“Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution”: Identifying and Understanding Early Historic-Period House Sites

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "“Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution”: Identifying and Understanding Early Historic-Period House Sites," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Over half a century of archaeological research in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic has resulted in the discovery and excavation of a relatively small number of previously unknown early Colonial-period house sites. In this session we seek to identify and address the challenges in finding, investigating, and documenting early historic-period domestic sites. Contributing factors to the low discovery rate include testing and excavation strategies, and a lack of understanding about architectural forms, household practices, and archaeological signatures of early domestic sites. Other issues are difficulty in obtaining permission and funding to pursue small assemblages and a regional bias towards pre-contact Native American archaeology. Our goal is to explore how the archaeological community can improve its abilities to locate, identify, and preserve the information from Colonial sites to better understand the lives and experiences of the 17th- and early 18th- century inhabitants of the region.