Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Brown.

The study of site formation processes is an important part of understanding and reconstructing the sequence of events relating to a shipwreck. On 17 February 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank, after detonating a torpedo below Union blockader USS Housatonic. It came to rest approximately four nautical miles off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, in less than 10 m of water and was subsequently buried beneath roughly 1 m of sediment. By mapping the distribution of artifacts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly E Swords.

Hotels are often overlooked when studying the settlement of the American Frontier, although they played a pivotal role in shaping the West.  Frequently doubling as restaurants and taverns for locals and visitors alike hotels were established to accommodate the numerous settlers, travelers, salesmen and others who headed the call "Go West!" One such hotel, the Pend d’Oreille, in Sandpoint, Idaho is an example of an early nineteenth century hotel that offered accommodations, entertainment, food,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Fogle.

An agricultural reform movement took rise in the late antebellum period aimed at modernizing the southern plantation system. Productivity of once prosperous farmland in many southern communities was gradually failing due to soil degradation from intensive cash crop cultivation. Drawing on Enlightenment principles and scientific farming innovations such as crop rotation, fertilization, and soil chemistry, this modern agricultural discourse attempted to control and maximize the efficiency of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Noa Corcoran-Tadd. Guido Pezzarossi.

Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated.  This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession, and the disciplining of labor and dynamic biopolitical ecologies of assemblage, coercion, and accumulation. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine H Heacock.

The physical landscape at James Madison's Montpelier underwent drastic changes between the mansion's original construction in 1764 and the end of Madison's life in 1836. These modifications paralleled Madison's rise in social status and increase of political power. This paper seeks to examine the ways in which a male's upward trajectory in the public sphere and subsequent changes to his home led to feminine renegotiations of place in a continually modified space. This paper utilizes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Petrich-Guy. Mark Warner.

From 2005 to 2008 archaeologists conducted the largest excavation in the state of Idaho's history in the small north Idaho town of Sandpoint.  The excavations were a prelude to the construction of a byway through the city's former historic core by Idaho's Department of Transportation. Despite not being able to conduct a public program during the excavations, project archaeologists were subequently able to create a number of outcomes derived directly from the excavations that were ultimately...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James C Dunnigan.

Since 1959 the continuous archaeological investigations at Fort Michilimackinac have shaped our understanding of colonial life in the Great Lakes. The fort served as the center of a vast, multicultural trade network. While the Fort’s interior continues to be vigorously excavated, little attention has been given to the larger village that emerged outside the Fort’s walls in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Summer excavations from 1970-1973, conducted by Lyle Stone, attempted to explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua J Wells. Robert DeMuth. Kelsey Noack Myers. Stephen J Yerka. David Anderson. Eric Kansa. Sarah Kansa.

This paper examines big data patterns of historic archaeological site definitions and distributions across several temporal and behavioral vectors. The Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) provides publicly free and open data interoperability and linkage features for archaeological information resources. In 2015, DINAA had integrated fifteen US state archaeological databases, containing information about 0.5 million archaeological resources, as a linked open data network of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Altschul.

How humans respond to climate change has been identified as one of archaeology's grand challenges. Traditionally, archaeologists correlate local or regional environmental reconstructions with human settlement to form post hoc inferences about adaptive and social responses to changes in climate and associated environmental resources. Regardless the logical strength of these explanations, rarely can they be generalized beyond the case study. To offer general statements about human adaptation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Freire. Jorge Russo. Augusto Salgado. António Fialho. Frederico Dias.

The archaeological interpretations of the role that environment plays in the nature of the anthropogenic occupations on the coast, are currentely a thorough line of analysis on the Underwater Archaeological Chart of the Municipality of Cascais (ProCASC ).The main focus of our research have been divided into two categories that have direct impact on archaeological sites: a concern about the change in the coastal environment driven by man or nature, and, processes of adaptation and management of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen L Wheeler. Thomas A Crist. Mihai Constantinescu. Andrei Soficaru.

Little documentary or archaeological information currently exists regarding the presence of people of African descent in Eastern Europe during the historical period.  Known to have arrived in Europe with the Romans, free and enslaved Africans were common members of European society by the advent of the Renaissance, especially in the Moorish territories and the Ottoman Empire.  In 1952, archaeologists recovered a set of partial remains of 30-35-year-old man during excavations of an Orthodox...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley H. McKeown. Meradeth H. Snow. Rosanne Bongiovanni. Kirsten A. Green. Kathleen Hauther. Rachel Summers-Wilson.

Bioarchaeological interpretations of five burials from a small family cemetery likely associated with one of the domestic structures at the Elkins Site integrate information from in situ data collection and standard laboratory assessment, as well as DNA and stable isotope analysis. Four of the burials (two adult males and two adult females) were tightly clustered and the fifth burial (a male infant) was spatially separated within the cemetery. Despite craniofacial morphology that could be...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana D. Kollmann.

The Bioarchaeology of the Columbian Harmony Cemetery Series (51NE049), Washington, D.C. Archaeological investigations on a portion of the Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C. resulted in the identification of 231 grave features, many of which had been disturbed by a cemetery relocation project that took place in 1960. Information obtained from skeletal and dental analyses have provided information on 19th and early 20th century patterns of burial, postmortem treatment (i.e., embalming...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany M Raszick. John Bedell.

