Above Water, Below Ground: Toward an amphibious archaeology of empire in the early American Chesapeake

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

A tenet of the maritime cultural landscape is that however expansively it is applied, its starting point is maritime culture. The maritime cultural landscapes of European coloniality were, however, enmeshed in greater taskscapes spanning media and species. An essentialized “maritimity” continues prioritizing this land-water binary even as archaeologists actively complicate and connect maritime archaeological work to broader anthropological discussions. This project interrogates regional American ship construction and breaking in the 17th-19th centuries as part of larger Euro-American colonial projects exercising power over the natural and anthropogenic. These analyses necessitate a theoretical framework for an amphibious archaeology that moves freely between land, water, and the interstitial spaces from which empires rose. Looking at Chesapeake Bay shipbuilding as a part of the region’s agroforestry taskscape using an aggregate of excavation, palynological, and archival data, this paper pushes for a shift from a binary land-water perspective to an amphibious analysis of watery archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow