History Commons^™

Spirits And Spirituality: Temperance And Racial Uplift In Nineteenth-Century Nantucket, Ma, John T. Crawmer

Graduate Masters Theses

Studies of alcohol consumption have shown alcohol’s role in defining social boundaries based on class and ethnicity, but few have interrogated alcohol in the context of race. During the early-19th century, free black communities were encouraged to refrain from alcohol as part of a larger project of racial uplift. Black societies and churches perceived intemperance as not only immoral but a threat to community survival. Excavations of the Nantucket African Meeting House noted a considerable lack of alcohol bottles, but it was unclear whether temperance was equally observed at the neighboring Boston-Higginbotham House. This research uses a minimum number of …

The Function Of A Nail: An Archaeological Examination Of Three 18th- And 19th-Century Eastern Pequot Reservation Homes In Southeastern Connecticut, Salvatore A. Ciccone

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines three indigenous households excavated on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. Architectural artifact and spatial analyses, combined with historical documents, are utilized to understand reservation building practices of Native Americans navigating colonialism in the 18th and 19th century. The homes are small in design with at least one window and one stone chimney each. They all possessed cellars, but not all are stone-lined. Nails and window glass serve as the primary architectural artifact classes in this work, with an emphasis on their manufacture and modification. Examining nail and glass type, quantity, modification, and spatial patterns …

Changing To Stay The Same: Spatial Analyses Of Tobacco Pipes From 18th- And 19th-Century Eastern Pequot Households, Stephen P. Anderson

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines indigenous smoking practices using European white ball clay pipe disposal patterns on the Eastern Pequot reservation in North Stonington, Connecticut. The Eastern Pequot used European-made smoking pipes in their day-to-day life during the 18th and 19th centuries. Material and spatial analyses of pipes and their disposal patterns detail how Eastern Pequot smoking practices changed and continued in the North American colonial world.

Smoking and tobacco use are unique in North American colonialism as the practice originates with the continent’s Indigenous people and was transformed by the English. Questions around cultural change and continuity in smoking due to …

Beakers, Berkemeiers, And Roemers: Glass Drinking Vessels From The 17th-Century Dutch Settlement Of Fort Orange, New Netherland, Kristina Staats Traudt

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines 17th-century glass drinking vessel remains uncovered during the 1970-1971 Fort Orange excavations in Albany, New York. Fort Orange was a colonial outpost established by the Dutch West India Trading Company on behalf of the United Provinces of the Dutch Republic in 1624. The fort served as an important trading post within the colony of New Netherland. Drinking vessels are studied in order to determine any traceable patterns of preference in form, decorative elements, or use. Vessels of note include roemers, berkemeiers, goblets, and varying forms using Venetian and Façon de Venise decorative techniques. The analysis is separated …

Constructing Spaces, Deconstructing Meaning: An Examination Of Architecture And Labor At A 17th-Century New Mexican Ranch, Katherine A. Albert

Graduate Masters Theses

There are few archaeological studies of the architecture of 17th-century New Mexican ranches (estancias) due to the paucity of surviving examples. Even fewer archaeological treatments of architecture from 17th-century New Mexico consider the cost of constructing estancias in terms of resource and labor extraction. Using a variety of methods to analyze archaeological evidence from LA 20,000, as well as comparative research of reports from other 17th-century colonial sites, this study presents a hypothetical reconstruction of the three main structures at LA 20,000—the house, the barn, and the corral—and provides estimates of the total quantity of materials and labor needed to …

More Than Just A School: Medicinal Practices At The Abiel Smith School, Dania D. Jordan

Graduate Masters Theses

The Abiel Smith School, located on the North Slope of Beacon Hill in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the oldest Black schools in the United States in one of the oldest free Black communities. The Abiel Smith School was constructed between 1834 and 1835 as a means to resist racial discrimination in the public school system. The Smith School is central to Beacon Hill’s Black history because it helped Black Bostonians advance in society and mitigate against the effects of racism through education. However, the Smith School may have served a dual role in the Black community. Medicinal bottles excavated …

“We May Have Profitable Commerce And Trade Together”: An Analysis Of 17th-Century Ceramics In Plymouth Colony, Elizabeth G. Tarulis

