History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Priestesshoods As Expressions Of Civic Identity, Isabella Kershner

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis offers a comprehensive examination of the role of priestesshoods in shaping the civic identity of women in Classical Athens. It challenges the traditional narrative that confines Athenian women to the domestic sphere by highlighting their public and influential roles in religious practices. Through a meticulous analysis of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence, the study traces the journey of Athenian females from childhood rituals to the esteemed positions of the High Priestess of Athena Nike and Athena Polias, revealing how these religious roles served as both a spiritual passage and a civic curriculum.

The thesis argues that these priestesshoods …

Re-Evaluating Egalitarian Design In Contemporary Danish Society, Alice Baughman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study examines the discourses and practices of egalitarian architecture in contemporary Denmark. Denmark’s long standing comprehensive welfare system promotes, for all citizens, equal access to education, healthcare, and public services, and other opportunities. Similarly, its own brand of socially progressive, egalitarian architecture encourages spatial designs intended for use by all people regardless of social disparities. Drawing on a range of sources from government documents to architectural magazines to design projects themselves, this study defines the historical development of this discourse going back to Modernist and Functionalist movements in the 1930s. By revealing the cultural and demographic assumptions on which …

Pompeiian Mill-Bakeries: Spatial Organization And Social Interaction, Madeleine Rubin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines bread production and the daily lives of those who worked in mill-bakeries during the first century CE. Bread was the staple food across the ancient Mediterranean; however, there is little textual evidence about those who produced the bread that fed the Roman Empire. The most significant body of evidence relating to the lives of mill-bakers is the archaeological remains of mill-bakeries from the city of Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. This thesis analyzes the spatial organization of bread production within these mill-bakeries and applies the methodologies of spatial syntax – a …

The Cult Of The Nymphs: Identity, Ritual, And Womanhood In Ancient Greece, Ivana Genov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Examining archeological and epigraphic evidence in its historical context, in this thesis I explore the Cult of the Nymphs venerated across ancient Greek poleis. I analyze the nymph’s profound cultural and historical impact that is often overlooked in the study of ancient Greece. Nymphs were female deities thought to embody ecological sites, such as fountains and springs, and became fundamental to polis identity. Their locations were often central to city plans, and their faces, depicted on coinage, became representative of the city itself. In the community, nymphs were integral to rituals for major life events, most often in the lives …

Landscapes Of Silence At The First Baptist Church, Victoria R. Gum

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg is often presented as a “town which time passed by” (Yetter 1988:30). This narrative implies that the museum landscape reflects the actual past and that restoration efforts simply returned the town to the way it used to be. However, the Restoration was accomplished according to specific ideological goals. Colonial Williamsburg was created as a shrine to traditionalist, conservative values (Greenspan 2002; Handler & Gable 1997; Lindgren 1989; Lindgren 1993) which are intrinsically linked to the global structure of systemic White supremacy. These values were enacted during the Restoration, as Black residents of the future …

A Black Mount Vernon: Exploring Enslaved Homespace And Family At Mount Vernon Plantation, Heather L. Little

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This thesis utilizes a theoretical approach that draws on Whitney Battle-Baptiste's (2011) homespace framework combined with network theory and cultural geography to explore the enslaved community's domestic lives and social structures at Mount Vernon Plantation in the late 18th century. I argue that using homespace and network theory in conjunction with one another allows for a more complex and nuanced exploration of enslaved communities at a household level. Three datasets have been utilized that embody both quantitative and qualitative data. The first is archaeological data from the Mount Vernon excavations, obtained from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS). …

An Unsettled History: Measuring Settlement Population And Sedentism In The Late Woodland Potomac River Valley, Matthew Anthony Borden

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This thesis investigates what information accumulations research can provide on settlement population and sedentism in the Late Woodland Potomac River Valley. Accumulations research is a flexible method that mathematically models the relationships between past populations and the archaeological record they leave behind using the discard equation. This study reviews the available data for several different variables in accumulations research, including settlement population, use duration (occupation length) and residential stability (seasonality), and uses the discard equation to evaluate the data. My research focuses on five archaeological sites in the Potomac River Valley, which was home to several different cultural groups during …

The Architecture Of Clothing: Notions Of Public And Private Space, Savannah Orsak

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Space, as defined as a three dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction, is conversely bound through clothing, architecture, and other margins that organize humanhood for everyday purpose. Continually, clothing imposes and extends itself into everyday experiences and dictates notions of interaction between both people and objects. In this written body of work, my intention is to explore public and private spatial influences within clothing and the ways in which these influences can be curated to reflect and evoke notions of interaction and identity. Following three related studies on space, form, and curation, a survey …

