Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Making The Old City: Life Projects And State Heritage In Rhodes And Acre, Evan Taylor

Doctoral Dissertations

The “old city,” a widely recognizable category of urban space, has long been a locus of development projects, state monitoring, and mass tourism, while also being home to resident communities. This dissertation explores the intersections of community life and state-driven heritage projects in the Old Town of Rhodes, in the Greek Dodecanese, and the Old City of Acre (‘Akka), a Palestinian community in northern Israel/Palestine. Both old cities are UNESCO World Heritage sites and subjects of intense state-supported tourism development. However, their resident populations and their built environments, which coalesced mainly under Crusader and Ottoman rule, challenge the authorized heritage …

Above The Oxbow: The Construction Of Place On Mount Holyoke, Danielle R. Raad

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is a study of the orogenesis of Mount Holyoke, or the making of place on a mountain. It is an orogenic ethnography and a contemporary archaeological ethnography of place. Mount Holyoke is a mountain in Western Massachusetts that rises above the Connecticut River Valley. It is a prominent destination for tourists and locals alike to recreate outdoors in a state park, to observe the view of the valley below, and to visit the historic, nineteenth-century Summit House. I explore the nature and nuances of attachment to Mount Holyoke through time, by examining conceptions of place over two centuries. …

Kc 1.1: Cultural Heritage And Climate Change: Exploring The Impacts And Issues, Elizabeth Brabec, Andrew Potts, Julianne Polanco

ISCCL Scientific Symposia and Annual General Meetings // Symposiums scientifiques et assemblées générales annuelles de l'ISCCL // Simposios científicos yy las Asambleas Generales Anuales

As noted at the 2017 ICOMOS Assembly in Delhi, cultural heritage is both under threat from climate change, and an asset in our attempts to adapt to and mitigate its impacts. The Paris Agreement emphasizes the need for urgency about climate change; cultural heritage can play a central role in this effort. For example, iconic sites at risk from storms, coastal erosion, wildfires or permafrost thaw can alert public to the very real impacts and costs of climate change.

World Heritage Sites (WHS) around the world play a key role in alerting the public to the impacts of local climate …

The Political Work Of Memory In Collaborative Caribbean Archaeology, Elena Sesma

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the product of a community-based research project that sought to understand how descendants of the 19th century Millars Plantation on the southern end of Eleuthera, Bahamas continue to use and reinterpret the landscape that they have called home for over a century and a half. In 1871, the last owner of the Millars Plantation left the estate in her will to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, although in recent years, a Bahamian developer has attempted to gain title to the acreage through the …

Recollections: Memory, Materiality, And Meritocracy At The Dr. James Still Historic Office And Homestead, Marc Lorenc

Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation explores how memory, materiality, and meritocracy articulate together to create a meritocratic subjectivity at the Dr. James Still Historic Office and Homestead. This subjectivity frames how we experience and promote the history of Dr. James Still through an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006) that promotes and re-ingrains American meritocracy, specifically the “bootstrap myth”, as a “common sense”. Using a combination of archaeological excavations, documentary analysis, and ethnography conducted under the Dr. James Still Community Archaeology Project (DJSCAP), I explore how cultural artifacts shape and influence our subjectivities at the site and more broadly in everyday interactions with …

Production And Power At Idalion, Cyprus In The First Millennium Bce, Rebecca Bartusewich

Doctoral Dissertations

In archaeology, the analysis of ordinary things does not often lead to assessments of power. Political systems are difficult to trace materially because today they seem separate from our lives, but yet are involved in most everything we do. In this case study of first millennium BCE Idalion, Cyprus, I have found that the producers of undecorated, or utilitarian, pottery are impacted by political behavior and social relationships, which both impact their economic stability. When discussing the political economy, archaeologists describe elites as the controllers of wealth including the consumption and sometimes production of high value goods. However, I argue …

Modeling The Local Political Economy Of Adulis: 1000 Bce-700 Ace, Daniel Habtemichael

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation models the local political economy of Adulis, during Africa’s Classical Age (1000 BCE-700 ACE), by evaluating the materiality of Adulis (built forms and artifacts). Thirty-nine built forms are 3D modeled, and their energetics values (labor and time) are inferred to estimate the social power and wealth that was necessary for the construction of such a built-forms. Two political economy models are used to critically evaluate the energetics data from the built-forms combined to another set of data of essential artifacts from the site. The traditional political economy perspective holds that Adulis is a periphery, a port in an …

Memory And History In South Eleuthera: A Report To The People Of South Eleuthera, Elena Sesma

Archaeological Project Reports

Over the past 5 years, archaeologists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have made several short-term trips to South Eleuthera to research the history of this portion of the island. Our main interests have been in understanding how the landscape has changed over the past 150 years, and especially in the past few decades as tourism has fallen off in the south. Through a combination of ethnographic research and pedestrian survey of the South Eleuthera landscape, we have gained a clearer understanding of the history of this region, and of contemporary life today. This report offers a summary of findings …

