This paper describes the archaeology of one family’s tolerance to the stressors associated with the settlement of a new place. Artifacts associated with the maintenance of clothing suggest that a British family newly arrived at the Swan River colony in the southwest of Australia had the ability to remain composed during a period of reduced resources and psychological strain. The family’s ability to

The plantation as a fusion of rural industry and commercial agriculture has become a shorthand for the the intensification of land-use, circulation of commodities, and the organization of labor concomitant with the modern world. While not the only place where plantations existed, the Atlantic is the context in which most archaeological research has taken place leaving untested certain assumptions about

This article discusses the development of a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project in the historic resort town of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. It builds on critical theoretical agendas in community-based archaeologies by asking how Black feminist theory-informed CBPR could help archaeologists create meaningful, equitable, and theoretically grounded relationships with local communities

The Ahar city not only has a large number of historical cemeteries but also the courtyard of the city’s museum has one of the richest Islamic-era gravestone collections. These gravestones date to the thirteenth-eighteenth centuries and have been collected from inside the city as well as from surrounding villages. The present study analyzes these gravestones based on a symbolic approach. In this paper

Archaeological evidence from Britain shows botanical inclusions formed part of the post-medieval funeral. Findings from the analysis of three burial grounds consider the extent of demographic, socioeconomic, and local variation in the manner of tributes. Twenty-six of 1431 excavated burials showed evidence for flowers placed inside or bouquets or wreaths placed on top of the coffins, and adults and

This article explores the complex dynamics involved in making African Diaspora histories and cultures visible at Historic Jamestowne, a setting traditionally viewed as white public heritage space. In response to the 400th anniversary of the forcible arrival of Africans in Virginia, archaeologists and heritage professionals at Jamestown are engaging the local African American descendant community in

A zooarchaeological study of fish remains deposited between 1710 and 1900 within a large urban center provides information about households, social hierarchies, and fisheries. Charleston (South Carolina, USA) is an international seaport founded on the southern Atlantic coast of North America in 1670. Fish were important in the city’s cuisine and economy, with Africans involved in many aspects of the

This article shows how archaeology contributes to our understanding of life in the nineteenth-century Jewish diaspora. Using both qualitative and quantitative (statistical) methods, I compare several family-specific, archaeological artifact collections from San Francisco, California, to show how diaspora Jews adapted their traditional practices to modern life while retaining their ethnic identity.

Despite playing a central role in establishing our current racialized prison system, Southern convict leasing has been largely forgotten by American society. The Lone Rock Stockade Project is carrying out excavations at the site of an 1870s convict stockade in order to illuminate the depravity of convict leasing and acknowledge the sacrifices of the convicts who were forced to work without pay in Tennessee’s

The development of iron technologies in mid–eighteenth Century Britain led to an explosion in the variety and scope of iron objects manufactured for the consumer market. One of the primary markets for iron goods was the Caribbean plantation complex. An astonishing amount of iron ware was shipped to Jamaica, where archaeological investigations at Marshalls Pen, a nineteenth-century coffee plantation

Mortuary rituals at the mission church of Yacman, a sixteenth-century rural Maya community, reflect locally specific variants of cultural hybridity relevant to the comparative study of the archaeology of agency and social change in early Colonial settings of Mesoamerica. Burial practices in this church reveal early adoption of Christian norms, followed by a return to more traditional Pre-Columbian

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-020-00583-3

This essay considers the ramifications of “The Umbrella Man” - a brief mystery that was of interest to historians and theorists examining the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 - on the practice of modern archaeology and some of the basic tenets upon which it relies. The paper focuses on certain materials, analytical methods, and research themes associated with the study of nineteenth-century

This article investigates the connections between Wheat Pattern refined earthenwares produced in São Paulo and the Italian immigration farming colony of northeast Rio Grande do Sul during the first decades of the twentieth century. It explores the wheat symbology to discuss the role that these wares exerted in the construction of an Italian identity in southern Brazil appealing to those immigrants´

Since the arrival of the Sakura Maru in 1899, and even back to the seventeenth century with the presence in Lima of Indios de Xapon, generations of Japanese immigrants and their descendants have settled across Peru. While this process has been thoroughly documented by other disciplines, there are almost no studies focused on the resulting material culture. In this article, we introduce potential research

Archaeology of the Japanese diaspora has reached “critical mass” in its disciplinary development, and there is a need to document the current state of this burgeoning subfield of historical archaeology. In this introduction we present a summary of the history of the Japanese diaspora and an overview of scholarly literature in related disciplines. The papers in this special issue reflect both current