The Bird-Houston Site is a homestead that was occupied from around 1775 to 1920. During that long span the site was used in various ways by diverse occupants. Two houses stood there; the earlier log house was replaced by a frame house around 1825, and the two houses were far enough apart to keep their associated artifacts separate. The site’s occupants included unknown tenants, white property owners, and, after 1840, African American farm laborers and their families. Excavation of the site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ilene B. Grossman-Bailey. Michael J. Gall. Adam Heinrich. Philip A. Hayden.

Rich and provocative data on 1740s to 1850s tenant occupations were revealed by Phase II and III archaeological investigations at Locus 1 of the Rumsey/Polk Tenant/Prehistoric site.  Documentary research, the recovery of 42,996 historic artifacts, and the discovery of 622 features, provided a rare glimpse into the lives of free and enslaved African American workers and white tenants living side-by-side in the racially charged atmosphere of 18th- and 19th-century Delaware. Artifacts like wolf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey K Dwyer.

 The relationships between white men and black female slaves resulted in the formation of new ethnic identitites and social structures associated with their mixed-heritage or "mulatto" children. Sources like artwork and ethno-historical accounts of mulatto children in areas of the Caribbean and the role of African female slaves lend unique insights into social dynamics and cultural markers of modern populations. This paper examines the historical narratives and archaeological findings of black...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher P. Barton.

Race and racism are learned. While there has existed a myriad of social practices that have been used to socialize individuals into ideologies of race, this paper details the use of material culture directed at children, that is automata, costumes, games and toys. This paper focuses on material culture from the 1860s-1940s depicting Africans/African Americans. These objects produced, advertised and purchased by adults from children’s play served three purposes; 1) to cultivate ideologies of race...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Kirk.

In the early morning of May 29, 1813, British and Canadian provincial troops launched an amphibious assault on the American shipbuilding facility and fortifications at Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario in northern New York. An ABPP grant sponsored a wide-scale metal-detecting survey of the battelfield and detailed artifact analysis of the resulting assemblage. Besides shedding new light on the battle’s controversial narrative, the study also subjected musket balls to blood-residue analysis to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan S Rose. Kelsey K Dwyer. Sydney Swierenga.

The boats of Cahuita, Costa Rica vary in design, size and decoration. This poster displays the design variation and depicts the East Carolina University summer field school methods used to record these small watercraft. The differences in design are catalogued through photography and also with recorded measurements. The information gathered should be sufficient to reconstruct the vessel at full scale. In some cases, the data was further utilized to create more practical three dimensional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Hall. J. Barto Arnold.

  Archaeological study and historical research have combined to present a detailed picture of blockade running in the western Gulf of Mexico during the American Civil War. From the beginning of the conflict until weeks after Appomattox, the Confederate coastline west of the Mississippi was a hive of blockade-running activity, first with sailing vessels and later with steamships. The wrecks of the paddle steamers Will o’ the Wisp, Acadia, and Denbigh, all dating from the final months of the war,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefanie Smith.

With the cooperation of the Westmoreland County Historical Society and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, faunal remains from three areas of the Historic Hanna’s Town site in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania were subjected to detailed zooarchaeological analysis in an effort to answer broad questions regarding the subsistence practices of eighteenth century frontier communities of Western Pennsylvania. As the first court and county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains, Hanna’s Town played a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisabeth A. LaVigne. William Chadwick.

On the morning of 11 September 1777, Hessian Captain Johan Ewald was leading an advance force ahead of the Crown Forces column that outflanked the American position along Brandywine Creek. The precise location of Trimble’s Ford, where the Crown Forces ultimately crossed the west branch of the Brandywine, and the road system that was traveled by the Crown Forces to reach the ford was the subject of a multi-faceted study. Geophysical investigation utilizing ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelika R. Kuettner.

Coupled with inventories, receipts, account books, trade cards, and newspaper advertisements, archaeology broadens the interpretation and understanding of an object’s value and worth in the period in which it was made and used. Evidence of mended ceramics in the archaeological collections at Colonial Williamsburg and in other collections provides a means to assist in the identification, dating, and contextual understanding of repairs made to ceramic objects of a variety of materials. Questions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Borrelli. B. Lynn Harris. Melissa Price.

Ships wrecked in Caribbean waters seldom preserve their structural integrity. Often only ferrous artifacts and ballast remain as the cultural indicators. The ballast of a wreck, if carefully documented, may have significant interpretive value to the site. An East Carolina University team investigated a wreck site in Costa Rica consisting of yellow brick stacked in a concentrated, organized pile.  This paper examines the function of brick as both ballast and cargo in the historical record of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alena R. Pirok.

In the 1930s a swath of Williamsburg, VA became Colonial Williamsburg. The newly minted Colonial Williamsburg Foundation funded a major reconstruction effort to turn the dejected neighborhood into the picture of colonial architecture and colonial revival esthetic. Since that time visitors have noticed that colonial era ghosts have reemerged in the houses and meeting places they were once known to frequent. Parapsychologists have argued that archaeological investigation has stirred ghosts from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Hoffman.

USS Monitor conservation staff are often asked, "What was the goal for recovering artifacts from the ironclad’s wreck site?" The answer is to use the artifacts as mediums to tell the stories of the ship and crew. Two Worthington steam pumps recovered in 2001 are good examples of this concept. Both pumps are complex machines which led to extensive research to understand how they operated and physically changed during burial to be able to safely conserve them.  As the conservation of the pumps...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert DeMuth. Kelsey Noack Myers. Joshua J Wells. Stephen Yerka. David Anderson. Eric Kansa. Sarah W. Kansa.

Unlike prehistoric archaeology, there is no general unified system by which historical archaeological sites are classified. This problem, which is in part due to recognized biases in the recording of historic archaeological sites, has resulted in numerous incompatible systems by which various states classify historic sites. This study demonstrates a first step toward providing historical archaeologists with the means of creating a more cohesive ontology for historic site reporting. The advent of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew D. Cochran.

In 1712 Richard Jenkins devised his personal estate, located on the Patuxent River near Benedict, Maryland, to three orphans and a woman that he wasn’t married to. Valued at just over 96 pounds sterling, Richard Jenkins’ plantation, was excavated in 2013 by staff from the Ottery Group and the Maryland State Highway Administration. This paper details the archaeological investigation of the c.1680 through 1713 Jenkins plantation, and seeks to emplace the plantation within a multi-scalar narrative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kerri S. Barile. Emily Calhoun. Kerry S. Gonzalez.

In the summer of 2012, a dozen Dovetail archaeologists and scores of volunteers toiled in the sun to excavate the Houston-LeCompt site, located along the newly proposed Route 301 corridor in central Delaware. Using test units, backhoe scraping, feature excavation, and artifact and ethnobotanical analysis, the team recovered an astounding amount of data on the Houston family and generations of subsequent tenant farmers who worked the land. House cellars, kitchen refuse pits, wells, and sheet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen R. Potter. Tom Gwaltney. Karen L. Orrence.

Union and Confederate forces fought at Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in American military history with nearly 23,000 dead, wounded, and missing. Some of the fiercest fighting occurred around the Sunken Road -- the northern boundary of the Henry Piper farm. Over four field seasons, archaeologists conducted a systematic metal-detector survey of the Piper Orchard, site of the Confederates’ retreat from the Sunken Road and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria A Cacchione. Maria Bruno.

 Isolated in a single location in central Pennsylvania within Michaux State Forrest rest the remnants of an Early Republic farmstead, a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp, a Prisoner of War (POW) Interrogation Center from World War Two (WWII), and a Church camp. The one common factor throughout each of these disparate time periods is the farmhouse built circa 1788. This wooden structure stood until the 1970s when the Church camp ended. Now only the stone foundation remains along with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

Excavations at the Biry house of Castroville, Texas yielded a large assemblage of buttons, which may be studied to yield a better understanding of the lives of Alsatian immigrants within the community. Buttons represent a class of material objects that are simultaneously intimate and utilitarian in nature. While buttons are used on a daily basis, we remain largely aloof to these small, discrete fasteners in our lives. This paper represents an exercise in discerning the information that buttons...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Eric Schweickart.

The lives of the members of the enslaved community at James Madison’s plantation in Virginia, Montpelier, were shaped by the types of work they were expected to do in order to keep the president’s mansion and farm running smoothly. Recent work by historical demographers has highlighted the importance of pooling resources within households, with members each contributing the results of their production activities to the group.  Archaeological excavations at several different early 19th century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only jean Cascardi. Megan B Veness.

Acquired in 2006 the Old Colchester Park and Preserve is over 145 acres located in Lorton, Virginia situated on the Occoquan River and is part of the Fairfax County Park Authority’s system of parks. Archaeological investigations in the park have revealed foundations contemporary to the Colchester port tobacco town that was in operation from ca. 1754-1830. Through research and various survey methods the Colchester Archaeological Research Team (CART) have discovered the presence of numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Palus.

Camp Stanton was a major Civil War recruitment and training camp for the U.S. Colored Infantry, established in southern Maryland both to draw recruits from its plantations, and to pacify a region yet invested in slavery. More than a third of the nearly 9,000 African Americans recruited in Maryland during the Civil War were trained at Camp Stanton. Archaeological survey and testing resulted in the discovery of four features associated with shelters that housed recruits over the winter of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher P. Morris.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, massive multi-agency infrastructure projects were undertaken along the Atlantic seaboard to repair the damage. Such projects can have a disastrous effect upon historic resources long since buried. During a large-scale seawall project in Brick Township, NJ, ship timbers, planks, fittings, fastenings, and structural elements were pried from their sites by construction equipment, moved before being stockpiled, and the hole backfilled with sand. This was prior to it...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chris Underwood.

During the past twenty years, the UK among other countries has undergone a period of urban and social regeneration. As part of this process maritime environments including historic ships have been integrated into harbour and coastal redevelopments, with tourism and social wellbeing considered key components. But, has underwater cultural heritage (UCH) formed a part? The most obvious is the Mary Rose along with smaller collections housed in larger institutions. Acknowledging that innovative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Flora Vilches. Lorena Sanhueza. Cristina Garrido. Cecilia Sanhueza. Ulises Cárdenas. Daniela Baudet.