Potters On The Penobscot: An Archaeological Case Study Exploring Human Agency, Identity, And Technological Choice, Bonnie D. Newsom

Doctoral Dissertations

Archaeology has a long history of dehumanizing the past by placing artifacts at the center of archaeological inquiry while neglecting human agency and the dynamic relationship between humans and their material culture. This is due, in part, to an over-reliance on normative approaches to archaeology such as typologies, culture histories, and artifact-centered research designs that disengage people from their technologies and erase them from archaeological interpretations of the past. This study humanizes past peoples by applying theories of agency, technological choice, and Indigenous archaeologies to an archaeological case study from Maine, U.S.A. With these theoretical principles as a framework, I …

On The Landscape For A Very, Very Long Time: African American Resistance And Resilience In 19th And Early 20th Century Massachusetts, Anthony Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

Massachusetts is an ideal place to study Africans in New England during the 19th and early 20th century because the state abolished slavery in 1783, while surrounding states and the federal government did not. Although Massachusetts Blacks had certain rights and freedoms and the state became a haven for escaped captive Africans from surrounding states, it remained segregated White space and had racialized social, political, and economic structures to regulate and control the Black population. Yet, within adversity, the African Americans established their own communities and agitated for full citizenship, equality, and the end to African captivity. Their daily life …

Clay Pot Cookery: Dairy, Diet And Class During The South Levantine Iron Age Ii Period, Mary K. Larkum

Doctoral Dissertations

Goody’s (1982) model of cooking and its relation to hierarchy posits a correlation between class and cuisine that is typical of societies practicing intensive agriculture and creating storable surpluses. This archaeological case study tests his model using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analyses to investigate ancient food remains (fatty acids) preserved in unglazed clay cooking ceramics from archaeological sites across the Iron Age II period (1000-586 BCE) kingdoms of the southern Levant. These kingdoms are known historically as Ammon, Aram (Aram-Damascus), Edom, Israel, Judah, Moab and Philistia. Samples from this time period and region are suitable for use in this research …

A List Of Racialized Black Dolls: 1850-1940, Anthony F. Martin

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

Between 1850 and 1940 Black racialized dolls made in Europe and the northern United States saturated the marketplace with the peak years in the 1920s. These dolls were advertised with pejorative names and descriptions that typed cast African Americans as domestics and labors on mythical antebellum landscapes assisted White children in shaping Black people as inferior to Whites. Data mining doll encyclopedias, websites, and catalogs, I have compiled a list of Black racialized dolls. Additionally, I have provided advertisements of positive imagine Black dolls from The Crisis and The Negro World that provided a counterweight to the stereotyped dolls.

Terracotta Pipes With Triangular Engravings, Flavia Zorzi, Daniel G. Schávelzon

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

The discovery of two smoking pipes from seventeenth-century contexts in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is used to suggest the presence in colonial times of a new set of stylistic norms derived from African traditions that are expressed at a regional scale not only in smoking pipes, but in a variety of items of material culture. These terracotta pipes, recovered at Bolívar 373 and the Liniers House sites, are characterized by their particular geometric decorative pattern, achieved by engravings and incisions. Similar specimens were found elsewhere in Buenos Aires, as well as in Cayastá (province of Santa Fe, Argentina) and Brazil.

Uncovering And Recovering Cleared Galloway: The Lowland Clearances And Improvement In Scotland, Christine B. Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

This study seeks to understand the removal of people from the land as symptomatic of two narratives based in the colonial and capital enterprises, clearing and Improvement. Spatially, this relationship has been constructed around the distances between two players: the beneficiaries of the colonial enterprise, namely core, western and European based countries, and the subaltern or peripheral populations usually located at great distances from the sites of inception. These peripheral spaces were the locations of immense change in terms of both material culture and historical memories. Here, these moments are explored within the small, defined space of Galloway, Scotland, which …

Producing The Dead Sea Scrolls: (Trans)National Heritage And The Politics Of Popular Representation, Evan P. Taylor

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the politics of representing the assemblage of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls to popular audiences in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the United States. I demonstrate that these objects of national heritage are circulated along transnational routes to maintain the legitimacy of nationalist discourse abroad. Three sites—the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Qumran National Park in the West Bank, and a travelling exhibit presented at the Boston Museum of Science—are examined for textual narrative, spatial arrangement, and visitor behavior. Analysis of these observations illuminates two recurring motifs common …

Historic Black Lives Matter: Archaeology As Activism In The 21st Century, Kelley F. Deetz, Ellen Chapman, Ana Edwards, Phil Wilayto

