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United States History

University of Massachusetts Boston

Archaeology

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“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson Aug 2018

“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ceramics, both full-scale and toy, and dolls recovered from the Industrial School for Girls (1859-1941) in Dorchester, MA, in order to assess the ways in which the Managers who ran the School used material culture to enculturate the girls, as well as how the girls used material culture to shape their own identities. This site provides a unique opportunity to study the archaeology of a single-gender, and predominately single-class and single-age. The Industrial School for Girls, as an institution whose aim was to better the lives of poor girls and give them economic opportunities, as well …


'Improvement The Order Of The Age': Historic Advertising, Consumer Choice, And Identity In 19th Century Roxbury, Massachusetts, Janice A. Nosal Aug 2016

'Improvement The Order Of The Age': Historic Advertising, Consumer Choice, And Identity In 19th Century Roxbury, Massachusetts, Janice A. Nosal

Graduate Masters Theses

During the mid-to-late 19th century, Roxbury, Massachusetts experienced a dramatic change from a rural farming area to a vibrant, working-class, and predominantly-immigrant urban community. This new demographic bloomed during America’s industrial age, a time in which hundreds of new mass-produced goods flooded consumer markets. This thesis explores the relationship between working-class consumption patterns and historic advertising in 19th-century Roxbury, Massachusetts. It assesses the significance of advertising within households and the community by comparing advertisements from the Roxbury Gazette and South End Advertiser with archaeological material from the Tremont Street and Elmwood Court Housing sites, excavated in the late 1970s, to …


Native Interactions And Economic Exchange: A Re-Evaluation Of Plymouth Colony Collections, Kellie J. Bowers Jun 2015

Native Interactions And Economic Exchange: A Re-Evaluation Of Plymouth Colony Collections, Kellie J. Bowers

Graduate Masters Theses

This research furthers our understanding of colonial-Native relations by identifying and analyzing artifacts that indicate interaction between Native Americans and English settlers in Plymouth Colony archaeological collections. This project explores the nature of these interactions, exposing material culture's role in both social and economic exchanges. Selected 17th-century collections were excavated in modern Plymouth, Massachusetts, and nearby Marshfield and Kingston. My examination includes identifying materials exchanged between the Wampanoag and English settler groups in archaeological collections through scholarly literature and comparative 17th-century sites. This project draws on the documentary resources to provide contextualized insights on the relationships formed by and around …


Ubiquitous And Unfamiliar: Earthenware Pottery Production Techniques And The Bradford Family Pottery Of Kingston, Ma, Martha L. Sulya Jun 2015

Ubiquitous And Unfamiliar: Earthenware Pottery Production Techniques And The Bradford Family Pottery Of Kingston, Ma, Martha L. Sulya

Graduate Masters Theses

Redware ceramic sherds are frequently found in New England historical archaeological sites; however, detailed data has not always been published regarding excavated New England earthenware pottery production sites. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to the small body of research on New England redware production through the study of the life and ceramic production techniques of the Bradford family pottery. Their workshop operated in Kingston, Massachusetts, from the 1780s to the 1870s, a time when stoneware production and industrial scale ceramics manufacturing took hold in America. Documentary study of the Bradford family and the ceramics industry shows that …


Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen Aug 2011

Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen

Anthropology, Historical Archaeology Masters Theses Collection

This thesis examines the bottles recovered from an 1895 fill deposit at the Blake House site in Dorchester, MA, to determine what inconspicuous consumption reveals about the anonymous consumers of Dorchester in the late 19th century. The assemblage is composed of 1,892 pieces of bottle glass, representing food, alcohol, medicine, and household products, 73 with original paper labels. The analysis presented here demonstrates the consumers were from several households and included men, women and children from immigrant populations. Despite evidence for intensive recycling of bottles, indicating that these individuals were under economic stress, they had some amount of discretionary money …


"A Good Sized Pot": Early 19th Century Planting Pots From Gore Place, Waltham, Massachusetts, Rita A. Deforest Aug 2010

"A Good Sized Pot": Early 19th Century Planting Pots From Gore Place, Waltham, Massachusetts, Rita A. Deforest

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis looked at the elite status of cultivating gentlemen at the site of the Gore Place greenhouse through the medium of planting pots. The goal of this thesis was to analyze the planting pot remains and to subsequently answer three questions: what kinds of activities were performed in the greenhouse, who was conducting those activities, and most importantly, how they played in to Christopher Gore's self presentation as having elite status. This project analyzed over 2,000 pot sherds found during the excavation of the 1806 Gore Place greenhouse. The outcome of a minimum vessel count of the planting pots …