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Urbanization On The Landscape Of The Old City: An Archaeological Investigation Of Site 40kn223 In Knoxville, Tennessee, Garrett B. Wamack

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine the effects of urbanization on the landscape and the people who lived upon it at archaeological site 40KN223 within the Old City in Knoxville, Tennessee. This landscape analysis focuses particularly on the decades from 1850 to 1920 during the birth and growth of the Old City. Amid the rising tides of commercialization, industrialization, and the flood-prone waters of First Creek, residents established a working-class neighborhood on the fringe of a substantial African American community. I examine this neighborhood and the transformation of its immediate landscape to understand how urbanization impacted its transformation, to learn who …

Creating And Implementing Strategies For Nrhp Eligibility Assessment At The Fort Polk Military Reservation, Matthew Thomas Hoover

Masters Theses

Large U.S. military installations, such as Fort Polk military reservation in south-central Louisiana, have for decades been the sites of cultural resource management (CRM) investigations, primarily due to the corpus of federal legislation developed to protect archaeological resources. These projects have yielded massive amounts of material and geospatial data and allowed researchers to develop sophisticated methodologies for analyzing site distribution, lithic tool manufacture, and many other avenues of inquiry. However, the cultural chronology represented on Fort Polk is still not well understood, and as a result assignation of National Register of Historic Places (NRHP)significance to sites on Fort Polk has …

No Tunes Chime Amidst The Bones: A Zooarchaeological Analysis Of Saltpeter Cave (3nw29), An Ozarchaic Bluffshelter In Northwest Arkansas, Nathanael G. Fosaaen

Masters Theses

The Southeastern Ozarks region is a karst limestone environment featuring many sheltered sites, including Saltpeter Cave in Newton County, Arkansas. Early and Middle Archaic components of this site assemblage contain abundant faunal materials that illustrate how Ozarchaic peoples modified their subsistence strategies to accommodate significant climate change that began ~10,000 years ago. I have employed several quantitative techniques, including, density-mediated attrition analysis, diet breadth models, and bone fragmentation patterns to investigate the hunting and trapping practices at this southern Ozarchaic site. I have also employed small mammal representation and correspondence analysis using datasets from Dust Cave, Modoc Rock Shelter, and …

Those Beyond The Walls: An Archaeological Examination Of Michilimackinac’S Extramural Domestic Settlement, 1760-1781, James Cain Dunnigan

Masters Theses

Ideal for both the French and British, the location of Fort Michilimackinac was selected to serve as a key entrepôt for European goods from the colonized east coast to be traded for furs from the Upper Country. The diverse population that formed around Michilimackinac included French and British soldiers, traders, craftsmen, and their families, as well as large seasonal populations of Native Americans. While the Fort’s interior continues to be vigorously examined, little focus has been directed to the larger, multicultural village that emerged outside the fort’s walls in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Excavations from 1970-1973, conducted …

Deeply Rooted: A Feasibility Study Testing The Potential For Ams Dating Through Paleoethnobotanical Recovery Methods At The Topper Site (38al23), Sarah Elizabeth Walters

Masters Theses

Archaeologists often make limiting operational choices that — though considered and logical — are (sometimes) necessarily selective in nature. One such a priori framework posits that costly paleoethnobotanical recovery and associated analyses are not worthwhile when working in sandy, acidic soils; as dateable organic remains are too rapidly destroyed by inherent chemical and mechanical processes to allow for differential preservation. This research demonstrates that these destructive processes are largely misunderstood. Indeed, the successful collection of significant paleoethnobotanical material is possible from certain types of sandy soils previously thought to be organically sterile. Moreover, such paleoethnobotanical recovery efforts can yield viable, …

Slave Subsistence Strategies At Thomas Jefferson’S Monticello Plantation: Paleoethnobotanical Analysis And Interpretation Of The Site 8 (44ab442) Macrobotanical Assemblage, Stephanie Nicole Hacker

Masters Theses

Throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, millions of enslaved Africans and African Americans were crucial to the success of plantations in the American South, but despite their numbers little exists in the written record to provide an accurate history for the African American slave community. However, archaeological and historic research shows that even under the constraints of slavery, enslaved African Americans were active in forming their own families and communities, countering ill-treatment and nutritional deprivation, maintaining their cultural and spiritual identities, and establishing ways to enhance their well-being. The research presented in this study emphasizes the utility of studying carbonized …

Tracking Trajectories: Charting Changes Of Late Archaic Shell Ring Formation And Use, Martin Peter Walker

Masters Theses

For the past fifty years the shell rings of the North American, southeastern, Late Archaic period, have been a continuous object of archaeological research. They have been studied within contexts of the initial creation and use of ceramics in North America, mounding and monumentality of hunter-gatherers, early sedentism and social complexity, forager feasting, ritual, and ceremonialism, and human-environment interactions. The aim of this project was to bring together the cumulative data generated by this continuous research focus and centralize it within a single database, the Late Archaic Shell Rings Repository. In utilizing this consolidated data set, it is possible to …

