Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2021
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World," at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
The careful consideration of archaeological provenience is what gives archaeologists our edge in studying the past. Not only do archaeologists recover material traces of past (and present) worlds, we do so in a manner that allows contexts of use to be reconstructed or inferred. While such an approach is often considered more method than theory, in fact, it is these contexts that are critical for deep interpretation of the past, regardless of how recent or ancient that past is. Using case studies from the Chesapeake region of North America, presenters urge archaeologists to think deeply about provenience and context and to recognize that these concepts are foundational for integrating archaeology’s unique form of empirical evidence with higher order interpretations. By closely engaging with the material world, we realize the full potential of our field; without it, our interpretations are at best incomplete and at worst unsubstantiated.
Other Keywords
Magic •
Colonialism •
context •
Apotropaic •
Agriculture •
Native American •
Interpretation •
Material Culture Analysis •
Paleoethnobotany •
Caches
Geographic Keywords
Chesapeake •
Chesapeake (Maryland and Virginia) •
Chesapeake, United States •
Eastern Seaboard
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)
- Documents (7)
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Crafting Tradition: Historical Archaeology and the Persistence of the Patawomeck Eel Pot (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Traditional crafts associated with Virginia Indian tribes have drawn the attention of colonizers, collectors, anthropologists, and material culture researchers for hundreds of years. The vast majority of these crafts have a connection to traditional foodways systems and serve as major aspects of tribal identity and...
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Ho-Hum Hoofwear or Meaningfully Magical? How to Identify and Interpret Apotropaic Horseshoes (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Horseshoes are common finds on post-contact sites in the Chesapeake and elsewhere. While they are typically interpreted as artifacts of transportation or agriculture, horseshoes also served magical functions such as warding off evil and bringing good luck. This creates an interpretive problem for archaeologists as the...
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In the Weeds: Digging Deeply into the Paleoethnobotany of the early Colonial Chesapeake (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. We share preliminary results of a comparative paleoethnobotanical analysis of carbonized macrobotanical remains recovered from archaeological sites in Maryland and Virginia spanning three periods (1630-1660, 1661-1700, 1701-1730) and four ecological zones. Samples from contexts with defined dates and precise locations...
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Magic and Mystery on a Chesapeake Plantation (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. At Smith’s St. Leonard, the site of a Maryland tobacco plantation dating to the first half of the 18th century, a number of apotropaic objects have been discovered by archaeologists over the last two decades. Including bent silver coins, horseshoes, fossils and altered spoons and lead disks, these objects seem to embody...
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Make Context Great Again: Reconnecting Context with the Archaeological Record (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Each archaeological site contains a tangible archaeological record, meaning the commingled artifacts, features, and soils that form contexts and proveniences at each site are unique and in fact existed in three dimensions in space and time. Beyond the physical description and recordation of these contexts, everything...
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The Social Dynamics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: Inferences from Tobacco Pipe Assemblages and Their Archaeological Contexts. (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. We explore how the analysis of variation in tobacco pipe assemblages among excavation contexts provides insights into social dynamics on eighteenth-century slave quarter sites in the Chesapeake. We draw on data from multiple quarter sites, available on the DAACS website (daacs.org). We apply signaling theory to build a...
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When Time Has Run Out: Using Space And Form To Build Context (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Digging Deep: Close Engagement with the Material World" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. What does one do with artifacts recovered from disturbed proveniences? Or with artifacts recovered almost a hundred years ago and now sitting in museum collections? Are reasonable, responsible inferences possible? Space and form may help achieve what lost levels cannot: this paper considers the case of the mysterious...