, outdated, or dead concept,  irrelevant to a sustained understanding of the modern world or the past that gave rise to it.  These contradictory ideas are evidence that class has been defined and utilized in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dean Saitta.

It has been five years since The Archaeology of Collective Action was published in UPF’s "American Experience" series. This paper summarizes the purpose of the book and reflects on the dozen or so reviews that appeared in a wide variety of publications.  It also describes the "reviewer polarization" that was produced when the essence of the book was distilled and packaged for inclusion in an edited volume on the evolutionary dynamics of cooperative behavior.  This polarization forced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark D Groover.

Farming was a prevalent way of life in North America between the 1600s and 1900s. Consequently, archaeologists conducting cultural resource management studies routinely encounter a large number of farm sites during fieldwork. Sometimes viewed as a redundant and insignificant archaeological site type, farmsteads offer a plethora of research opportunities, limited only by the questions that archaeologists address with these resources. Compelling social topics can be explored through farmstead...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terrance J. Martin.

Archaeological investigations of historical sites in the midwestern United States provide numerous examples that illustrate how zooarchaeological analyses can provide unique perspectives on how various social and ethnic groups responded to changing culture contact situations, as well as to alterations in economic and environmental settings. Although studies of animal remains are typically directed at revealing details about past foodways, several case studies demonstrate how animal exploitation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Casella.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Matthews.

In The Archaoelogy of American Capitalism, I examine a diverse range of studies to make the case that the historical archaeology in the United States is well served by a direct analysis of capitalism as a principle context for production, consumption, and cultural experience in America. Whether looking at the fur trade, the Georgian order, the creation of modern cities and industries or the practices of history-making and archaeology itself, I show how the lust for profit and bourgeois...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nan Rothschild. Diana Wall.

 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, ...