This paper presents the first archaeometrical data on colonial glazed wares (taches noires) imported in Haiti (Fort Liberte). The analysis evidenced the exclusive presence of Italian taches noires products, dated before 1820 and related to the colonial era. The presence of English wares next to colonial materials demonstrated continuity in the use of landscape after the Independence and the establishment

This article discusses a small cemetery on the outskirts of Beirut in Lebanon. The cemetery contains the tombs of two of the nineteenth-century governors of Lebanon as well as a handful of high ranking people associated with Ottoman rule in Lebanon. The cemetery is unique because it contains the graves of both Muslims and Christians as well those of men and women. The article records both the tombs

Drawing on folklore, oral history, songs, historic ethnography, literature, and archaeology, this study investigates the economic, social, and material evidence of traditional late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century wakes along coastal Ireland through the lens of an archaeological case study on the island of Inishark. We analyze material practices of “good” and “bad” deaths, and explore the myriad

Since Europeans first attempted to settle the region of the Tarka river valley in today’s Eastern Cape, South Africa, during the late eighteenth century they were opposed by Indigenous groups. The disruptive nature of the colonial project meant that people from different ethnicities sought safety together and launched a wave of attacks, characterized by stock theft against the settlers. This resistance

This article is a form of activist archaeology in taking a feminist intersectional approach to suggest additional information and sites to increase the inclusiveness of Boston’s Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail. First a critical feminist approach is taken to analyze the biases of these trails. Critique of the dominance of elite white heterosexual men in Freedom Trail sites is needed to open the

The archaeology of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) has experienced an important development over the last two decades. Several field projects have studied aspects such as mass graves, forced labor camps, and battlefields. In this paper, we present a case study from the so-called “Northern Front” (Frente Norte). The impressive mountain of Monte Bernorio, situated at the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains

Archaeological deposits build up inside standing buildings both under and between floors and these have the potential to provide considerable information about human behavior in the past. Under and between floor spaces provide a unique depositional environment that allow the survival of rare and fragile organic materials that typically do not survive in other archaeological contexts, including paper

At the end of the fifteenth century, there was a shift from a defensive tower house residential model to a type of palatial-style residential model. The Loyola Tower Palace, located in the Basque Country, Spain, is an example of this evolution. This paper aims to analyze the architectural elements and construction system of a pre-renaissance manor house. The work was divided into three sections: fieldwork

Caribbean plantation landscapes were designed to mediate interactions between planters and enslaved laborers. In this paper, wind-powered sugar mills on the island of Montserrat are singled out as being prominent components of the plantation environment that were not only economically productive, but also served as markers of planter power and control. The mills’ distinctive shape and height render

Smell is a language, communicative and interpretive. Firmly embedded in the physical, social, emotional, and semantic context, odor emanates as existential expression that is integral and idiosyncratic to human culture, behaviors, and practices. Advances in scientific techniques allows for odor to be used as primary source evidence. Focusing on a ground-breaking technique, headspace sampling provides

Following Spanish colonization, the food and symbolic roles of domesticated guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) changed depending on geographic setting and the ethnic composition of inhabitants. I draw on archaeology, ethnohistory, historical imagery, and historical studies to explore how Spanish social perceptions regarding edible food animals and the human body altered the culinary and ritual uses of guinea

As archaeology turns to the study of sustained colonialism, researchers are reassessing sites occupied by Native people from the mid-nineteenth century onward. In California, this was a particularly crucial time, with many Indigenous people creating social and economic ties with newcomers in order to maintain connections to their ancestral homelands. One such locale was Toms Point, a landform on Tomales

The aim of this article is to analyze the ore dressing technics present during the peak production period of a silver mine in the Seventeenth-Century Andes, from an archaeological and historical perspective. It is not focused on the silver refinery constructions, or their description and social relationships, which are presented in the specialized literature, but rather on attention to the objects

During Editor proofing, the article title was mistakenly changed to “ Flowers in the Garbage: Transformations of Prostitution in Iran in the late Nineteenth-Twenty-First Centuries in Iran

Technological change has interested archaeologists since the inception of the field, but persistence – particularly in a broader context of social transformation – is also a phenomenon that demands explanation. This paper examines the persistence of Indigenous silver production in Porco, Bolivia from Inka times to the twenty-first century, arguing that rather than solely being the result of either

