Oak and Bluestone: Resource Extraction, Agriculture, and Economy in the Catskills

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper evaluates existing data and collections from compliance based archaeological studies located in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Over the course of European settlement, the economy in this region has been based almost entirely in agriculture and resource extraction to include mining and logging. The social and economic environment derived from a lack of easy travel to this remote region has created a unique opportunity to interpret dynamic social change caused by the influx of immigrants. The region is typified by a lack of industrial development. This lack of development has caused a vacuum of archaeological research and available collections due to the low frequency of compliance driven studies. The following paper will utilize case studies in the region to interpret social change and trends while also interpreting data biases introduced by the low amount of archaeological research and available existing collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 564