Making waves: A celebration of the scholarship and influence of Marley Roberts Brown III

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven R. Pendery.

The tragedy of the deportation of the Acadians from their homeland by the British in the 1750s was compounded by their exploitation by the French government at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. French imperial policy focused on settling and developing portions of tropical colonies such as French Guiana with Acadians and Europeans in order to minimize slave labor.  Although more than 9,000 colonists perished upon their arrival in La Guyane, a few hundred Acadians survived in extended coastal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Fennell.

Research projects in historical archaeology have been greatly enhanced by trans-Atlantic, comparative perspectives and questions probing the contours of European colonial impacts. Marley Brown's work has provided a key intellectual impetus to these developments. His focus has compelled colleagues to exhaust interdisciplinary data sets in each research project, and to frame questions with a large-scale, comparative perspective. A remarkable variety of research questions are being addressed, often...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael J. Jarvis.

Building on MRB3's dedication to comparative colonial archaeology, the SIAP incorporates 22 terrestrial sites and adjoining waters to investigate Bermuda's changing history and Atlantic integration across four centuries . Fieldwork since 2010 has uncovered Bermuda's earliest home (timber-frame, c. 1615 to c. 1714), a maritime quarantine building, a cave site, an 18th c. doctor's home, a c. 1759 whale processing complex, several quarries, limekilns, and docks, a small enslaved/free black...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven N. Archer.

Marley Brown's investment in and foresight toward environmental and garden archaeology during his tenure at Colonial Williamsburg has created a community of scholarship and professional archaeologists that has adopted these research domains in a more scientific, critical, and publicly-engaged way than before.  Garden and environmental arcaheology are frequently topics of interest to historical archaeologists but have a checkered record of application.  This paper examines how lessons learned,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Mrozowski.

I first met Marley Brown in 1973 when he was both a PhD candidate at Brown University and an Assistant Professor – a dual status that reflected his role in the early development of Historical Archaeology. As both a student of the young field and one of its early leaders, Marley had a unique place in the growth of Historical Archaeology in New England. Marley would go on to be an inspiration, mentor, critic, collaborator and friend. Anyone who has worked with Marley knows that he could be all of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Battle-Baptiste.

Through the nineties, there were significant moments in the development of African Diaspora archaeology as a field and as a practice.  We were moving our focus from the Main House to the daily lives of captive people and interpreting plantation landscapes differently. We witnessed major archaeological discoveries, such as the African Burial Ground in New York City and the Levi Jordan Plantation in Texas, and it was the beginning of lively debates about the practice of community engagement. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Franklin.

Marley Brown is little recognized for the tremendous role he played in mentoring those of us who, with his support and encouragement, pursued research on the African diaspora. It wasn’t his style to seek the spotlight, and he was far more concerned with social justice and the positive growth of the discipline which he considered to be inseparable issues. Brown not only opened doors for many of us, he served as a critical sounding board for our fledgling ideas and was generous with his advice. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia King.

When I first met Marley Brown, I thought, what a character. Some thirty years later, Marley is still a character who has made major contributions to Chesapeake historical archaeology. During his tenure as director of CW’s department of archaeological research, Marley expanded the program’s focus to include sites along the James and York rivers, building a spatial and temporal context that has served all of us working in the region, including those of us in Maryland. Marley’s refreshing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian C. Praetzellis. Mary Praetzellis.

Marley had a way of making a bad first impression. So it’s odd that neither Adrian nor I can remember when or where we all met. Marley followed Jim Deetz out West in the late 1970s. While Jim inspired students, Marley did battle with regulators and the under-informed from his job at Interagency Archaeological Services.  Our boss David Fredrickson probably performed the introduction. Marley knew theory like no one else and we could find our way around any archaeological site. We had a brief and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ywone Edwards-Ingram.

Since the 1980s, the archaeological study of African Americans has moved from the periphery to the center of research and interpretive initiatives at Colonial Williamsburg. For over two decades, Marley Brown directed the museum’s archaeological program and worked tirelessly to build teamwork and foster ties among individuals of different racial and ethnic  groups. To highlight Brown’s contributions to the field of African American Archaeology, I use interpretations from my study of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen B Wehner.

After finding me a free place to stay when I reported, homeless, to my first summer field school in 1996, Marley didn't give much indication that he thought me worth the effort. He was one tough customer, ever astute and incisive. But once I passed the gauntlet, he became my staunchest, most unfailingly generous mentor. Marley's influence cast its long shadow across my PhD Dissertation, which challenged standard historiography of Virginia’s ‘’tobacco’’ colony by placing craft production...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin M. Bartoy.

In the past twenty years, historical archaeology in the American West has developed into a mature field of study. Prior to this time, with a few notable exceptions, historical archaeology in the United States was firmly rooted to the east of the Mississippi. Many budding historical archaeologists in the west went east to become initiated to the discipline. For many of these undergraduate and graduate students, Marley Brown was an embedded westerner, who opened the door of the eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Edwards.

Two of the most influential institutions involved in making Historical Archaeology the discipline we enjoy today are The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) and The College of William and Mary (W&M). Although located in the same tiny town, until 1982 they might have existed on separate planets.  When Marley Brown became director of CWF’s archaeology program in 1982, he quickly formed a liaison with the College. By hiring students and recent alumni of the Anthropology Department’s new graduate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Bowen.

From his student years at Brown University, Marley Brown initiated projects that led the field of Historical Archaeology.  During the 1970’s when he directed the Mott Farm Field School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, he linked household cycles and family histories to depositional histories.  As Director of Archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg he again led the field by embedding urban households into Williamsburg’s neighborhoods, the Chesapeake, and the broader colonial world.  As students, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Eric Deetz. Anna Agbe-Davies.

North Carolina has often been described as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit" a sentiment also reflected in the official state motto "to be rather than to seem."  The idea that North Carolina was markedly different from either of its colonial neighbors has been almost universally accepted.  The contrast has been forwarded by North Carolinians for generations, from historians to presidential candidates. For example, the often cited lack of a deep-water port has been used to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Audrey Horning.

In 1999, Marley Brown defined his approach to historical archaeology as a 'cumulative practice marked by proper respect for the role of theory… but one which privileges the discovery of real and significant patterning in the archaeological record.’  Along with imposing intellectual rigour on archaeological interpretation, Marley has always sought new ways of discovering, recording, and ‘disciplining’ data, applying rigorous sampling methods; prioritizing environmental data; embracing GIS and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Smith.

Few historical archaeologists in the field today have escaped the influence, advice, and impact of Marley R. Brown III. His reach has extended to the tropical shores of the Caribbean, and his work, along with that of his students, has helped shape the direction of Caribbean historical archaeology. In Bermuda, Barbados, and the British Virgin Islands Marley has fostered a generation of students that have moved beyond site specific processes to embrace the big picture of British colonial and...