The high mountains of the Mediterranean are often considered as refuges of ancient traditions, particularly of pastoralism and brigandage. Is this image true? This paper reports the first systematic archaeological research on Aspromonte, Southern Calabria. Archaeological, cartographic and air photo evidence suggests that people used the high mountains in all periods from the Neolithic onwards. However

The archaeology of garbage project was conducted in 2017-18 to investigate the daily garbage of inhabitants of two districts of Tehran. Among the discarded materials, we recognized scattered evidence of prostitutes’ daily life. Finding such evidence gave us an alibi to work on the historical documents in order to trace the patterns of prostitution in nineteenth-century Tehran. In this article, we configure

The redevelopment of a football stadium in Brisbane, Australia provided the opportunity to archaeologically salvage the remains of 397 colonial inhabitants from a cemetery that was in use between 1843 and 1875. No burial registers survived and DNA testing of the remains failed. One person, Eliza Coffey, who burned to death in 1863, has been identified through the forensic analysis of a small piece

This paper is about the palimpsest of the colonial heritage of Iguape-São Paulo, Brazil. Our objective is to illustrate the various occupations present at Sobrado dos Toledos, a historic building in the Brazilian context, and a neoclassical symbol of an important colonial context. We also highlight the importance of this monumental architectural structure as a landmark of a social reality in space

Over 1,600 extant WW2 impact craters in the Foret Domaniale de la Londe-Rouvray, Lower Seine valley, Normandy, France, have been mapped and analyzed using LiDAR, historic aerial photographs, archive documents, and field survey. Crater densities average 0.26/ha2 with values up to 31/ha2 in clusters around road and railway infrastructure. Some 576 craters can be dated using aerial photographs to intervals

Archaeology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland began looking for the former homestead of West Ashcom in the Spring of 2012. West Ashcom was established on the south bank of the Patuxent River in what is now St. Mary’s County, MD by John Ashcom in 1651. At its height in the early eighteenth century it contained a manor house, kitchen, dairy, orchard, port, haberdashery, and various other barns and

Innamincka Station, South Australia, built by Henry Colless on the northern bank of Cooper Creek in 1875, was, until recently, believed be the original Innamincka Station. This belief is now challenged by the discovery of three small ruins on the south bank of Cooper Creek and the identification of a little-known pioneering venture of courage and youthful exuberance. Searches through a tangle of archives

In 1949, a lumber executive and city alderman in Charleston, South Carolina, named Alfred O. Halsey produced a visually unique map of the Charleston peninsula. The map highlights the fluctuations and changes of the urban landscape through time and traces the contours of historic events in the city. Although his depiction is compelling, tapping into a dialectical understanding of the city landscape

Using ArcGIS, I map the ways in which primary and secondary sources describing an 1850s cholera epidemic in the Caribbean spatialize the epidemic. More specifically, I probe the scale at which varying narratives report the epidemic to consider whether it was understood as a broad, regional event, or at the level of specific colonies or islands. I draw upon post colonial and feminist critiques of the

Missions and indigenous villages are commonly investigated contexts for indigenous responses to Spanish colonialism in the American Southwest. In early colonial New Mexico, colonists’ households were also a venue for interaction and exchange of information between Pueblos and Spanish. Using the concept of hybridity, I explore seventeenth-century Spanish ranches in northern New Mexico for the interactions

In the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania, Australia) the period 1839-53 witnessed an irrevocable change in the way in which prisoners (convicts) were managed. Known as the “probation system”, its introduction saw convicts newly transported from the corners of the Empire sequestered in government-run stations across the colony’s length and breadth. At these places, rigorous and uncompromising

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, company towns often provided housing for workers within a system of benevolent paternalism. This paper examines a set of workers’ cottages known as “the Twelve Apostles” on Maria Island, Tasmania. The archaeology reveals differences between the standardized, company-built houses, providing evidence that the residents’ responses often varied in ways

Spanish colonial incursions into highland Guatemala encountered a vibrant assemblage of entangled people, places, plants, and things. Colonists sought to marshall this assemblage into various accumulation projects through strategies of colonial control that re-ordered the landscape and its settlements, enabling new forms of surveillance, tracking, subject making, and exploitation of Native communities

The 1733 St. Jan Slave Rebellion in the Danish West Indies was an ephemeral event, from an archaeological perspective. Lasting only eight months and diffused across the 52-km 2 island, the rebellion lacks a traditional archaeological signature even from battlefield methodologies. However, it is useful to apply archaeological questions to topics that are difficult to approach through dirt and shovel