In the second half of the 19th Century Chile began a period of profound change resulting from the expansion of the mining industry and increasing investment by large private capital interests. Only a few decades later, the subsistence mode of indigenous Atacameño society, in the far north, was profoundly transformed from an essentially agricultural-pastoral economy to a more diversified capitalist-based one. In this poster we present the results of interdisciplinary research on four subsistence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David G Orr.

This paper interprets the various actions and violent encounters between the American Revolutionary Army and the British Crown forces in the Philadelphia Campaign of 1777-78. Probably one of the most significant narratives imbedded in these events is the role of the Hessian mercenaries fighting for the Royalist cause. Fortunately, the diary that Captain Johann von Ewald wrote has survived to brilliantly annotate this critical moment in the history of the war. He was an unusually candid and keen...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda F. Carnes-McNaughton. Mark U. Wilde-Ramsing.

In November 1717, at the height of his short-lived career as a notorious pirate, Blackbeard stole a French prize, the La Concorde de Nante. After taking the ship, he kidnapped several crewmembers and slaves, crucially needed to continue his pirating.  In June 1718, the ship was run-aground on a sandbar at Topsail Inlet and life changed once again for the crew and conscripted passengers. As Blackbeard and a few loyal crewmembers fled the scene on a smaller vessel, the rest were put a-shore. From...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemarie T Blewitt.

This paper analyzes botanical remains recovered at the Old Town site, a late 18th century occupation of the Catawba Nation, and integrates those data with faunal and ceramic analysis along with ethnographic and ethnohistorical sources to describe Catawba foodways. The Old Town occupation was defined by wars and a major epidemic, and was one of the places where the devastated Catawba peoples reformed and reconstituted their new identity. I examine the foodways at Old Town as part of the changing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith A.B. Ellis.

While bioarchaeologists are able to estimate age from the remains of children into narrow ranges, they often avoid dividing childhood into categories based on these age estimates.  Children then end up lumped under just a few categories, or even a single category, "child."  While this is prudent in cases where chronological and cultural age cannot necessarily be matched, historical bioarchaeology gives us a unique opportunity to examine historical records and further refine how we categorize,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth A. Comer.

For more than 42 years, the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society, Inc. has maintained heritage programs in the village of Catoctin Furnace. These activities balance the needs of the ongoing village lifestyle with those of the received visitor experience. Updating traditional seasonal events while adding leisure amenities involves constantly balancing funding sources and message.  However, the tourism experience must be rooted in solid academic research.  Current research on the African-American...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia M. Samford.

Over the last fifty years, a great deal of archaeological research has come about due to the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act.  The Society for Historical Archaeology, the Society for American Archaeology, and the Register of Professional Archaeologists– in partnership with the American Cultural Resources Association and the Archaeological Legacy Institute (home of The Archaeology Channel) are supporting a nationwide initiative to highlight some of the important things we have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dwayne Scheid.

The fragments of unglazed red earthenware vessels used in the production of sugar and  identified as ceramic sugarwares, were frequently used by plantations for processing and curing sugar and collecting molasses, and were a common sight on Barbadian plantations from the seventeenth into the late nineteenth centuries.  The local production of these wares occurred in potteries operated by plantations along the east coast of Barbados. Planters managed these potteries while the workers themselves...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Hunter.

Ceramic research continues to be a mainstay of historical archaeology endeavors.  In spite of years of the so-called quantitative approaches to ceramic analyses including mean dating, South’s pattern analysis, and most recently the DAACS’s  recording methodology, the basics of identifying specific potters and their products is alive and well.  Writing the story of American ceramics is a regional undertaking.  It requires historical research, excavation, material science, study of antique...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie M. Meinsen.

Excavation of the Pethick Site in Schoharie County, New York first began in the summer of 2004 with a field school organized by the New York State Museum Cultural Research Survey Program and the University at Albany. The resulting research has largely been dominated by the study of prehistoric ceramics and stone tools. Like the Native Americans, early European settlers in the Schoharie Valley were draw to the Pethick Site’s proximity to the Schoharie Creek, which is one of the major tributaries...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross W. Jamieson. Fernando Astudillo. Florencio Delgado. Peter Stahl.

From 1880 to 1904 Manuel J. Cobos ran the El Progreso Plantation in the highlands of San Cristóbal in the Galapagos Islands.  This operation focused on sugar, cattle, coffee, and fruit production, exploiting the labour of convicted prisoners and indentured peons from mainland Ecuador.  Excavation of the household midden in 2014 and 2015 demonstrates that Cobos imported a variety of goods that tied this remote location in Pacific South America to a global supply chain of luxury consumer products...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom McCulloch.

Until the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation revised its regulations implementing Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act in 2000, an undertaking that would destroy all or parts of a National Register listed or eligible archaeological site could be considered to not adversely affect the site if data recovery was carried out beforehand. This in spite of the fact that generally only a small percentage of the site was usually excavated, and the rest subsequently destroyed. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melonie R Shier.

