David B. Landon

Labor and Agricultural Production at Sylvester Manor Plantation, Shelter Island, New York

Archaeological and historical research on Sylvester Manor, Shelter Island, New York, provides insight into the productive strategies and labor organization of a northern agricultural plantation. Between 1652 and 1693, Sylvester Manor produced and shipped food, animals, and other provisions to a sugar plantation on Barbados. This New York plantation was a commercial-scale operation, based on the labor of enslaved Africans and free Native Americans. Plant and animal remains recovered from the archaeological excavations at the site provide evidence of the plantation’s products and insights into the various daily agricultural tasks that comprised the work of the plantation. The choice of crops and animals, seasonal agricultural cycles, cultural and gendered conceptions of labor tasks, and the power dynamics inherent in multicultural plantation settings all structured the agricultural work of the plantation.

Urbanization and Landscape Change in Early-Eighteenth-Century Boston: The Environmental Archaeology of Town Dock

The creation of the urban built landscape is perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of anthropogenic environmental change. This paper explores the creation of the urban landscape in downtown Boston during the early 18th century. Archaeological excavations next to Faneuil Hall, Boston’s iconic market building, recovered evidence for land-making processes and the filling of Town Dock. The macrobotanicals, pollen, faunal remains, and insects in the landfill reveal, at very different scales, the changing nature of the urban environment from the area immediately around the site to the broader region. A study of these data in the context of the filling of Town Dock thus provides a detailed view of human actions in the creation and structuring of the urban landscape.

Seasonal Slaughter Cycles and Urban Food Supply in the Colonial Chesapeake

People have lived in cities for over five millennia, thus understanding the emergence, development, and characteristics of urban settlements is a core research area in archaeology. Archaeologists have traditionally linked urbanization and urbanism to environmental questions because the concentration of people that defines a city requires a large supply of food as well as social and economic mechanisms to bring it to the city and distribute it. Cities typically rely on systems of intensive agriculture and high levels of surplus production from intensive agriculture systems are either a prerequisite for urbanization or a quick by-product. Cities are permanent settlements with dense populations, complex social systems, productive specializations, and strong appetites for food, fuel, and other natural resources. In addition to depleting local resources, cities change the environment though continued building and discharge of large volumes of waste. This case study investigates urban food supplies and distribution systems by comparing seasonal slaughter patterns of domestic animals at urban and rural sites in North America. The data are from sites in the states of Virginia and Maryland dating from the mid-17th century through the end of the 18th century (Figure 19-1). Incremental growth structures in the dental cementum of cattle (Bos taurus) teeth are examined on thin-sections of teeth to interpret the season of slaughter. In the New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts,