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Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Anthropology
“Provisioned, Produced, Procured,” And Purchased?: A Macrobotanical Study Of Enslaved Individuals’ Economic Engagement In The Shenandoah Valley, Linda A. Seminario
“Provisioned, Produced, Procured,” And Purchased?: A Macrobotanical Study Of Enslaved Individuals’ Economic Engagement In The Shenandoah Valley, Linda A. Seminario
Graduate Masters Theses
This research investigates enslaved peoples’ economic engagement in the Shenandoah Valley during the first half of the 19th century. In 2017, archaeologists excavated two features at the Belle Grove enslaved quarters in Middletown, Virginia— a root cellar and subfloor pit that were filled in when a log cabin burned down. The preservation of the macrobotanicals has allowed for an in-depth analysis of the plants with which enslaved individuals engaged and the relationship between plant acquisition and enslaved people’s regional formal economic involvement at a 19th-century plantation in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. These data sets have also allowed for an …
Spirits And Spirituality: Temperance And Racial Uplift In Nineteenth-Century Nantucket, Ma, John T. Crawmer
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 …
Preliminary Report 2021: Coring And Excavations At Hof In Hjaltadalur, John M. Steinberg, Zachary N. Guttman, Guðný Zoëga
Preliminary Report 2021: Coring And Excavations At Hof In Hjaltadalur, John M. Steinberg, Zachary N. Guttman, Guðný Zoëga
Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications
This report outlines the 2021 work at Hof as part of the Hjaltadalur Archaeological Survey Project (HASP). The results of soil coring suggest that the site of Hof is relatively small compared to other settlement farms. The footprint of the farmstead expands substantially after the 11th Century. The midden from the 11th and 12th centuries appears to be located just north of the main farmhouse (Hof 1). Cores from this area show an abundance of midden on either side of the white AD 1104 tephra. There is a notable absence of post-1300 midden deposits. The excavation unit …
Creating Community: Examining Black Identity And Space In New Guinea, Nantucket, Jared Muehlbauer
Creating Community: Examining Black Identity And Space In New Guinea, Nantucket, Jared Muehlbauer
Graduate Masters Theses
In the late 18th century, the abolition of slavery through manumission initiated a period of enormous change in the lives of people of African descent living on Nantucket, MA. Newly free, people of color living on the island immediately began to establish families and purchase property. At the end of the 1700s, they founded the community of New Guinea, located on the southwestern edge of the town of Nantucket. Though enslavement had been abolished and the whaling industry brought economic opportunity to Nantucket, the people of New Guinea continued to experience evolving forms of racial inequality, discrimination, and violence. To …
Social Movements And Charitable Dress: An Examination Of 19th Century Adornment At The Industrial School For Girls In Dorchester, Massachusetts, Madelaine A. Penney
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 …
“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson
“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 …
'Improvement The Order Of The Age': Historic Advertising, Consumer Choice, And Identity In 19th Century Roxbury, Massachusetts, Janice A. Nosal
'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 …
Native Interactions And Economic Exchange: A Re-Evaluation Of Plymouth Colony Collections, Kellie J. Bowers
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 …
Ubiquitous And Unfamiliar: Earthenware Pottery Production Techniques And The Bradford Family Pottery Of Kingston, Ma, Martha L. Sulya
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 …
Conversations Between Communities: Umass Boston Archaeology For And With The Nipmuc Nation & The Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Stephen W. Silliman
Conversations Between Communities: Umass Boston Archaeology For And With The Nipmuc Nation & The Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Stephen W. Silliman
Office of Community Partnerships Posters
Community-engaged scholarship, learning, and service are becoming important parts of university missions, ensuring that academic projects do not just “take” but also give back in meaningful ways. For Native American communities and archaeologists who come from and work with them, this kind of research sensitivity and community accountability is fundamentally important. Archaeological projects with, by, and for Native American communities vary as much in their structures and goals as the communities themselves. In order to meet the desires and needs of each community, two archaeological field schools at UMass Boston – Hassanamesit Woods (Grafton, Massachusetts) and Eastern Pequot (North Stonington, …
Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen
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
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 …
Gentility And Gender Roles Within The 18th-Century Merchant Class Of Newport, Rhode Island, Nicki Hise
Gentility And Gender Roles Within The 18th-Century Merchant Class Of Newport, Rhode Island, Nicki Hise
Graduate Masters Theses
The Capt. Thomas Richardson household rose to prominence in Newport, Rhode Island during the community’s golden age of prosperity in the 18th century when Newport quickly became one of the leading seaports in the New World. However, all prosperity halted due to the hardships and damage Newport suffered during the American Revolutionary War. Much of the city’s property and economic success was destroyed at the hands of occupying British troops, and the Rhode Island community was never able to fully recover. Like others in colonial Newport, Capt. Thomas Richardson achieved genteel status as a merchant, distiller, and slave ship owner …
"A Good Sized Pot": Early 19th Century Planting Pots From Gore Place, Waltham, Massachusetts, Rita A. Deforest
"A Good Sized Pot": Early 19th Century Planting Pots From Gore Place, Waltham, Massachusetts, Rita A. Deforest
Graduate Masters Theses
This thesis looked at the elite status of cultivating gentlemen at the site of the Gore Place greenhouse through the medium of planting pots. The goal of this thesis was to analyze the planting pot remains and to subsequently answer three questions: what kinds of activities were performed in the greenhouse, who was conducting those activities, and most importantly, how they played in to Christopher Gore's self presentation as having elite status. This project analyzed over 2,000 pot sherds found during the excavation of the 1806 Gore Place greenhouse. The outcome of a minimum vessel count of the planting pots …