In California at the turn of the 20th Century, large companies formed through lands speculation as a result of the land grant system and the dissolution of mission properties. The Kern County Land Company, based in Kern County California, had over 1.1 million acres across the American West, utilizing a varied labour force with the primary agriculture product of cattle. The varied properties were interlinked and employed a plethora of workers from chemists to cowboys. This paper aims to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie J Devine.

Coal Miner’s lives in Southern Colorado were fraught with violence and hardships during the Coal Wars. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company attempted to assimilate ethnically diverse immigrant employees into American society. One of these methods was to impart American values to the children living in company towns. Archaeological work was conducted at the coal mining company town of Berwind, and at the Ludlow Massacre Tent Colony site. Using archaeological evidence and the historical record this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Delfin A. Weis.

The cultural perspective that developed out of the American West during the expansionary period (1850-1900) is viewed as the product of adults. Characteristics of independence, self-reliance, and gender-role relaxation defined the western individual and group. While the physical and social frontier impacted the adult, their cultural perspective was closely linked to the eastern United States. In contrast, children of the frontier matured in an environment that was at odds with eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Valentino.

In the tide flats of Smith Cove was one of Seattle’s small shantytowns, occupied between 1911 and 1941. In 2014, construction monitoring uncovered the remnants of this community, and with it, materials representing an itinerant, low-income, multi-cultural population. The artifacts indicate the presence of Native Americans, Japanese, Chinese, and Euro-Americans, and demonstrate how Smith Cove functioned as a multi-cultural nexus of traditional practices within a modern industrialized urban...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginia S. Popper.

Food provides an excellent means for exploring the experiences of the Overseas Chinese because it is integral to cultural identity and reflects adaptations to new environmental, economic, and social settings. Plant remains recovered from the late-19th-century Chinatown in San Jose, California, present a picture of the complexity of Chinatown life. They represent a variety of activities such as purchasing food and medicine from local farms and Chinese grocery stores to prepare for daily meals and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Polk.

The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) was completed in May 1869. Much of the work on that railroad was carried out by more than 10,000 ethnic Chinese workers. After completion of the railroad many, if not most, of them either returned to China or left for work in the mining industry or construction on other railroads. However, a large number remained with the CPRR to work on railroad maintenance. Ethnic Chinese appear to have been a dominant labor force through the mid 1880s, perhaps longer, as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine J. Watson.

Established by the Canterbury Association in 1850, Christchurch, New Zealand, has long been regarded as the most English of New Zealand's cities. This sobriquet - sometimes meant positively, but often used negatively - has been based in large part on the city's appearance. Curiously, however, the validity of this assumption has never really been tested, and certainly has not been tested using archaeological data. The volume of archaeological work in Christchurch since the 2011 earthquakes - 2000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Burley. Robyn P Woodward. Shea Henry. Ivor Conolley.

Stranded in Jamaica for a year in 1503/1504, Christopher Columbus and crew became reliant on the Taino village of Maima for provisions.   Knowledge of this and other Taino villages on the Jamaican north coast near present day St Anns Bay led to the establishment of New Seville, a 1509 Spanish colony.  With introduced disease, Spanish/Taino conflict and forced labour under encomienda, Taino peoples were all but annihilated by 1534 when New Seville was abandoned. Recent archaeological survey and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lyle Torp. Matthew Palus.

Fort Stevens is a well-known fort within the Civil War Defenses of Washington. Prior to the Civil War, the land was owned by Betsey Butler, a free black woman, who sold the land to the trustees of Emory Chapel in 1855 for the construction of a church. The church was razed for the construction of Fort Massachusetts in 1861, which was later expanded and renamed Fort Stevens in 1863. The congregation rebuilt the church following the Civil War. The context of the Emory Church is entwined with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janene W Johnston.

The Civil War Battle of Natural Bridge was fought within miles of Tallahassee, Florida, in March of 1865. Much of the site is now the Natural Bridge Battlefield Historic State Park and a metal detector survey was conducted of previously unsurveyed portions of the state-owned land, supplementing work previously done. KOCOA analysis and the survey results provides a new landscape-based interpretation of the placement of the battle events, which will be utilized in future interpretation of this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip Shiman. Julia Steele. David Lowe.

The last year of the Civil War witnessed a dramatic change in military tactics from open-field fighting to trench warfare as the soldiers increasingly covered themselves with fortifications on the battlefield, leading to the entrenched gridlock at Petersburg.  When under fire or if combat was imminent, the soldiers used an innovative process in which they fortified progressively, starting with basic shelters and gradually building them up into complex and impregnable earth-and-wood defenses. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Bloch.

Working with fragmentary collections, it is often difficult for archaeologists to assess potentially diagnostic vessel forms or surface treatments on utilitarian ceramics. It is therefore a challenge to identify the production origins for many of these wares. Surveying the products from 24 historic earthenware kiln sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, this paper considers the reliability of visual attributes such as paste color and inclusions for distinguishing the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Kutys.

Recent archaeological excavations conducted for PennDOT under Interstate 95 in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia have produced a number of artifacts related to the volunteer fire companies that once existed in the neighborhood. Between 1736 and 1857, over 150 volunteer companies came into existence across the city, and two of those were once situated within the current project area. With the creation of the paid Philadelphia Fire Department in 1871, the era of the volunteer companies passed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jodi Reeves Flores. Leigh Anne Ellison. adam brin.

Archaeological projects generate data that is often underutilized in research and analysis beyond the life of the initial project. Discipline specific digital repositories and data publishing platforms can address problems related to the access and the utility of these databases and data sets, making it possible to synthesize data across projects and investigations. tDAR has a tool that can do this without a priori standardization, meaning researchers can easily bring together large data sets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William B. Lees.

The Oklahoma Historical Society conducted metal detector survey of the Civil War Battle of Honey Springs, Creek Nation (Oklahoma) in the 1990s. A variety of papers between 1995 and 2002 reported on different aspects of this research, but I present a comprehensive archaeological treatment of the battle here for the first time. Results show the battle to have been a series of three engagements over several miles, with a distinctly different signature at each of the three conflict locations. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Stroud Clarke. Jon Marcoux.

When analyzing archaeological sites with almost continual episodes of occupation, it is often difficult to discern distinct temporal periods; given this challenge archaeologists have long relied on a variety of methodological techniques to help narrow down dates of occupation. In 2012, Jon Marcoux published a new correspondence analysis study using over 35,000 glass trade beads in Native American mortuary contexts dated c.1607-1783 with the results indicating four discrete clusters of time. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tyler Allen. Heather Alvey-Scott. S. Ryan Jones. Nicholas Starvakis. Paul Simmons. Jason Carnes. Michael Workman. Robert DeMuth.

The Coal Heritage Archaeology Project’s inaugural excavations were carried out as part of a summer archaeological field school at West Virginia State University.  Working in collaboration with Indiana University and the Rahall Transportation Institute, excavations focused on the residential houses at the former coal company town of Tams, WV and sought to better understand issues of material consumption, labor, and class. This poster presents the results of these initial excavations and explores...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine M Ames.

Successful collections management encompasses proper housing, monitoring, and curation to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility.  However, successful collections management also involves identifying and addressing issues(s) that threaten collections.  The Washington, D.C. Historic Preservation Office (DCHPO) is in the midst of addressing a collections crisis.  The DCHPO consults on both District and Federal compliance projects, and without a curation facility, its collections are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen A Damm.

The Museum Management Program (MMP) provides national guidance and policy to the National Park Service (NPS). It also administers the Interior Collections Management System (ICMS) for the NPS and the Department of the Interior (DOI). In an effort to look towards the future, the MMP and the Interior Museum Program (IMP) administered a user satisfaction survey to federal and non-federal users of ICMS. This poster examines the results of this survey and looks for solutions to common problems, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Johnson.

Where did ‘colonialism’ come from?  Clearly, and at once, colonialism is a set of practices that can be traced back to the ancient and medieval worlds.  However, also and at the same time, it is an analytical term which, if used loosely, holds the danger of uncritically back-projecting a 19th century model of colonial worlds into earlier centuries.  How to map patterns of colonial practice before they were colonial?  This paper tries to engage with this difficult issue through a comparative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Liebmann.

Following the Spanish colonization of New Mexico, Pueblo peoples began to adopt various technologies, cultural practices, and beliefs introduced to them by their colonial overlords.  This tradition continues today, with contemporary appropriations of "foreign" elements into "traditional" Pueblo practices.  How should we as historical archaeologists interpret this appropriation of outside influences and material culture?  This paper explores the phenomenon of post-colonial difference through case...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reilly.

Following Raymond Williams’ critical analysis of the relationship between the English countryside and its urban counterpart in The Country and the City (1973), this paper expands Williams’ analysis to incorporate the entanglements of the colony, specifically the Caribbean post-colony of Barbados, and English urban centers. Despite studies of well-known historical relationships existing in terms of Atlantic world economics, there has been less discussion of the repercussions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Montgomery.

In 1844, the Comanche leader Mopechucope signed a treaty with the state of Texas, in which he described central and western Texas as "Comanche land and ever has been" (Gelo 2000: 274; Dorman and Day 1995: 8). Mopechucope’s understanding of Comanche history lies in stark contrast to the narratives of terra nullius and cultural decline found in colonial documents and reified in anthropological and historical scholarship. Drawing on an indigenous understanding of history and place-making this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia King.

Ghosts and other spectral forms have a history of use as literary devices for safely ‘remembering’ particularly traumatic events. Beyond the literary, in the everyday, lived world of the vernacular, ghost stories can also reveal trauma—what geographer Steve Pile refers to as a "fractured emotional geography cut across by shards of pain, loss, and injustice." Like ruins, ghosts and other haunted places are often about coming to terms with grief and with loss. Nowhere is that more true than at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John P. Molenda.

What do Chinese work camps in the American West tell us about emergent capitalist networks in the mid-nineteenth century? This talk will draw upon current archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork as well as historical studies to contextualize the historical archaeology of Chinese railroad laborers. The extant archaeological remains found on work camps - hearths, ceramic sherds, game pieces, etc - only tell part of the story. A focus on remittances, and the transnational flow of cash, goods,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Heath.