Patterns In Faunal Remains At Fort St. Joseph, A French Fur Trade Post In The Western Great Lakes, Joseph Hearns

Masters Theses

Faunal studies have the potential to detect a variety of patterns in animal processing activities at an archaeological site. The spatial relationships of taphonomic mechanisms observed within the animal bone assemblage illuminate the use of space on a site as well as the patterns of waste discard. Patterns within the formation processes influencing the distribution of faunal remains serve as the basis for interpretation of animal processing behaviors. This study analyzes a sample of animal bones from Fort St. Joseph (20BE23), an eighteenth-century French fur trade post in the western Great Lakes region. This post was a hub of exchange …

Casting Stones: An Analysis Of The Late Archaic Period At The Big Pine Tree Site, South Carolina, Based In Behavioral Ecology, Adam Daniel Russell

Masters Theses

The Big Pine Tree site (38AL143) is located in the Central Savannah River Valley in the coastal plain of South Carolina. A chert quarry site, it has been used since the Late Paleoindian period (12,850-11,200 cal yr BP) and is in fact still utilized to this day by employees of the nearby Archroma facility. The site has been extensively excavated under the direction of Albert C. Goodyear III for many years, resulting in a large assemblage. This research addresses an unusual 30-centimeter thick dark-brown soil stain located between 60-90 centimeters below ground surface that dates to the beginning of the …

Plant Remains From The Smokemont Site In The Appalachian Mountains Of North Carolina, Gabrielle Casio Purcell

Masters Theses

Smokemont (31Sw393) is a multicomponent site consisting of deposits from Archaic, Woodland, Mississippian, Cherokee, and Euro-American occupations. Located in Swain County in the Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina, two structures have been identified at Smokemont, one as a Mississippian Pisgah phase house, and the other a Contact period Qualla phase house. Beneath the Pisgah house are several Connestee period pit features. Archaeobotanical remains have been collected from Woodland, Mississippian, and Cherokee contexts. Floral analysis of Middle Woodland features indicate some horticultural activity, with wild plants remaining important but supplementary to maize agriculture during the Mississippian and Cherokee occupations. This …

Faunal Analysis Of Sachsen Cave Shelter: A Zooarchaeological Approach To Site Function, Meagan Elizabeth Dennison

Masters Theses

Faunal remains are not often utilized to explore settlement practices and site use by prehistoric hunter-gatherers in the southeastern United States. Instead, lithic reduction sequences and site features are generally relied upon when making these kinds of interpretations. Faunal analysis, however, can offer an additional line of support to these interpretations, especially when seasonal indicators, transport of large animal remains and diversity of species are taken into account. This thesis is an attempt to address the prehistoric use of Sachsen Cave Shelter through the lens faunal analysis. Sachsen Cave Shelter is a large sandstone rock shelter located on the Upper …

A Gis Analysis Of The Dynamics Of Power: An Example From 18th-Century Piedmont Virginia, Crystal Lynn Ptacek

Masters Theses

The neighborhood surrounding historic Indian Camp plantation located in Virginia’s eastern piedmont provides an opportunity to examine past identity formation and power dynamics. Using public records and ArcGIS, I researched this historical community to explore networks in which these individuals were involved. Historic land patents and transactions surrounding the Indian Camp property were given a geographical context, and based on resulting maps, research has identified a dynamic neighborhood whose members were deeply entangled in one another’s lives. Many who patented lands around Indian Camp did not do so because of a lack of opportunity in their home counties or due …

The Age Of Consumption: A Study Of Consumer (And Producer) Behavior And The Household, Stephen A. Damm

Masters Theses

While anthropologists have often emphasized the importance of factors such as the household's age, lifecycle, and kinship within the context of the wider community, archaeologists have paid less attention to these factors. Using data from the excavations of eighteen farms in the Finger Lakes National Forest, occupied from the 19th century into the 1930s, I examine how household age influenced the consumer choices made by a sample of households and how aspects of production and consumption were prioritized within this context. By examining broad patterns in the archaeological and historic data, an age-based analysis as a young/old categorization is juxtaposed …

Contextualizing The Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site (40wg59): Understanding Landscape Change At An Upland South Farmstead., Daniel Whitaker Howard Brock

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on a contextual archaeological approach to investigate the historic landscape of the Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site. Tipton-Haynes is a late eighteenth- through twentieth-century upland south farmstead located in Johnson City, TN. Home to two prominent Tennessee families and occupied until acquired by the state in the 1960s, the site has experienced many alterations to the landscape over time. The analysis presented views the landscape as material culture investigated through a multidisciplinary approach including historic research, architectural survey, geophysical survey, dendrochronology, and archaeology. To make sense of the complex nature of the Tipton-Haynes site, multiple methods were used …