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the formation of early English colonial trade networks through an examination of three Plymouth Colony sites. This research compares the 17th-century ceramics from Burial Hill (a recently discovered section of the core of the initial settlement, 1620-c. 1660) to two homesteads established later by Plymouth colonists, the Alden First Home Site (c. 1627- c. 1697) and the Allerton/Prence/Cushman Site (1631-c. 1691). A minimum number of vessels was established for each site and the country of origin was established for each vessel to determine the origin of consumer goods, specifically ceramics, in Plymouth Colony. These vessels were then …

Form, Function, And Context: Lithic Analysis Of Flaked Stone Artifacts At A 17th-Century Rural Spanish Estancia (La 20,000), Santa Fe County, New Mexico, Clint S. Lindsay

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the flaked stone artifact assemblage recovered from LA 20,000, a 17th-century (ca. 1630-1680 AD) rural Spanish colonial estancia located near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Settlements like LA 20,000 were important locations of cultural interaction between Spanish colonists and local Indigenous peoples who often worked and lived together in multi-cultural households. By analyzing the procurement, production, and use of flaked stone artifacts to identify choices and activities performed at the site by the people who lived and labored there this study helps to fill gaps in the knowledge and understanding of 17th-century flaked stone artifact production and use …

Social Movements And Charitable Dress: An Examination Of 19th Century Adornment At The Industrial School For Girls In Dorchester, Massachusetts, Madelaine A. Penney

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis is an examination of the 19th century adornment assemblage recovered from the archaeological excavation of two features (1859-1884) at the Industrial School for Girls in Dorchester located at 232 Centre Street in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The school was administered by middle class Bostonian women that wished to train working class girls from broken, abusive, or unfit homes in professionalized domestic work. This thesis is a rare examination of a site that is single-gendered, and predominantly single-classed and aged with a large collection of documented activity. This investigation was conducted in order to question the values that the administration of …

Eat This In Remembrance: The Zooarchaeology Of Secular And Religious Sites In 17th-Century New Mexico, Ana C. Opishinski

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the faunal remains from LA 20,000, a 17th-century Spanish estancia near Santa Fe, New Mexico that was inhabited by a family of Spanish colonists and indigenous laborers. The data collected from these specimens are examined to better understand the diet of the site’s inhabitants, especially in conjunction with existing data on the plant portion of the diet at this site. Creating a more complete picture of the diet, the analysis covers Number of Identified Specimens (NISP), Minimum Number of Individuals (MNI), potential meat weight represented by the various species, bone modifications, and ageing and kill-off patterns. These …

Comales And Colonialism: An Analysis Of Cuisine And Ceramics On A 17th-Century New Mexican Estancia, Adam C. Brinkman

Graduate Masters Theses

The archaeological site of LA 20,000 is an early colonial Spanish estancia, or ranch, in New Mexico that was occupied between A.D. 1630 to 1680. Spanish estancias became the homes and work spaces for people with a wide range of cultural backgrounds. In this thesis, the author analyses the ceramics and ground stone assemblage of LA 20,000 to understand the daily practice of cuisine on this rural frontier. Cuisine has important symbolic components related to an individual’s identity. Through the practice of cuisine, inhabitants consumed foods that fit conceptions of acceptability, enacted preparation and cooking methods that were taught intergenerationally, …

Tools Of Teaching: Metal At Magunkaquog, Nadia E. Waski

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis provides the results of a comprehensive analysis of the metal artifact assemblage from Magunkaquog, a mid-17th- to early-18th-century “Praying Indian” community located in present-day Ashland, Massachusetts. Magunkaquog was the seventh of fourteen “Praying Indian” settlements Puritan missionary John Eliot helped in gathering between the years of 1651-1674 as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s attempts to convert local Native American populations to Christianity. Originally the site was discovered during a cultural resource management survey conducted by the Public Archaeological Lab (PAL), and further investigated by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research (then known as the Center for Cultural …

“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 …

Community Through Consumption: The Role Of Food In African American Cultural Formation In The 18th Century Chesapeake, Alexandra Crowder

