Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island histories have been documented by archaeologists, historians, and communities within which sites and commemorative places are located. This session explores the well-known site of the Myles Standish House in Duxbury; largely forgotten places including two cemeteries in Boston and Providence’s Gaspee Street neighborhood; and formerly hidden sites like the Martha’s Vineyard brickyards and rum distilleries in Bristol’s waterfront district. Each site paper examines how these places were documented over time and why they were remembered or forgotten. By re-examining the archaeological, written, and oral history of each site with a twenty-first century perspective, new and sometimes very different stories are being carried into the future. The session concludes with ways in which innovative digital technology can be used to interpret these types of archaeological sites and provide interactive visitor experiences, with examples from the Martha’s Vineyard brickyard and a shipwreck discovered in South Boston’s seaport district.
Other Keywords
Rhode Island •
Vernacular Architecture •
Brickyard •
Technology •
Interpretation •
Urban Archaeology •
Cemeteries •
industrial •
boston •
Working Class
Temporal Keywords
19th Century •
21st Century •
18th and 19th centuries •
Seventeenth Century
Geographic Keywords
Coahuila (State / Territory) •
New Mexico (State / Territory) •
Oklahoma (State / Territory) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
Texas (State / Territory) •
Sonora (State / Territory) •
United States of America (Country) •
Chihuahua (State / Territory) •
Nuevo Leon (State / Territory) •
Delaware (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)
- Documents (6)
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The Archaeological "Exceptionalism" of the Seventeenth Century: Myles Standish, James Deetz, and the Siren Song of Welsh Architecture (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Myles Standish House Site in Duxbury, Massachusetts, is familiar to most historcial archaeologists through James Deetz’s 1977 publication In Small Things Forgotten. In it, Deetz highlighted the 1635 foundation ruins as the earliest systematic excavation of a post-contact period site in the United States and an important...
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The Brickyard in Chilmark – Once a Busy Vineyard Industry and Now One of the Island’s Hidden Industrial Wonders (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Martha’s Vineyard is historically well known for its maritime economy, but what many do not know is that there was sufficient water power along inland rivers for substantial land-based industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Roaring Brook, originating in the hills of northwest Chilmark, was the site of several...
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Digging into Digital: Using Technology to Interpret Archaeological Sites (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Technology provides a constantly increasing toolset for site interpretation, and one that has been utilized by museums and corporations alike in recent years. Each physical site hosts a unique constellation of content and history, and each site’s expansion into the digital realm should build upon that unique source material to...
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A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Examining Nineteenth-Century Cemetery Relocations in Roxbury, Massachusetts (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Kearsarge-Warren Avenue Cemetery and the St. Joseph’s Cemetery were nineteenth-century burial grounds located approximately one-third of a mile apart in the Roxbury section of Boston. Both were in use for several decades: Kearsarge-Warren Avenue from 1818 to 1883 as a Protestant parish and later a City-owned cemetery, and...
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The Triangle Trade and Early Nineteenth Century Rum Distilleries in Bristol, Rhode Island (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Although the slave trade was outlawed in 1787, Rhode Island merchants continued slave voyages to West Africa and the West Indies into the early 1800s. By then the coastal town of Bristol had surpassed Newport as the busiest slave port in the state. Bristol’s DeWolf family financed 88 slaving voyages from 1784 to 1807, roughly...
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Working Class Providence: The Gaspee Street Neighborhood in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reinterpreting New England’s Past For the Future" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For the last six years, The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. has worked to catalog and analyze the Providence Cove Lands Collection. This assemblage represents artifacts from two archaeological sites from the edges of what was once the Great Salt Cove: the Carpenter’s Point Site (on the south shore), and the North Shore...