The Apocalyptic Mode In Contemporary Environmental Art, Victoria Erisman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Apocalyptic themes make up a growing trend in contemporary Western environmental art, especially art concerned with climate change. From art that revives the apocalyptic sublime of the nineteenth century Romantic and Hudson River School movements to photojournalism of current end-of-days disasters, apocalyptic motifs and subject matter have become significant in visual responses to and depictions of present environmental crises. This thesis examines the apocalyptic mode in contemporary environmental art, arguing that the apocalyptic mode ultimately creates more problems instead of spurring solutions to environmental injustices. Through engagement with existing scholarship on the history and efficacy of apocalypticism and catastrophism, as …

Asking For Forgiveness: Negotiating The Creation Of Memory Through Public Memorialization, Alyssa Castronuovo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The practice of spatializing culture, or “examining space through theories of embodiment, discourse translocality, and effect,” localizes the global and separates hegemonic narratives of space from how it is actually utilized by the people who interact with it. Setha Low argues that this perspective is especially useful to the anthropologist committed to challenging the discipline’s historically eurocentric approach to studying culture. She writes that a spatial focus “[draws] on the strengths of studying people in situ, producing rich and nuanced sociospatial understandings.” This project began with an interest in theorists such as Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre, …

Sustaining The Shell Middens: A Coastal Vulnerability Assessment Of Shell Midden Sites Within The Nansemond River Tributary, Mary Lawrence Young

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Throughout history, coastlines have commonly drawn human settlements. However, modern environmental processes (i.e., shoreline erosion, sea-level rise, land subsistence, inundation) threaten to destroy much of our remaining global coastal heritage. To prevent the further loss of archaeological contexts, this study seeks to develop a coastal vulnerability index through geospatial analysis to assess the vulnerability of 35 precontact shell midden sites along the Nansemond River in Suffolk, Virginia. The Nansemond middens offer a long-term history of how coastal inhabitants interacted with their surrounding landscape, with occupation of the area ranging from the Early Archaic period through Contact. This research considers various …

"These Their Women Bear After Them, With Corne, Acorns, Morters, And All Bag And Baggage They Use:" An Archaeological History Of Indigenous Households Along The Rappahannock River, Virginia, Josue Roberto Nieves

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation summarizes all research findings pertaining to 2017-2018 Archaeological Excavations at Camden Farm, Virginia. The goal of the project was to seek out a previously unexcavated Indigenous house site within the property’s “Post-Contact” (i.e.,1646 - ~1720 A.D.) Rappahannock Indian village in order to analyze structural morphology and the suite of artifact assemblages relating to domestic production, consumption, and exchange practices. Findings were compared to a previously excavated house site from the same village, in addition to similar domestic contexts dating between the “Late Woodland II” and “Contact” (A.D. 1200-1650) periods from the Virginia’s James River valley. The results of …

“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …

"Epic Poems In Bronze": Confederate Memorialization And The Old South's Reckoning With Modernity In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Grace Ford-Dirks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Scholars of the American South generally end their studies of Confederate memorization just before World War 1. Because of a decline in the number of physical monuments and memorials to the Confederacy dedicated in the years immediately following the war, scholars appear to regard the interwar era as a period separate from the Lost Cause movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, to fully understand the complexity of developing Southern identities in the modern age, it is essential to expand traditional definitions of Confederate memorialization and the time period in which it is studied. This paper explores …

The Line Of Dichotomy: Standpoints And Meaning In Anne Truitt's Art, Charles J. Parsons

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Some of Anne Truitt’s formal strategies—such as using the separate faces of the work to force the viewer to engage in it sequentially—build or depend on real or literal facts of the “situation” of the artwork. If this is the case, how do such works escape being reducible to their objecthood, their literal properties of size and shape? And how do they produce effects that are not mere experience or mere affective response? The answer I offer is that they depend on conventions and interpretation.

Much of my analysis focuses on the ways Truitt makes her intentions visible through form, …

Archaeology Saves The Bay: The Sustainability Of The Chesapeake Bay Oyster Fishery, Mary Young

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper addresses the progression of oyster harvesting practices in the Chesapeake Bay watershed through three distinct periods—the Late Archaic, Middle Woodland, and Historic—framed within ideas derived from historical ecology, resilience theory, and sustainability. A critical examination of approximately 4000 oyster shells from Site 44YO0797, an archaeological site located along the York River, indicates that Native fishers harvested Chesapeake oysters sustainably on a millennium timescale. Common resource management practices allowed Native oysterers to actively foster resilience within the fishery through harvest habitat variation over time (i.e., focus shifting from offshore to nearshore reefs). The Chesapeake oyster fishery thrived until the …

