Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Captain Pierce's Fight: An Investigation Into A King Philip's War Battle And Its Remembrance And Memorialization, Lawrence K. Lacroix

Graduate Masters Theses

On March 26, 1676 Native Americans from southern New England overran a company of Plymouth Colony militia, handing the English one of their worst defeats during King Philip's War. This study was concerned with the reconstruction of the Pierce Battle, as it has come to be known, and its eventual memorialization. The study's two main research questions were: First, to what extent did a complete and critical examination of the primary and secondary sources change, support, or add to the commonly accepted battle perspective? Second, in what ways did a contextual analysis of King Philip's War monuments in Rhode Island …

The Marketplace Of Boston: Macrobotanical Remains From Faneuil Hall, Ciana Faye Meyers

Graduate Masters Theses

Residents of Boston in the eighteenth century utilized a wide range of botanical materials in their daily lives, navigating complex urban marketing systems and utilizing their own individual ingenuity to procure botanical resources. The one thousand eight hundred and eighty-three botanical remains recovered from a "community midden" underneath the present-day Faneuil Hall represents a diverse collection of taxa which encodes information not only about the localized dietary practices of colonial urban residents, but also helps to illuminate the more subtle ramifications of Boston's participation in the Atlantic economy on the lives of its residents. These botanical remains represent taxa from …

An Emptying Village: Transformations In Architecture And Spatial Organization At Streamstown Village, Co. Galway, Meagan K. Conway

Graduate Masters Theses

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ireland was a country of instability. The population rose rapidly, and traditional farming practices shifted to accommodate the rapidly changing population in addition to incorporating and almost entirely depending on a new crop, the potato. A spattering of famine years culminating in the Great Famine of 1847-1850 created an unstable environment for rural Irish farmers and factored into massive depopulation of the western counties. Abandonment of the western counties created dozens of empty villages across the landscape, the majority of which are comprised of stone structures located in farmland and in varying degrees of …

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 Viking Age Political Economy From Soil Core Tephrochronology, Kathryn Anne Catlin

Graduate Masters Theses

Saga accounts describe Viking Age Iceland as an egalitarian society of independent household farms. By the medieval period, the stateless, agriculturally marginal society had become highly stratified in exploitative landlord-tenant relationships. Classical economists place the origin of differential wealth in unequal access to resources that are unevenly distributed across the landscape. This irregularity is manifested archaeologically as spatial variations in buried soil horizons, which are addressed through thousands of soil cores recorded across Langholt in support of the Skagafjörður Archaeological Settlement Survey. Soil accumulation rates, a proxy for land quality, are derived from tephrochronology and correlated with archaeological and historical …

Farmstead And Household Archaeology At The Barrett Farm, Concord, Massachusetts, Thomas P. Mailhot

Graduate Masters Theses

Changes in the landscape across the Barrett farmstead in Concord, Massachusetts, are examined and related to changes in the household during the 1850s and 1860s. Although the Barrett family had a long and prosperous tradition of farming in Concord, this changed at the end of the 19th-century, as the farm was reduced in size and the operation reduced in scale. The majority of artifacts and data recovered from an excavation in 2007 by UMass Boston dealt with the 19th-century occupation of the farmstead. Changes in the household and across the farmstead in the 19th-century can be seen archaeologically through the …

Flint At The Fort: Investigating Raw Material Scarcity And Locations Of Lithic Activity At Monhantic Fort, John M. Kelly

Graduate Masters Theses

The Monhantic Fort site on the Mashantucket Pequot reservation in southeastern Connecticut has yielded many insights into Pequot life in the late 17th century. This fortified village, occupied during King Philip's War, has given archaeologists a glimpse of the domestic practices and organization of the people who lived within as well as details about how they engaged with military expeditions. In this thesis, I examine the lithic assemblage from Monhantic Fort. This assemblage, comprised of European flint employed to create tools like gunflints and strike-a-lights, can be used to investigate how the Pequots utilized new stone tool technologies and negotiated …

Depicting Simultaneously Similarity, Diversity, Ancestry, And Admixture?, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

Can any depiction of genetic relationships among humans allow simultaneously for similarity, diversity, ancestry, and admixture (i.e., groups that had split mixing again)? I asked this question while puzzling over the messages conveyed by diagrams from the work of Tishkoff and collaborators on genetic variation among humans in and out of Africa. In this talk I present explorations of alternative depictions of human genetic variation keeping my initial question in mind. By the end I will have prepared the ground for an assertion that the very methodology of generating and depicting human ancestry privileges a racialized view of human diversity.

Data Recovery Excavations Of The Carriage House, Greenhouse, And Greenhouse/Carriage House Well At Gore Place, Waltham, Massachusetts, J.N. Leith Smith, Christa M. Beranek, John M. Steinberg, Michelle G. Styger, Heidi Krofft, Rita A. Deforest

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

Excavations and ground penetrating radar at Gore Place in Waltham, Massachusetts, examined the original 1793 carriage house site, the 1806 greenhouse, and the greenhouse/carriage house well, all associated with Christopher and Rebecca Gore. The carriage house was moved in 1968, and its cellar was filled at that time. Mechanical removal of the fill in a portion of the carriage house cellar revealed that the lower portion of at least the rear (north) foundation wall is well preserved along with the cellar floor. Documentary evidence indicated that the carriage house cellar had been used for manure (compost) preparation, while the first …

Preliminary Report: Evaluating The Potential Of Archaeogeophysical Surveying On Viking Age And Medieval Sites In Greenland, 2 – 16 August, 2010, Douglas J. Bolender, John M. Steinberg, Brian N. Damiata, John W. Schoenfelder, Kathryn Caitlin

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

The primary goal of this research is to begin to overcome biases in the Greenlandic Norse archaeological record. Assessing the establishment dates and organization of Norse sites in Greenland is difficult because substantial cultural deposits can be hidden under deep windblown sand deposits as well as later occupations. Shallow geophysical methods were used to help recover information on the nature, extent and depth of subsurface cultural deposits. Assessing these site characteristics is a first step in overcoming the bias towards the later, the larger, and the more visible sites in the archaeological record.

Norse Greenland presents a relatively visible medieval …

Results Of Archaeogeophysical Surveying At The Great Friends Meeting House In Newport, Rhode Island, John M. Steinberg, Brian N. Damiata, John W. Schoenfelder, Kathryn A. Catlin, Christine Campbell

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

Archaeogeophysical surveys were carried out in October 2010 over a 30 x 50 m grid that was established immediately to the north and west of the north end of the Great Friends Meeting House (GFMH) in Newport, RI. The surveys were conducted using a Geonics EM-38 RT ground conductivity meter and a Malå X3M Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) system that was equipped with 500 and 800 MHz antennas. In addition, a resistance survey was performed over a much smaller central area using a Geoscan RM15 resistance meter. From this work three types of geophysical anomalies have been identified: those associated …