Archaeological Anthropology Commons^™

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 Architectural artifact and spatial analyses, combined with historical documents, are utilized to understand reservation building practices of Native Americans navigating colonialism in the 18th and 19th century.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 …

Colonial Markets, Consumers, And Trade: A Comparative Analysis Of Historic Ceramics From The Bluefields Bay Area, Westmoreland, Jamaica, Lacy Risner

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The ceramic assemblages from a British colonial settlement in Bluefields Bay, Jamaica, provide a unique window into the market availability, exchange routes, and consumption patterns of the eighteenth century. This study compares the historic ceramics collected from two sites in Bluefields Bay to one another and to other intra-island (Jamaica), intraregional (Lesser Antilles), and international (North America) colonial and postcolonial sites to reveal patterns of individual and global ceramic consumption and distribution in the emergent capitalist networks and markets of the colonial era. Integrating small British colonial sites into the networks of other more extensive studies focusing primarily on plantations …

Storage Organization And Analysis Of Artifacts, Rebecca Glatz

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

I worked with the Institute for Human Science and Culture at the Drs. Nicholas & Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology and Department of Anthropology at the University of Akron to help create an inventory of the collections that are being stored in the storage of the Cummings Center. After I finished the general inventory, I selected a collection of interest to do further research on an item level. The collection was processed and photographed and this paper is a report of what I learned about the collection and a guide of how to process a collection for …

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, …

“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 …

Seeing The Forest And The Trees: Tracing Fuel Use And Landscape Change On The Eastern Pequot Reservation 1740-1850, Kalila Herring

Graduate Masters Theses

Gathering fuel wood was a regular chore for most people throughout time and certainly was a part of life for people living in 18th- and 19th-century Connecticut. During this period, the landscape was being altered due to rapidly expanding agriculture and, by circa 1850, would be at the peak of deforestation. During this period, the Eastern Pequot, a Native American nation in North Stonington, were living on their reservation (established in 1683) in a colonial environment and dealing with timber theft, a reduced land base, overseer control, and the overall environmental changes occurring in Connecticut. This thesis examines the charred …

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 …

Archaeological Investigation Of The Drive Circle And West Hyphen At Gore Place Waltham, Massachusetts, Christa M. Beranek, Alexandra Crowder

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

In July of 2015, the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston conducted test excavations at Gore Place, the 1806 mansion house of Christopher and Rebecca Gore in Waltham, Massachusetts, to answer questions about changes in the landscape on the north side of the house. The excavations focused on areas of interest within the drive circle and against the west hyphen of the house. The project was carried out under State Archaeologist Permit #3559. The main results in the oval were the discovery of a Gore-period driveway under the grassy oval, indicating that the driveway was broader in front …

Community Formation And The Development Of A British-Atlantic Identity In The Chesapeake: An Archaeological And Historical Study Of The Tobacco Pipe Trade In The Potomac River Valley Ca. 1630-1730, Lauren Kathleen Mcmillan

Doctoral Dissertations

Trade in goods, and the exchange of information and ideas that resulted, was the backbone and lifeblood of the Chesapeake colonies. Through these formal and informal interactions colonists formed personal and community relationships that defined many aspects of life in 17th-century Virginia and Maryland. Marked or decorated imported clay tobacco pipes and locally-produced mold-made tobacco pipes are one of the most tangible pieces of evidence of these relationships and are the main focus of this study. By combining archaeological and documentary records, the multiple interaction spheres in which residents from 16 archaeological sites in the Potomac River Valley were engaged …

Oral History And Archaeology Of The Keith's Siding Site Location, Amanda Kay Flannery

Theses and Dissertations

At the beginning of the 20th century railroad logging camp settlements dotted the landscape in Northern Wisconsin in order to supply growing city populations and immigrants moving west with building materials. Many temporary towns were created in order to house the workers and their families and provide basic amenities needed to survive in an isolated environment. These communities typically lasted until the extraction of the hardwood was complete and then communities would abandon their makeshift dwellings and move on to the next stand of trees. Very few of the lumber siding settlements have been documented within the archaeological record. Great …

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 …

A Macrobotanical Analysis Of Native American Maize Agriculture At The Smith's Point Site, Kelly A. Ferguson

Graduate Masters Theses

The Smith's Point site was a seasonally inhabited Native American encampment in Yarmouth, Massachusetts occupied from the Middle Woodland through the early Colonial periods. Excavations at the site in the early 1990s yielded the remains of a multi-component site including both an agricultural field and an adjacent living area. The macrobotanical remains from the agricultural and living area features were examined for this thesis project in order to investigate subsistence practices at the site. The findings show that Native Americans actively shaped these ecological niches for purposes such as maintaining and improving their subsistence base. These landscape management activities included …