Abraham Hondius's Dog Market: Early Modern Animal Imagery In Transition, Sarah Roberts

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Though today animal painting is frequently associated with English painters like George Stubbs and Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, its foundations lie in the earlier work of Dutch and Flemish painters. The work of these earlier artists marks an important (if little recognized) transitional phase in popular attitudes and understandings of animals. By the 1670s, the Rotterdam-born painter Abraham Hondius had immigrated to London, leaving the Dutch Republic and its declining art market for England where the market for paintings was rapidly expanding in the late seventeenth century. Abraham Hondius’s 1677 painting The Dog Market, which entered a museum collection …

A Crescendo Of Violence: A Biohistorical Assessment Of Violence As A Form Of Social Control Involving The African Population Of New York City During The 18th Century, Christopher Richard Crain

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

During the 18th century, New York City was developing rapidly, and it required a significant source of labor to keep pace. The solution, like the century before, was to increase the forced migration of enslaved Africans. The growth in this population, as one would expect, needed a system of control that would maintain the status of the growing English mercantile class. An intricate system of violence evolved various physical, structural, and cultural components to accomplish this goal. This research sheds light on this system of control. Using Galtung's theoretical construct, the Triangle of Violence, this research revisits the fracture data …

Geospatial Analysis Of Traditional Taro Farming In Rurutu French Polynesia, Claudia Michelle Escue

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is the main subsistence crop across much of Polynesia; however, its production via traditional methods is becoming increasingly rare. This study explores taro cultivation in Rurutu, Austral Islands, French Polynesia where traditional farming practices have persisted from pre-European contact times to the present. Specifically, we investigate if pre-European contact Rurutu fits Kirch’s ‘Wet vs. Dry’ hypothesis describing the relationship between environmental variables, agricultural choices and productivity, and the development of socio-political complexity across Polynesia. We use Landsat imagery and geospatial suitability analysis to determine the location of 13 dormant taro systems on Rurutu. We then estimate the …

Properties Of Belonging: Landscapes Of Racialized Ownership In Post-Emancipation Barbados, Stephanie M. Bergman

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

My dissertation research at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation places landscape at the forefront of analysis in order to tell a story of power and conflict over rights and claims to belonging in one of the most profitable British colonies during the era of emancipation. I spent years completing archaeological and ethnohistorical research at this popular national heritage site to learn how the transition from slavery to emancipation occurred on the ground, and to provide a comparative analysis of the tenantry system as it developed locally in the Caribbean region. I conceived the concept of a landscape of racialized ownership …

Plantation Spaces: A Gpr Analysis Of An Eighteenth-Century Enslaved Family’S Dwelling In The Colonial Chesapeake, Robert Thomas Chartrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has recently gained traction amongst academic researchers and cultural resource managers due to reasonable equipment costs and software processing advancements. Archaeologists have applied GPR within various methodological approaches, focusing on GPR's ability to map multiple soil types, concentrate an area of interest for archaeological testing, or gain knowledge with attention to site preservation. More recently, non-invasive practitioners of GPR have called for an advancing discussion of GPR results. The trajectory of this call aims to focus the interpretation of historical groups and events through GPR results and move beyond traditional geoarchaeological prospection practice. My research assessed …

"Mehtaqtek, Where The Path Comes To An End": Documenting Cultural Landscapes Of Movement In Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) First Nation Territory In New Brunswick, Canada, And Maine, United States, Mallory Leigh Moran

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Saint John River emerges from tributaries in the highlands of the state of Maine, arcs north and east into the province of New Brunswick, then winds southward, through vast marshlands, before it empties into the Bay of Fundy. For part of its journey, it forms the international border between Canada and the United States. This river, the Wolastoq, and its large drainage basin and tributaries, forms the heart of the homelands of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) First Nation. For many hundreds of years before contact with Europeans, and well into the 19th century, the Wolastoqiyik navigated the land- and waterscapes …

“The Dutch Found Us And Relieved Us…” Identifying Seventeenth Century Illicit Dutch Trade Relations On Virginia’S Eastern Shore And In The Chesapeake, Haley Marie Hoffman

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This study explores how illicit transatlantic trade relations with the Dutch in seventeenth-century Virginia can be identified through the material record. The research was motivated by recent excavations at a seventeenth-century plantation on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Eyreville, as it is now known, was a hub of transatlantic trade during the formative years of the Virginia colony. The recognizable presence of Dutch trade goods, coupled with the site’s pro-Dutch merchant residents, prompted the investigation into material signatures of illicit trade on the Eastern Shore and the Chesapeake. The identification of these material signatures is based on extensive research into geopolitical histories, …