The “Pots Project” documents and studies modern pottery workshops in Sudan, in the area of el-Zuma and Karima, which is the core area investigated by the Early Makuria Research Project (EMRP) of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology University of Warsaw (PCMA) researching the beginnings of the Kingdom of Makuria. This interim presentation discusses observations from two modern workshops in

The archaeology of colonialism has been recently reconceived as the investigation of persistent cultural practices that connect the past and the present which values alterities and cosmologies. In São Paulo, the singular alliance between Tupiniquim and the Portuguese starting in ca. 1502 CE generated practices that linked knowledge structures from the pre-colonial period to the present. This study

Cherokee Landscapes is a digital conservation project to protect and preserve heritage in ways determined by Ani-Kitu Hwagi (Cherokee) stakeholders. This digital repatriation project requires new ways of visualizing archaeological information and geographically integrating Ani-Kitu Hwagi materials that are dispersed among many national and international institutions. The platform for Cherokee Landscapes

Using a brief experiment in GIS, this article explores the relationship between showing and knowing in archaeology, and the relationship between seeing and understanding in medieval and modern ideas about landscape. The experiment plays with recreating the travel ‘mnemonic-scape’ along a section of medieval (thirteenth-fifteenth CE centuries) mountain highway, along a branch of what is now called “the

This is an introduction to the special issue entitled “Beyond (within, through) the Grid: Mapping and Historical Archaeology.” The papers in this issue emerge from a 2017 Society for American Archaeology session, in which archaeologists considered the intersections of mapping and historical archaeology. In this volume, the papers expand upon these discussions and explore the ways in which mapping can

Since the 1990s, US border policies have worked to funnel undocumented migration into remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where deadly terrain and temperatures make border crossing most dangerous. This weaponization of the desert finds some cover, we argue, behind the scalar projects of state-centered maps emphasizing vast geography and gross statistics over personal pain and trauma. Counter-mapping

This article discusses the use of ESRI’s ArcGIS Story Map application for heritage place-making in a small, diverse, deindustrialized urban neighborhood in Binghamton, New York. “Stories from North of Main” is a Story Map that weaves together the multiple meanings residents attach to neighborhood places by layering audio, images, and text to create stories of work, home, and community life, past and

European enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas began in the Caribbean, quickly spreading to the rest of the continent and impacting the lives of millions. Despite its centrality to the creation of the colonial Caribbean, is still an understudied subject. This article summarizes the archaeological evidence on the topic and discusses the utility of the archaeological approach based on research

Lowell is considered as the birthplace of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth-century United States. Originating in 1822, the new textile factories harnessed the waters of the Merrimack River using a system of canals, dug and maintained by laborers. While this work employed many local Yankees, it also attracted groups of emigrant Irish workers. Grave memorials are a valuable source of

Unlike other social sciences, the archaeological discipline has been lacking a theoretical framework to discuss the mechanism of migration. Traditionally, patterns of population movements were denoted from material culture and interpreted within the context of ethnicity and the diffusion of ideas without considering underlying processes and incentives, despite active consideration of these issues by

Similarity coefficients between artifact samples can be used for constructing larger groupings or for seriating the artifact samples. Indeed, these two approaches work well together, because the construction of groupings assists the seriation of the samples within and across groups. Sequentially grouping the samples into a single total sample, through hierarchical analysis of their coefficients, enables

The Garrison cemetery in Gothenburg was established for the enlisted soldiers and their families but also for others working at the garrison. It was in use from the end of the seventeenth century to 1835. The soldiers belonged to a group that had a poor financial situation. The purpose of this study was to trace signs of their living conditions through the osteological material. Looking at the age

Zooarchaeological research at Spanish colonial missions in the U.S.-Mexico border region indicates that cattle ranching formed the basis for economic colonialism in the region. Animal remains from Mission Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera add to this expanding body of research and demonstrate heterogeneity in mission economic strategies, particularly influenced by local ecology, and

Transnational mobility of people, goods, ideas, and capital was a key feature of the British Empire in the long nineteenth century, as millions of migrants created new colonial societies at the expense of Indigenous peoples. Archaeological biographies of individuals provide crucial insight into these wider processes of social, material and environmental transformation. James William Robertson (1823–76)

Maltese earthenware makers produced a range of utilitarian wares that formed a crucial part of the islanders’ foodways for much of the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Despite the industry’s social significance, archaeologists have hitherto refrained from giving these mundane items any serious consideration. In this paper I present the first detailed account of post-medieval Maltese earthenware