Graduate Masters Theses

Stratford Hall Plantation’s Oval Site was once a dynamic 18th-century farm quarter that was home to an enslaved community and overseer charged with growing Virginia’s cash crop: tobacco. No documentary evidence references the site, leaving archaeology as the only means to reconstruct the lives of the site’s inhabitants. This research uses the results of a macrobotanical analysis conducted on soil samples taken from an overseer’s basement and a dual purpose slave quarter/kitchen cellar at the Oval Site to understand what the site’s residents were eating and how the acquisition, production, processing, provisioning, and consumption of food impacted their daily lives. …

Household Activities And Areas: A Reanalysis Of The John And Priscilla Alden First Home Site, Caroline Gardiner

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to further understanding of early colonial life within New England through an examination of the John and Priscilla Alden First Home site in Duxbury, MA, excavated in 1960 by Roland Robbins. It specifically focuses on the composition and spatial distribution of the ceramic assemblage to discuss household activities and the spaces in which they were performed. The findings of the ceramic analysis detail a collection composed primarily of utilitarian vessels that indicate multiple subsistence farming activities including dairying. The spatial study reveals the significant patterning of these artifacts. It is proposed that these denote specific activity areas …

Identity Behind Glass: The Second Gore Place Greenhouse, Sean P. Romo

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the second greenhouse at Gore Place, a historic country estate in Waltham, Massachusetts. Gore Place was owned by and named for Christopher and Rebecca Gore, members of the 18th- and 19th-century political and economic elite in New England. The greenhouse was constructed in 1806, and excavation at the site took place in 2004, 2008, and 2012. The latter two projects were data recovery excavations, which exposed portions of the greenhouse’s foundations and interior, as well as several features in the yard surrounding the building. Historic greenhouses were prestigious structures, financially accessible only to institutions, governments, and the …

Chase Home For Children: Childhood In Progressive New England, Katherine M. Evans

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis aims to further the study of childhood in archaeology through the examination of a children’s aid institution in Progressive New England. Specifically, this research explores how the Progressive and Victorian aims of Chase Home for Children, as expressed in primary sources, are manifested in the material culture. Chase Home participated in the larger Progressive movement in its mission to train children “in the practical duties, to encourage habits of honesty, truthfulness, purity and industry, to prepare them to take their position in life as useful members of society” (Children’s Home Pamphlet 1878). An analysis of small finds from …

'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 …

Ceramic Consumption In A Boston Immigrant Tenement, Andrew J. Webster

Graduate Masters Theses

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House at 21 Unity Street was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century but was later repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century. In 2013, the City of Boston Archaeology Program excavated the rear lot of the Clough House, recovering 36,465 artifacts, including …

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 …

Deep Coring, Viking Age Accumulation Rates And Household Wealth In Skagafjörður, Northern Iceland, Eric D. Johnson

Graduate Masters Theses

Discerning and explaining social and economic differences is a fundamental task of archaeology, but a fine-tuned measure of household wealth is often obfuscated by the inability to account for time or demographics in the archaeological record. This project tests the ways that Iceland, settled by Norse populations between A.D. 870 and 930, provides a temporally-sensitive mode of measuring household income through average rates of deposition of architectural material and fuel refuse while also providing a context for studying the emergence of inequality in a previously uninhabited landscape. In 2014, a deep-coring survey of 11 occupational sites was conducted in the …

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 …

From Horse To Electric Power At The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site: Archaeology And The Narrative Of Technological Change, Miles Shugar

Graduate Masters Theses

The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site in Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts, was first excavated in the late 1970s by staff of the Museum of Afro American History. Researchers recovered nearly 20,000 artifacts related to the site's life as a horsecar street railway station and carriage manufacturer from 1860 to 1891, its subsequent conversion into an electric street railway until around 1920, and finally its modern use as an automobile garage. Using the framework of behavioral archaeology, this project uses GIS-based spatial methods and newly collected documentary evidence to reexamine the site's assemblage of horse accoutrements and carriage manufacturing byproducts. Artifact distribution maps …

Altered Lives, Altered Environments: Creating Home At Manzanar Relocation Center, 1942-1945, Laura W. Ng

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to understand how individuals exiled from their homes due to racial prejudice cope with institutional confinement. Specifically, this study focuses on the World War II mass incarceration of individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast of the United States after Japan's attack on the American naval base Pearl Harbor. Under the guise of national security and without due process, the United States government forcibly removed over 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and imprisoned them in camps spread throughout the country. This thesis examines institutional confinement at one Japanese American carceral site: an incarceration camp …

