Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake

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.