I Found Something In The Woods Somewhere: Narrative, Heterotemporality, And The Timber Industry In The Great Smoky Mountains, Elizabeth Albee

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been prized as an area of unmatched biodiversity in the Eastern United States. However, the presentation of the Park as an unpeopled, pristine wilderness does not acknowledge that the Park is a heterogeneous space where nature and culture are entangled. Recognizing and remembering the region’s cultural history is vital to understanding the Smoky Mountains in the past and present. The archaeology of the 20th-century timber industry is largely forgotten within the context of the National Park today, though the industry and its associated artifacts contradict popular myths about Appalachia. In 2019, I recorded …

Dwelling "Where The Waters Rise And Fall:" The Historical Ecology Of Archaic Period Settlement In The Rappahannock River Valley, Gail Williams Wertz

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This study examines long-term change in Indigenous settlement in Virginia's Rappahannock River Valley and its underlying causes during the Archaic Period (10,000-3000 BP). Previously-unstudied archaeological collections from two sites along the Rappahannock River provided evidence of demographic changes from the Middle Archaic to the Late Archaic period, and offered evidence of shifting settlement patterns. To evaluate why different locations were selected for Middle Archaic settlement versus Late Archaic settlement, the overall topography, hydrology and environmental settings of the two sites were evaluated by geospatial analyses of LiDAR images. The reasons for the changes were assessed further using the research framework …

Social Memory, Persistent Place, And Depositional Practice At The Hand Site (44sn22) In Southeastern Virginia, Taylor Blair Triplett

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The Hand site is a complex Native American village site located on the Nottoway River in southeastern Virginia. Intensive excavations in the 1960s identified over 600 archaeological features, including hearths, pits, structural remains, and a complex of human and canine burials, long assumed to date to the Protohistoric period. While previous researchers emphasized the site’s ties to the colonial actors, a reexamination of the collection instead suggests the site was a geographic locus for Indigenous peoples for over a thousand years. A close attention to chronology as well as space speaks to a deep history of emplacement, whereby social memory …

His Majesty's Ship Saphire And The Royal Navy In 17th-Century Newfoundland, Erika Elizabeth Laanela

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The English fifth-rate frigate Saphire was set on fire by its commander in Newfoundland during an attack by a French squadron in September 1696. Prior to its untimely sinking, this small warship had served the Royal Navy for over two decades, primarily in the Mediterranean, acting as convoy and escort to English shipping. This study combines multiple lines of evidence, including archaeology and material culture recovered from the wreck and contemporary documents, art, and illustrations, to explore the significance of the Saphire through a series of multi-scalar and diachronic interpretive lenses. The approach is inspired by an analytical framework for …

Zone-Decorated Pots At The Hatch Site (44pg51): A Late Woodland Manifestation Of An Ancient Tradition, Douglas Makin

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Excavated in the 1970s and 80s by Lefty Gregory, the Hatch site is arguably among the most significant precolonial archaeology sites in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Though the collection sat in storage for decades, it recently became accessible to researchers. The thorough excavation combined with abundant radiocarbon data allow the historical narrative of this magnificent site to come into focus. an unusual place, hidden in a remote location, the Hatch site witnessed at least 600 years of regularly occurring ritualized gatherings. These gatherings involved the sacrifice and internment of dogs as well as elaborate feasts on both estuarine and terrestrial …

Ancestral Landscapes: A Study Of Historical Black Cemeteries And Contemporary Practices Of Commemoration Among African Americans In Duval County, Jacksonville, Fl., Brittany Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The end of slavery in North America presented an opportunity for African Americans in Jacksonville, Florida to reinvent themselves. The reconstruction era brought about new social, political, and economic opportunities for African Americans living in Jacksonville. Despite the failure of Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow, Jacksonville gave birth to a vibrant African American aristocracy. Jacksonville's Black elite comprised of doctors, lawyers, morticians, religious leaders, business people and other professionals. Jacksonville's Black elite thrived in the early half of the twentieth century, many of them used their knowledge and skills to contribute to the social and economic development of …

On The Margins Of Empire: An Archaeological And Historical Study Of Guana Island, British Virgin Islands, Mark Kostro

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The present study of Guana Island in the British Virgin Islands draws upon archaeological, archival, and architectural evidence to examine the material and spatial aspects of everyday life on the social, geographic, and economic margins of the British Empire between 1717 and 1845. Guana’s settlers were yeoman farmers, formerly indentured laborers, and fishermen displaced from other parts of the Caribbean who came to the Virgin Islands for the opportunity to seek their own fortunes in the small island territories initially forsaken by sugar planters as ill-suited for large scale sugar cultivation. Arriving with them, and with increasing frequency over time, …