Julia A. King

What Are We Really Learning through Publicly Funded Historical Archaeology (and Is It Worth the Considerable Expense

Historical archaeology has become an established discipline within the last 30 years, yet to some its value is unrecognized or open to question. The reason for this can be found in several areas. As a discipline, historical archaeology has yet to develop a coherent approach to the study of the historic past or to the identification of sites that are truly worthy of preservation or study at public expense. Reports of excavations are cumbersome and difficult to use by other archaeologists, let alone by professionals in other disciplines or the interested public. We are probably spending considerable money on sites that really do not warrant the effort. As a whole, our literature does clearly illustrate the value of our accomplishments. To remedy what is in reality a decades-old problem requires leadership from the profession and from individual professionals. We need to redefine what we as a discipline are attempting to accomplish and how it is best accomplished, redefine priorities for publicly funded archaeology, establish a meaningful threshold of significance, reinvent our reports, challenge other scholars with our findings and interpretations, and insist that publicly funded projects result in publicly oriented products.

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Excessive Animal Protein: The Question of an Adequate Diet in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

Historical documents and faunal assemblages have indicated that the 17th-century Chesapeake English diet was, for the most part, nutritionally adequate and perhaps more so than the contemporary English diet. Pathological conditions observed on a number of 17th-century era human skeletons, however, including 19 individuals recovered from a single plantation cemetery in Maryland, suggest nutritional deficiencies in the colonists. The excessive but culturally acceptable consumption of meat, alcohol, and tobacco by the Chesapeake colonists appears to have affected nutrient absorption by at least some 17th-century colonists. Despite a potentially nutritious diet, the Chesapeake colonists suffered nutritional deficiencies that negatively impacted individual health.

Still Life with Tobacco: The Archaeological Uses of Dutch Art

Historical archaeologists often make considerable use of 17th-century Dutch still life and genre art to document and interpret material life in the early colonial period. In colonial Chesapeake archaeology, this art has been used to identify artifacts, to reconstruct the material and social contexts in which artifacts were used, and to imagine what the past was like in early Maryland and Virginia. This paper argues for a more critical approach to the use of Dutch art in the interpretation of colonial life by comparing the representations of women smoking tobacco in Dutch art with archaeological evidence of women’s tobacco consumption at early domestic Chesapeake sites. Although smoking by women is rarely depicted in Dutch art, archaeological data indicate that Chesapeake women regularly consumed tobacco. Museum representations of early colonial women, which also draw heavily on Dutch art in their depictions of the colonial past, rarely show tobacco smoking. These representations and the archaeological evidence raise important questions about the relationship between artistic and archaeological context and about social attitudes concerning tobacco use in the 17th and the 21st centuries.

Passing for Black in Seventeenth-Century Maryland

In the Chesapeake region of the United States, archaeologists (including ourselves) typically organize the men and women who made up colonial society into one of three categories: European, African, or Native American. Although these three categories at one time were conflated with skin color, today, they are conceived primarily (although not always) in terms of ancestry or origin. Archaeologists have used these categories to document and interpret social life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to understand the nature and origins of attitudes toward difference, especially racial and ethnic difference. The best of this work has revealed a range of responses to post-Contact life in the region. Enslaved Africans, for example, were able to use material culture to exert some control over their material and spiritual lives.

An unusual pipe stem find from St. Inigoes Manor, Maryland

During the spring of 1985, a preconstruction archaeological survey was conducted by the Maryland Historical Trust in a two-acre field known to have been a part of 17th century St. Inigoes Manor in lower St. Mary’s County, Maryland. As a result of the survey, two colonial tenant sites were identified, and two unusual and significant artifacts were recovered. The artifacts are two white clay tobacco pipe stem fragments with hand inscriptions that are believed to be the first such finds in Maryland and Virginia.