An Analysis Of Personal Adornment At Fort St. Joseph (20be23), An Eighteenth-Century French Trading Post In Southwest Michigan, Ian B. Kerr

Masters Theses

Since 1998 Western Michigan University archaeologists have investigated Fort St. Joseph (20BE23), an 18th century mission, garrison and trading post located in present day Niles, Michigan. The project’s research directive focuses on exploring notions of identity formation and its material expression in light of the prolonged and persistent cultural contact between Native Americans and Europeans at the site.

This thesis seeks to further this directive by exploring how personal adornment materiality both structures and broadcasts individuals’ social identities. By employing an intrasite spatial analysis of the assemblage of adornment artifacts from recognized domestic contexts at Fort St. Joseph this thesis …

Plant Remains, Investment Strategies, And Site Processes: Two Sites Along The Nolichucky River In Greene County, Tennessee, Jessie Luella Johanson

Masters Theses

Sites 40GN228 and 40GN229, located in Greene County, Tennessee, provide a record of subsistence change and variation in landscape management practices spanning from the Late Paleoindian to the Pisgah phase of the Mississippian period. The botanical remains from these sites detail changing plant-human relationships over a 12,000-year time span in the upper Ridge and Valley of eastern Tennessee. The expansive temporal and spatial scale of the two sites presented an opportunity to evaluate the plant assemblages on several levels. The substantial cultural deposits allowed a synchronic and diachronic look into plant use. In addition, the geographic proximity of the two …

Chenopodium Berlandieri And The Cultural Origins Of Agriculture In The Eastern Woodlands, Daniel Shelton Robinson

Masters Theses

The development of agriculture in the New World has been a topic of prominent historic interest, but one that has ignored some regions in favor of others. The woodlands of Eastern North America have felt this bias in the investigation of agricultural origins, but this has not prevented the development of theories to explain the emergence of a complex of indigenous agricultural plants in the region. Data collection and technological advances have in large part validated these theories, creating a model for domestication. By emphasizing farming over other cultural practices, however, these theories lack explanatory power with regards to the …

Improvements In Multi-Tool Surveying Efficiency For Archaeological Geophysics, Caitlyn Marie Williams

Masters Theses

Conventional archaeological excavation methods are, by nature, extremely invasive and result in study areas being irrevocably altered for the sake of research. For this reason, near-surface geophysical techniques have been incorporated into archaeological investigations to aid in determining the locations of buried features with minimal damage to the site. The objective of this research was to perform a geophysical survey at an archaeological site on the Akrotiri Peninsula in Cyprus to locate evidence of a Roman naval base and to develop an improved data management workflow that will improve the usefulness of geophysical data to archaeologists.

An on-site archaeologist determined …

Predictive Modeling In Western Louisiana: Prehistoric And Historic Settlement In The Kisatchie National Forest, Erik Nicholas Johanson

Masters Theses

This thesis is an effort to provide the US Forest Service with a tool to effectively and efficiently protect and manage the cultural resource heritage of the Kisatchie National Forest. The development and subsequent evaluation of modeling efforts are vital to the archaeology of the region. There are two goals of this modeling project: to evaluate the active US Forest Service Predictive Model and secondly, if warranted, which it was, to improve upon previous models in the region. To do so 23 environmental variables were analyzed, many of which are inter-related, to develop a new set of probability zones while …

Geophysical Study At Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park, Manchester, Tennessee, Stephen Jay Yerka

Masters Theses

The Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park covers over 800 acres within Manchester, Tennessee, and is owned and managed by the Tennessee Division of State Parks. The central archaeological site within the park boundary is The Old Stone Fort mounds that enclose about 50 acres on a plateau above the convergence of the Big Duck and the Little Duck Rivers. The hilltop enclosure dates to the Middle Woodland Period, and radiocarbon dates obtained at the site range from the first to the fifth century A. D. Because of its size and apparent complexity, previous investigations of the site have been …

Faunal Remains From The Pine Hill Site (Ps-6), St. Lawrence County, New York, Jessica Lee Vavrasek

Masters Theses

The Pine Hill collection was discovered in the archaeology lab at State University of New York College at Potsdam after remaining unstudied for over 30 years since its initial excavation in the 1960s and 1970s. Pine Hill has been identified as a fifteenth century St. Lawrence Iroquois village site, located in St. Lawrence County, New York. The faunal remains and bone tools from the site indicate food procurement strategies, seasonal activities, the presence of discrete activity areas at the site, and the production and use of a wide range of bone tools. Replication experiments conducted on several bone tool types …