 The commoditization of cowrie shells in the 17th and 18th centuries was central to the economics of the consumer revolution of the early modern world. Cowries drove the Africa trade that cemented economic relationships between rulers, investors, merchants, and planters in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From their origins in the Pacific, to the markets of India, from Europe to West Africa, and from West Africa to the New World, cowries played a central role as both commodities and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina M Foxton.

Managing the historic environments of cities is a task that continually concerns local authorities and citizens. Currently in the UK, ‘Local Plans’ for the development of cities form as documents which guide archaeologists and developers forward in the ongoing rendering of urban fabrics. On the other hand, ‘Neighbourhood Plans’ written by community groups create palpable statements of ownership for local areas and heritage.  Arguably, the city’s fabric is woven not only by building materials but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meg Gorsline.

From New Amsterdam to Seneca Village, Diana diZerega Wall has examined the often-conflicting interactions of communities living in close relation.  In the early nineteenth century, the nearly 30-year process of Gradual Emancipation slowly dismantled the system of slavery in New York State, but it also created the conditions for the perpetuation of inequality among closely intertwined peoples: the black and white inhabitants of eastern Long Island. Inspired by Wall’s ability to uncover the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brenna J Moloney.

Community-engaged archaeology has played a role in reshaping the city of Detroit’s popular heritage narrative from one of decline and decay to one more rich and complex. In 2013, archaeologists from Wayne State University investigated Tommy's Bar, a rumored Prohibition-era speakeasy and haunt of the infamous Purple Gang. The project was a partnership between the University, a historic preservation non-profit, and the bar's owner. The project culminated in a theme party where archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Hamilton. William R. Chadwell.

In the three-plus years of its existence, the Battle of the Atlantic Research and Expedition Group has been engaged in a mutually-beneficial partnership with NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.  The Group, which is a part of the Institute of Maritime History, a 501(c)3 educational nonprofit corporation, is made up nearly exclusively of avocational archaeologists and historians all of whom are sport, or recreational, scuba divers.  Yet since its founding in late 2012, it has conducted or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krysta Ryzewski.

Michigan Central Station and Roosevelt Park were constructed between 1908 and 1918 as part of Detroit’s City Beautiful Movement. The construction process was a place-making effort designed to implant order on the urban landscape that involved the displacement of a community who represented everything that city planners sought to erase from Detroit’s city center: overcrowding, poverty, immigrants, and transient populations. Current historical archaeological research reveals how the existing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Lowman.

The historical response and endurance of Chinese diaspora communities in California, living with legally reified racism, is a critical component of understanding the economic and social impacts of immigration restriction. Between 1876 and 1925, the Chinese employees at the Stanford Stock Farm and Stanford University impacted the development of agriculture and infrastructure through their labor and entrepreneurship as farm workers, in construction, as gardeners, and as domestic workers. Over that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Evans.

The Chase Home for Children opened in 1883, housed in an immigrant-rich neighborhood of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Home accepted children, "without distinction of race, creed, or color*" who needed temporary or long-term care and housing. Chase Home was guided by tenants of the Progressive Era and supported solely by the local community, at a time before state welfare was available. In contrast to single religious denomination orphanages typical in Victorian America, or strict reformatory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zev A Cossin.

The post-independence period (post-1830) of Ecuador and Latin America presented profound socio-political transformations, catalyzing intense debate over the meaning of citizenship and equality for marginalized indigenous populations. Many of these changes manifested on agricultural estates known as haciendas, which often became spaces of direct political actions such as uprisings led by female indigenous activists Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amanguaña in the Cayambe area of Ecuador. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenn Ogborne.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many mining companies in the American West provided their employees with housing and boarding arrangements, even recreational green spaces and company-sponsored festivities on holidays. Daily meals offered by some mining companies were a part of larger managerial capitalist policies common during this period. These meals placed the necessity of eating under a company roof and at a company table with foods purchased with company funds. The town...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Dasovich.

Excavations collected approximately 14.4 cubic meters of a hard-packed living floor from a Fremch Colonial outbuilding for waterscreening (from 23SC2101).  This paper will discuss the partial analysis of the materials and information recovered from this mass soil collection process and draw broad conclusions about the efforts usefullness.  

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Tsai.

The first two decades of the seventeenth century saw a period of rapid technological advancement in shipbuilding, including ships’ rigging. This paper analyzes the changes in rigging seen in artifacts excavated from wrecks spanning from AD 1545 to 1700. Compiled from the most recent publications and/or personal correspondences, the list of artifacts include: blocks, sheaves, pins, deadeyes, chainplates, parrels, cordage, sails, and other miscellaneous parts. These remains will be analyzed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristen A Walczesky.

The examination of faunal remains from archaeological sites provides a wealth of information pertaining to the diets of past peoples and comparative analyses allow for an in-depth understanding of similarities and differences that occur amongst sites. This research focuses on the comparative analysis of faunal data from a variety of sites located in and around Québec City. Data from a privy associated with the French (1720s-1760) and English (1760-1775) occupations of the second Intendant’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Ancheta.

Nineteenth century Fair Haven, New Jersey was home to an African American community that persevered through religious and structural racism. Racism that escalated to the burning of their Free-African American School house.The African American history of Fair Haven is one of gradual emancipation accompanied by gradual gentrification. This research provides an important avenue to rediscovering a long forgotten and dynamic enclave of African Americans that once existed in Fair Haven. Examination of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Kiel.

