This paper will look at the interrelationships between geography, landscapes, and seascapes. It also discusses changing geopolitical strategic interests of and conflict between colonial France and England, as well as developments in military and naval technologies. The chronological span will be from the first construction of French defenses in 1725 to the British handing back of lands to civilian

The location, size, and structure of the farmlands and hydraulic systems built by the Indigenous inhabitants of Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain, remain unknown. This hampers our ability to understand how they organized agricultural production and how European settlers transformed local landscapes to build commercial plantations in the late fifteenth century. This paper combines an analysis of archival

The fill of two late and post-medieval cesspits in Brussels was analyzed using a multidisciplinary approach, including the study of macrobotanical and faunal remains, pollen, and parasite eggs. These show that in the diet plant foods were dominated by cereals while the animal remains document the consumption of mainly fish and birds. The presence of foods that were luxuries at that time would indicate

In the nineteenth century, New York State established poorhouses in each county. By the next century, most had been converted to elder care institutions or hospitals. Patients who died without family or means for burial elsewhere were interred on-site in graves marked with small numbered grave stones or wooden markers. After the institutions closed, markers were lost and cemeteries were destroyed by

Previous studies suggest that tropical storms and hurricanes are among the leading causes of shipwrecks in the Caribbean Sea since 1492. This paper will explore the relationship between shipwrecks and hurricanes in the Western Caribbean, particularly Roncador Cay, a place with complex environmental conditions that have made this area a trap for ships, but has up until now, been without rigorous shipwreck

This paper examines how agents inscribed their persona in buildings during the Renaissance in Scania in present-day Sweden. Through an analysis of stone tablets and timber beams with inscriptions, images, and dates, questions of identity and individuality are highlighted. The objects were often placed above doors in noble country residences or in buildings belonging to the urban elite. The paper discusses

This article summarizes the progress and current state of underwater archaeology in Colombia over the past three decades. It also presents the limitations for the scientific community imposed by the Submerged Cultural Heritage Law 1675 of 2013, implemented for the commercial salvage project of the Spanish galleon San José, sunk in 1708. This new legislation opposes basic archaeological principles as

Bones of remora are infrequently identified in archaeological assemblages yet ethnographic and historical accounts from across the world provide evidence for an innovative practice. People intentionally caught remora for use as a fishing aid, allowing them to haul in turtles, marine mammals, and other species to which remora attach themselves. Without considering historical and ethnographic evidence

This article discusses how Co-Principal Investigators that designed and executed the Estate Little Princess Archaeology Project (ELPAP) came together as a community, to demonstrate how such a formation within the discipline, with all its ups and downs, facilitates the skills needed to conduct community archaeology. By using the ELPAP as a case study, this article provides a multiscale examination of

European empires heavily relied on maritime connections for their expansion and operations. In the Andean region, where Spanish colonialism had a distinct urban character, maritime connections were emplaced in a tripartite arrangement or city-port axes. In this article, I show that the city of Arequipa, in southwestern Peru, differed from this pattern. There emerged instead a capillary arrangement

The Hill Community Project in Easton, Maryland, between 2012 and 2019 employed archaeologists from the University of Maryland to build social and political capital for local advocates in a campaign against gentrification in one of the United States’ oldest free African American neighborhoods. Emerging research on The Hill contributed to achieving a publicly funded program for equitable investment that

The Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s was a global economic crisis, yet to understand its impacts in material terms, it is necessary to recognize that they were situated within specific local and regional contexts. This article, drawing on the work of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Landscapes of the Great Depression in the North East project, explores the impacts and responses to the Great Depression

This paper is about Death Valley – a site of mass killings orchestrated by Nazi Germany that took place on the outskirts of Chojnice during the Second World War. I begin by referring to some examples of conflict archaeology that persuasively demonstrate how what has so far been the domain of history is transforming into archaeology. I then present historical information concerning Death Valley. Following

It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it was used by Aboriginal people in rock art and on a variety of objects. Recent examination of museum collections acquired from the Northern Territory Native Industrial Mission at Kapalga in today’s Kakadu National Park, shows that the introduction of laundry

This article intends to address archaeological coloniality and points to the urgent need for epistemological changes within the field. Conceived as an Afroguianese epistemological disobedience, Griotic Archaeology represents an attempt to step away from the disciplinary reiteration of colonial violence. This approach and the engagement of two communities, Moun'Roura and Moun'Wayam, allowed to open

Due to the existence of wares that were produced both within and outside Spanish-tradition workshop in Panamá Viejo, this site offers an apt opportunity to study how coexisting but seemingly distinct potting communities organized their craft in a colonial context. To this end, a sample of two locally produced wares—one characterized by high-fired, wheel-thrown, and tin-glazed vessels known as Panamanian

This paper describes features of secular buildings, mostly houses, shops, and warehouses, standing in the City of London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; buildings in some cases constructed after the Great Fire of September 1666, and in other cases buildings from before the fire which stood in the zone outside it until the nineteenth century. Some prevalent types of smaller house in

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´

Use of Indigenous divers on nineteenth-century northwest Australian pearling luggers gave rise to a transregional apparatus of coercion, physical mistreatment, and arguably, slavery. Where accounts of conditions experienced by divers are limited to the documents of contemporary colonial men, our contribution explores a rare archaeological perspective. Zooarchaeological and taphonomic analysis of the

In the last decade, historical archaeologists in the American West have begun conducting biochemical analyses of contents in bottles recovered from archaeological sites dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Archaeological excavations conducted at the Alameda-Stone Cemetery Site provided a large amount of data about the residents of a Tucson, Arizona neighborhood that existed

This paper documents the importance of French Guiana within the Modern World and the influence of this colony, considered as marginal, on the Atlantic trading networks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To reconstruct French Guiana’s commercial network, a material culture analysis of six archaeological collections and records of the boats reaching Cayenne annually during the Ancien Régime

Francis Buckley was extraordinary; an officer responsible for arming grenades, excavating trenches, surveying, sketch-mapping, and military intelligence, his actions were a roll-call of the First World War’s bloodiest battles. The psychological toll was significant. War remade the man and created the archaeologist. Under fire, Buckley recorded prehistoric lithics on the Somme, a rich archaeological

Historical archaeologists often view curated or heirloom pottery as a frustrating anomaly in the dating of historical-period sites or contexts. Fewer pause to consider why the artifacts were curated in the first place, or what their presence reveals about the people who maintained them. Drawing on a case study of curated micaceous pottery at a Hispanic diaspora site in east-central New Mexico, this

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 Liberté). 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