Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2024
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake," at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
In the 1970s and 80s, archaeologists discovered the early colonial Chesapeake, notably through studies of earthfast architecture, domestic artifacts, and subsistence practices. What emerged was a unified region with a distinctive identity based on the demands of tobacco cultivation. A few individual sites came to stand for this pan-Chesapeake identity. Fast forward 40 or 50 years and the many archaeological sites now available for study from this period have revealed extensive regional variability. Chronological scale has expanded to include the centuries preceding colonization, while geographical scale has shrunk to the many river valleys that make up the Chesapeake. In this session, presenters working in Maryland and Virginia acknowledge the important contributions that studies of variation make, while shifting their gaze to the greater Chesapeake and the broader Atlantic World, using a comparative approach to pose new questions using the rich material remains from the region as portals to the past.
Other Keywords
Chesapeake •
Architecture •
Ceramic Production •
Slavery •
Colonial Architecture •
coarse earthenwares •
Colonial Period •
Colonial •
Indigenous •
Indigenous Archaeology
Geographic Keywords
Chesapeake •
Chesapeake, Middle Atlantic •
Chesapeake/Mid Atlantic
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)
- Documents (6)
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Archival Silence, Archaeological Fluency: Finding Indigenous Slavery In The Chesapeake (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The capture, enslavement, and sale of Indigenous people emerged early in the colonized Chesapeake Tidewater but remains understudied by archaeologists, in part because researchers have traditionally considered Indigenous enslavement as rare in the region. I use a fragmentary archive,...
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Moments of Ambiguity: Using Jesuit Rings to Highlight Periods of Cultural Entanglement within the Potomac and Rappahannock River Valleys (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists studying the Chesapeake have interpreted the long 17th century as a period of certain and extended colonialism. However, by taking a sub-regional approach when examining the period, the shifts in power between Indians and settlers become more visible. In this paper, I examined...
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Patterns in Local and Global Coarse Earthenware Sources in the Early Colonial Chesapeake (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Locally produced, lead-glazed coarse earthenware ceramics are ubiquitous in archaeological assemblages from Chesapeake households. Between the 17th-19th centuries, ceramic industries in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria, and eastern Virginia thrived despite the popularity of imported European...
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Posts or Sills – What’s The Big Deal? (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines two colonial sites in Maryland’s Patuxent River Valley: the Melon Field site (18CV169), home of Robert Taylor Jr., dating between the 1660s and the 1680s and the 1690 to 1711 King’s Reach Site (18CV83), home of Richard Smith Jr. While these two small tobacco farms both have...
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Revisiting Buckley in 17th-Century Chesapeake Assemblages (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Most archaeologists working in the Chesapeake attribute coarse earthenware characterized by a marbled buff and red paste and dark brown to black glossy glaze to potters working in the town of Buckley in northeast Wales from the 1720s through the late 18th century. Recently, Lindsay Bloch has...
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A Storehouse of Architectural Inspirations and Legacies: Examining Structure 101 at St. Mary’s Fort, Maryland (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Over the past three years, archaeologists at Historic St. Mary’s City have revealed the footprint of a large, timber-framed building—dubbed Structure 101—located within the palisaded walls of St. Mary’s Fort (ca. 1634). Comprised of more than 70 posts and featuring a large cellar on its north...