Applied Contemporary Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerry Howard.

This research is an investigation into the African Diaspora and an archaeological approach that is based on exploring the African Diaspora in a complex, multi-ethnic, multiracial situation, where I was able to draw on excavations, archival documents, and ethnography to infer the process of culture change and emergent identities. The research takes place within the western Caribbean island community of Bocas del Toro, Panama. In this presentation I will present my perspectives and approach to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn White.

The city of Berlin, Germany is known for its art and for its community of practicing artists, amidst a city described as a living ruin. This paper focuses on the physicality, ephemerality, and durability of the art community and its engagement with the built environment. The physical spaces in Berlin and the artists that occupy those spaces are the focus, particularly in the ways that artists use and reuse of the physical environment of the post-Wall city and the surrounding environs in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bonnie J. Clark.

As Laurajane Smith contents, heritage is not a series of sites, but of practices. Practioners of contemporary archaeology are lodged firmly in that practice, participating through the data we uncover, the stakeholders we engage, and even the media attention we draw to particular historic events but not others.  The archaeology of Amache, the site of a World War II-era Japanese American internment camp, is a long-term, community-based project focused on a past that has often been muted in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin P. Riggs. Andrew H. Reagan. Matt L. Riggs.

This project investigates the material evidence of individual and City investment in the built landscapes of Oakland, California. Through virtual pedestrian survey, we have analyzed 1000 randomly selected home fronts, implementing a five-facet rating scale to document evidence of resident investment in diverse socio-economic areas. Results suggest that while residents throughout all areas of Oakland invest materially in their homes, they do so differently.  Those in higher income areas invest in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John D. Broadwater.

The Apollo Program received a high priority after President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address to Congress declaring his support for "landing a man on the Moon" by the end of the decade. This ambitious goal was achieved on July 20, 1969, during the Apollo 11 Mission, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. On each mission the Saturn V first stage plunged into the Atlantic Ocean with its five enormous F-1 engines. In March 2013 a scientific team sponsored by Jeff Bezos,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul R. Mullins. Timo Ylimaunu.

In the wake of World War II many Americans settled in suburbs that have been persistently derided for their apparent social, material, and class homogeneity. This paper examines the African American experience of post-World War II suburbanization and the attractions of suburban life for African America. The paper examines an Indianapolis, Indiana subdivision that placed consumption at the heart of postwar citizenship. Rather than frame such suburban materiality simply as resistance to anti-Black...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Scarlett.

In the Fall of 2012, students from Michigan Technological University undertook a Phase I site assessment of the three city lots of the Italian Hall Memorial in Calumet, Michigan, in anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the disaster/massacre.  The Keweenaw National Historical Park, which alternately owns or manages the three contiguous lots on behalf of the Village of Calumet, sought help with clearance of cultural resources before they could improve the quality of the memorial’s landscaping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chenoweth.

The concepts of "nature" and "culture" have been carefully critiqued by anthropologists over the last few decades, but they still remain in the forefront of the public debate over the environment and how best to preserve it.  The question of how modern people see the natural and cultural realms is at the heart of this issue.  This project explores the line between these ideas by analyzing the behavior of one segment of the modern public: visitors to Yosemite National Park.  Employing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret A Comer.

            As recent battles over the fate and meaning of the gulag site in Perm have shown, gulag heritage in Russia remains highly dissonant.  Questions of how to manage and interpret former gulags have become increasingly politically charged in the last few years, following a brief thaw during the perestroika and glasnost periods.  The island site of the infamous Solvetsky Gulag offers an illuminating case study of the struggles of stakeholders – monks, other island residents, tourism...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp.

The archaeology of Japanese and Japanese American interment has burgeoned in recent years, developing in large part out of research conducted by the National Park Service, and, to a more limited extent, cultural resource management firms and archaeologists working within the context of academia. This paper places these previously conducted research projects in dialogue by looking at the challenges inherent in conducting research on both demographically large and small internment camps. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E. Beaulieu.

Many Canadians are aware of the Japanese Internment Camps from WWII; however, very few are aware of the concentration camps that Canada built during WWI. Between 1914-1920, Canada arrested and interned 8549 Austro-Hungarians, Germans and Turks and interned them across Canada. Morrissey Internment Camp is situated in the abandoned coal-mining town of Morrissey, British Columbia and housed a population of 3-400 prisoners between 1915-1918. In 1954, the Canadian government destroyed most of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian T. Myers.

Hotel Ware is a highly durable, vitrified ceramic tableware introduced by American potters in the late nineteenth century. The ware became tremendously popular in the first half of the twentieth century, with production peaks in the late 1920s and again in the late 1940s. Hotel Ware was prized for its toughness and cost-effectiveness, and was the ware of choice in nearly every commercial and institutional setting of that period. Excavations at trash middens at the site of Riding Mountain Prison...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca S Graff.

From abandoned council flats to the World Trade Center site, scholars are attempting to understand the material remains of the very recent past by using the methodology of archaeological "excavation." These archaeologies of the contemporary past make familiar items unfamiliar as they explore material residues of late capitalist, post-industrial societies and beyond, participating in what Holtorf calls the merging of "archaeology in the modern world with the archaeology of the modern world." The...