Beyond (between, within, through) the Grid: The Contours of Mapping and GIS in Historical Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly Norton.

The 1733 St. Jan Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies was an ephemeral event, from an archaeological perspective. Lasting only 8 months and diffused across the 20-sq mile island, the rebellion lacks a traditional archaeological signature even from battlefield methodologies. However, it is useful to apply archaeological questions to topics that are difficult to approach through dirt and shovel. This paper will discuss the application of GIS methods to analyze the slave rebellion from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Kennedy. Guido Pazzarossi. Tamar Brendzel.

Situated at the mouth of the Medway River in coastal Georgia, Fort Morris provided protection for the bustling port city of Sunbury. During the Revolutionary War the fort was first controlled by American forces and later by the British, and while the fort’s history is well-known in local lore archaeological analyses are shedding new light on everyday life at the site. This paper draws on the identification of fish bones to provide an inventory of the fish taxa consumed by soldiers at the fort on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liza Gijanto.

Archaeology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland began looking for the former homestead of West Ashcom in the Spring of 2012. West Ashcom was established on the south bank of the Patuxent River in what is now St. Mary’s County, MD by John Ashcom in 1651. At its height in the early 18th century it contained a manor house, kitchen, dairy, orchard, port, haberdashery, and various other barns and dependencies. Using traditional sources such as archives and methods like pedestrian surveys and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Platt.

The city of Charleston, South Carolina is situated on a peninsula in a naturally marshy environment threaded with tidal creeks. Since European settlers first began to develop the city in the late seventeenth century, these wet, low-lying areas were drained and filled in to accommodate expansion of the southern metropolis and combat disease. The result is a landscape, both in shape and relief, that has changed dramatically from one generation to the next. Fires, the threat of war, hurricanes, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Siobhan Hart. George Homsy.

This paper discusses the use of GIS Story Map applications for discerning shared values and community capacity building in a small, diverse, deindustrialized urban neighborhood in Binghamton, New York. Most local sustainability and revitalization projects focus on homogeneous communities that have shared stories and understandings about the neighborhood’s past and present. But in the economically marginalized and diverse neighborhoods of America’s smaller rust belt cities, narratives of decline...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Sampeck. Tyler Howe. Russell Townshend.

First Landscapes is a digital conservation project with two major goals: to protect and preserve First Nation/Native American heritage in culturally situated manner, and to make information accessible and usable in ways determined by stakeholders. This project organizes and presents results of several seasons of archaeological fieldwork as well as historical documents, maps, ethnographic records, and imagery by and about Cherokee people curated in several institutions across the United States....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alanna Warner-Smith.

Several scholars have explored the role of the empirical sciences in colonial contexts; far from a neutral study of the world, they were actively making and remaking material, social, and geographic boundaries. Cartography was part of these boundary-making practices, as the varying positions and views of actors engaging with the world are dissolved into the singular, authoritative view offered by the map. Studying a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s, I consider how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Law Pezzarossi.

The Nipmuc people once lived seasonally mobile lifestyles among the lakes, rivers and hills of what is now Central Massachusetts. Colonial encroachment affected this lifestyle greatly, at first in the form of policed and restricted mobility and pressure from the colonial government to own and farm land in severalty, and then later, in the late 18th and early 19th c., the Nipmuc community was largely dispossessed of their land by surrounding Euro-American farmers. As a result, the 19th century...