The neophyte housing complex of Mission Santa Clara de Asís, one of the five Spanish missions established in the San Francisco Bay region during the California Mission Period, was excavated between 2012 and 2014. Excavations unearthed numerous refuse pits that contained a variety of faunal remains. Feature 157 was made up of three distinct multi-use pit sub-features that contained the remains of a variety of fauna. The assemblage dates to approximately 1777-1837 and contains several thousand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emlen Myers. Christopher Polglase. Benjamin D. Siegel. Manuel Roman. Douglas Park.

In 2014, ERM undertook an archaeological baseline survey for the Canal de Nicaragua project as part of an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment. Intended to assess the entire canal route, the area examined included a 10km wide corridor from the Boca de Brito on the Pacific coast to the mouth of the Punta Gorda on the Caribbean coast (a 1,400km² impact area). This paper presents ERM’s Nicaragua project as a case study of a high level CRM effort operating within a politically charged medium...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Catsambis.

The U.S. Navy has recently sought to advance the management of its sunken military craft though internal planning initiatives, as well as the promulgation of revised federal regulations that establish a new permitting program for researchers wishing to investigate ship and aicraft wrecks under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Navy. Following multiple coordination phases within the Department, among federal agencies, and with members of the public, the revised regulations are now in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valerie M. J. Hall.

Subtypological analysis of historic-period indigenous ceramics indicates changes in Maryland Indian women’s pottery over the course of the seventeenth century may have helped normalize the selection and adaptation of aspects of English material culture, while preserving family- and clan-based cultural traditions.  Previous research, hypothesizing that native-made items including ceramics were purchased/traded for and used by English colonists, elucidates a shift in surface treatments while...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacey Camp.

Three dimensional virtual worlds present new possibilities and new challenges for teaching about difficult pasts or "dark heritages." This paper considers how virtual environments can be used to explore conflict through user interaction with primary and secondary data sets. It will present a virtual world prototype of Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp, a World War II Japanese American internment camp that imprisoned over two hundred Japanese American men. Drawing upon pedagogical strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only V. Camille Westmont. Mikaela Girard.

Historical archaeology has an opportunity to tell histories that have been obscured, overlooked, or forgotten, purposefully or otherwise, through the passage of time; however, some of these facets of the past continue to ring true in the present. Archaeologists from the University of Maryland have documented patterns and stories of domestic violence in small company "patch" towns in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Anthracite coal region covering nearly 100 years of history. Oral histories with town...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen M. Sullivan.

Underwater archaeological sites are typically inaccessible to the general public. The public’s interaction with such sites occurs through connections made with excavated artifacts. However, the conservation of these artifacts, especially if they come from a marine environment, can take decades. Interpreting conservation to the public promotes understanding of the lengthy treatment process, thereby fostering support for the project and creating a connection to the artifacts and their history. USS...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John T. Eddins. Virginia Busby.

Reflecting on NHPA 50 years after its passage, it is its public relevance, engagement, and inclusiveness that increasingly enable it to protect the valued heritage of our diverse peoples.  Implemented wisely, with broad stakeholder involvement, and integrated with environmental considerations, NHPA, Section 106 in particular, can directly support future economic, cultural, and environmental sustainability.   From its beginnings NHPA provided flexibility that we have gradually grown more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Atkinson. Andrew Willard.

Archaeological investigation at the Emanuel Point II shipwreck has been ongoing since its discovery in Pensacola Bay in 2006. Excavations in the stern section conducted in 2009 produced a multitude of artifacts, including two of the iron gudgeons used to affix the rudder to the sternpost of the vessel. This poster provides an overview of the conservation process given to the larger of the gudgeons recovered, demonstrating the techniques used for a large-scale multi-component artifact. Comprised...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chemello. Paul Mardikian.

In March 2013, U.S. Navy-trained dolphins found a torpedo during a training session off the coast of San Diego, California. The middle and after body sections of the torpedo were recovered and identified by the Naval History and Heritage Command Underwater Archaeology Branch as a Howell torpedo, one of three known to exist in the world. This presentation describes conservation efforts to preserve this complex technological object. Partial disassembly of the torpedo allowed for effective cleaning...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Chemello. Shanna L Daniel.

The Naval History & Heritage Command (NHHC) Archaeology & Conservation Laboratory, part of the NHHC Underwater Archaeology Branch, supports the Command's mission through the conservation, preservation and curation of archaeological material recovered from US Navy sunken military craft (SMC).  More than 7% of the Navy's archaeological artifact collection was returned to NHHC for treatment and management following unauthorized removal from US Navy SMC.  Unsanctioned and uncontrolled removal of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Krop.

NOAA’s Monitor Collection, consisting of over 200 tons of artifacts recovered from the wreck site of the famed Civil War ironclad, is the focus of the world’s largest marine archaeological metals conservation project at The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.  But the Monitor Collection represents farm more than a series of advanced conservation challenges; it embodies a physical connection between America’s 19th-century history, technology, and culture, our modern efforts to conserve...