Disturbed But Not Destroyed: New Perspectives On Urban Archaeology And Class In 19th Century Lowell, Massachusetts, Katelyn M. Coughlan

Graduate Masters Theses

Through the artifacts from the Jackson Appleton Middlesex Urban Revitalization and Devolvement Project (hereafter JAM) located in Lowell, MA, this research explores social class in nineteenth-century boardinghouses. This thesis is a two-part study. First, through statistical analysis, research recovers interpretable data from urban archaeological contexts subject to disturbance. Pinpointing intra-site similarities between artifacts recovered from intact and disturbed contexts, data show that artifacts recovered from disturbed and intact contexts in urban environments are not as dissimilar as previously believed. In the second phase using both intact and disturbed JAM contexts, the analysis of four boardinghouse features highlights two distinct patterns …

Final Rest At The Hilltop Sanctuary: The Community Of Mount Gilead Ame Church, Meagan M. Ratini

Graduate Masters Theses

The Mount Gilead AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, perched on a mountain in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, has been a focal point of African American heritage in the area for over a hundred and seventy-five years. Though the second church building, dated to 1852, is still standing with its cemetery beside it, very little about its history has been thoroughly explored. Oral histories link the church with the Underground Railroad, a highly clandestine operation--yet the church itself was built of stone and advertised its location during the height of the movement of self-emancipated people out of the South. While it is said …

Indigenous Cuisine: An Archaeological And Linguistic Study Of Colonial Zapotec Foodways On The Isthmus Of Tehuantepec, Michelle R. Zulauf

Graduate Masters Theses

Cuisine refers to the ethnically idiosyncratic food choices and the manner and methods in which these foods are prepared and served. In this investigation I will explore traditional Zapotec cuisine and its early colonial changes and continuities on Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec by examining available food sources, food preparation techniques and equipment, and food serving traditions evidenced at the archaeological site of Rancho Santa Cruz. In order to achieve this I developed a two-fold analysis. The first component was the analysis of the Vocabulario en Lengua Zapoteca published by Fray Juan de Córdova in 1578. This historical dictionary provides an …

"She Of Gentle Manners": An Examination Of The Widow Pomeroy's Table And Tea Wares And The Emerging Domestic Sphere In Kinderhook, New York, Megan E. Sullivan

Graduate Masters Theses

Following the American Revolution, the new gender ideologies of Republican Motherhood and the Cult of Domesticity gained in popularity that associated men with the public sphere and relegated women to the private domestic sphere. Women were now tasked with the important job of raising the future citizens of the fledgling Republic. The quality of family and home life took on extra importance, and the elaboration of meals and the ceramics used in these rituals changed accordingly. This thesis analyzes the table and tea wares from an archaeological assemblage located in upstate New York that dates to the turn of the …

Subsistence In The Shrinking Forest: Native And Euro-American Practice In 19th-Century Connecticut, William A. Farley

Graduate Masters Theses

Southeastern Connecticut in the 19th century represented a setting in which Native Americans living on reservations were residing in close proximity to Euro-American communities. The Mashantucket Pequot, an indigenous group who in the 19th century resided on a state-overseen reservation, and their Euro-American neighbors both utilized local and regional resources in order to achieve their subsistence goals. This thesis seeks to explore the differences and similarities of the subsistence practices employed by these two groups. It further seeks to examine the centrality of forest landscapes to both Mashantucket and Euro-American subsistence, and to interpret the importance of the reservation to …

Sheep And Wool In Nineteenth-Century Falmouth, Ma: Examining The Collapse Of A Cape Cod Industry, Leo Patrick Ledwell

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the collapse of the sheep industry in Falmouth, Massachusetts in the 1830s. The documentary evidence for the collapse is examined through both the lens of microhistory and that of the traditional model for the collapse, one set forth by the American Geographical Society. The traditional model suggests that the importation of cheap agricultural goods from western states like Ohio caused the collapse of commercial farming in New England. An examination of the local evidence, however, suggests that the real reasons for the collapse of the sheep industry in Falmouth are much more complex, leaving open the possibility …