The World Turned Upside Down: Revisiting the Archaeology of the American Revolution

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The World Turned Upside Down: Revisiting the Archaeology of the American Revolution," at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

For over a century, antiquarians and scholars have been studying the archaeology of the American Revolution. Their work has identified campsites, battlefields, burials, and shipwrecks, all of which have provided new information about this formative period in American history. This session revisits famous and forgotten sites and collections associated with the American Revolution in order to expand our understanding of this crucial period. Through the use of new theories, technologies, and approaches, archaeology has tremendous potential for illuminating this storied conflict and exploring the lives and experiences of Revolutionary War generation. At the same time, these studies, which include terrestrial, cartographic, maritime, forensic, and collections-based research, expand, enhance, contradict, and question accepted beliefs about the Revolution, quite literally turning our archaeological world upside down.