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

May 19, 2015 would have been Malcolm X’s 90th birthday, and fifty years after his assassination we are still dealing with the ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow, and the manifestations of institutionalized racism. While much progress was made from the Civil Rights Movement, we still have far to go. This past year brought the topics of slavery, civil rights, and racism back into the mainstream. These stories are not new for those of us who work tirelessly to chronicle these historical and contemporary narratives in an attempt to educate the public about Black history. The “New Civil Rights Movement” launched …

Richmond’S Archaeology Of The African Diaspora: Unseen Knowledge, Untapped Potential, Ellen Chapman

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Don’T Call It A Comeback, We’Ve Been Here For Years: Reintroducing The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, Kelley Deetz

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Related Media And Additional Reading

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Significance Of Richmond's Shockoe Bottom: Why It's The Wrong Place For A Baseball Stadium, Ana Edwards, Phil Wilayto

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

The Thread: Reflections On #Blacklivesmatter And 21st Century Racial Dynamics, Kelley Deetz

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Curious Monuments Of The Simplest Kind: Shell Midden Archaeology In Massachusetts, Katharine Vickers Kirakosian

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I broadly consider how the recent past has affected rchaeologist’s present understandings of the deep past. To do so, I complete a historiography of the shell midden site type on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket, Massachusetts using Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods. While archaeologists have generally interpreted shell middens as places for food refuse disposal, Native oral traditions as well as ethnohistorical and archaeological data have prompted some to reconsider such monolithic views of these complex sites. Through a series of interviews with local professional and avocational archaeologists, I show that there is, in fact, little …

Performing Place At Ancient Idalion, Cyprus: An Anthropological Perspective On The Lower City South Sanctuary Architecture, Rebecca M. Bartusewich

CHESS Student Research Reports

The ancient site of the Lower City South sanctuary of Idalion is a site of place making and identity formation during the 1st millennium BCE of Cyprus. This archaeological site represents repetitive building patterns and persistent cultic activity that denote a cultural tradition that withstood the changes of administrative control in the Cypro-Classical and Hellenistic periods. Certain architectural elements, like altars and water features, are characteristic of a continued tradition at the ancient site and they are evidence of a recursive building practice that falls into templates of place making and identity formation as introduced by Bourdieu and Giddens. Identities …

Response & Resistance: A Comparison Of Middle Connecticut River Valley Ceramics From The Late Woodland Period To The Seventeeth-Century, Julie Woods

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Native Americans from the middle Connecticut River Valley of New England experienced massive social disruptions during the seventeenth century due to European settlement, but not much is known about their cultural continuities and/or discontinuities during this dynamic period. As an additive technology, ceramics embody the technical choices of potters made at the time of manufacture thus enabling the study of the effect, if any, of colonialism on indigenous material culture and practices in New England. This study examines ceramic assemblages from one Late Woodland period site and one seventeenth-century site in Deerfield, Massachusetts to explore the extent to which ceramics …

Concepts Of Place And Identity In The Iron Age Of Idalion, Cyprus: An Analysis Of Architectural Repetition, Rebecca M. Bartusewich

Rebecca M Bartusewich

No abstract provided.

Pottery In The Landscape: Ceramic Analysis At The City-Kingdom Of Idalion, Cyprus, Rebecca M. Bartusewich

Rebecca M Bartusewich

The ancient site of Idalion, Cyprus has a landscape dominated by two acropoleis containing sacred sites. The plain below is the location of domestic occupation. I have petrologically analyzed 45 ceramics from the domestic area and one sacred area and found that while the sacred spaces dominate the landscape, ceramics were not produced/chosen differently for the sacred area over the domestic area. The visual proximity of the sacred and the everyday seems to indicate cohesion in the social and natural landscape. The preliminary petrological analysis of pottery from Idalion has shown, thus far, that the sacred and profane are intertwined.*

Diggin' Uncle Ben And Aunt Jemima: Battling Myth Through Archaeology, Kelley Deetz

African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Sweepin' Spirits: Power And Transformation On The Plantation Landscape, Whitney Battle_Baptiste

Whitney Battle-Baptiste

When one thinks of power, a number of thoughts come to mind. Is power the ability to influence something or someone? Does power have anything to do with author- ity or control? Is power given by others or earned by the individual? I begin this article with the word and idea of power because some of the chapters in this book focus on power dynamics and all of the authors in this volume discuss how land- scapes are perceived in the past or in the present. In this chapter, I will explore landscapes as more than just places affected by …

Giving Voice To Choice: Integrating Scientific, Ethnographic, And Historical Analysis To Understand 17th Century Native Pottery From Western New England, Julie A. Woods, Matthew T. Boulanger, Elizabeth S. Chilton, David V. Hill, Michael D. Glascock

Julie Woods

No abstract provided.

Specification Of Cultural Identity Through Conflict: Evidence Of Phoenicianization At Idalion Cyprus, Jill C. Bierly

Jill C Bierly

No abstract provided.