Mary C. Beaudry

Grand challenges for archaeology

Abstract This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

Documentary archaeology in the New World

Introduction Part I. Archaeology is Not Enough: 1. Legends, houses, families and myths: relationships between material culture and American ideology Anne E. Yentsch 2. Perceptions of an artifact: Chinese porcelain in colonial Tidewater Virginia Julia B. Curtis 3. Documentary insights into the archaeology of smuggling Peter R. Schmidt, and Stephen A. Mrozowski 4. Words for things: linguistic analysis of probate inventories Mary C. Beaudry, Janet Long, henry M. Miller, Fraser D. Neiman, and Garry Wheeler Stone Part II. Documents and the Archaeologist: The Data Base: 6. Artifacts are not enough Garry Wheeler stone 7. The behavioural context of probate inventories: an example from Plymouth colony marley R. Brown III 8. Occupational differences reflected in material culture Kathleen J. Bragdon 9. On the use of historical maps Nancy S. Seaholes 10. Military records and historical archaeology Lawrence E. Babits 11. The material culture of the Christian Indians of New England, 1650-1775 Kathleen J. Bragdon 12. Anthropological title searches in Rockbridge County, Virginia H. Langhorne and lawrence E. Babits Part III. Ecological Questions In Historical Archaeology: 13. Farming, fishing, whaling, trading: land and sea as resource on eighteenth-century Cape Cod Anne e. yentsch 14. Seasonality: an agricultural construct Joanne Bowen Part IV. Consumerism, Status, Gender, and Ethnicity: 15. Classification and economic scaling of nineteenth-century ceramics george l. miller 16. For gentlemen of capacity and leisure: the archaeology of colonial newspapers stephen A. mrozowoski 17. What happened to the silent majority? Research strategies for studying dominant group material culture in late nineteenth-century California Mary Praetzellis, Adrian Praetzellis, and Marley r. brown III.

A vessel typology for early Chesapeake ceramics: The Potomac Typological System

A tentative scheme for classifying vessel shapes excavated in the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia is presented. The result, dubbed “The Potomac Typological System” (POTS), links gradations of forms of vessels commonly excavated on Tidewater sites to terms used in inventories and other documents of the period. Although many of the colonial terms also belong to the modern lexicon, their connotations and referents were not always identical in the past. The aim is not to produce a standardized, all-purpose typology but rather a preliminary foundation for comparisons enabling the exploration of what sorts of functional variability exist within and between assemblages. The important role of data from documentary sources in the interpretation of excavated ceramic material is also discussed.

The Lowell Boott Mills complex and its housing: Material expressions of corporate ideology

Lowell, Massachusetts, the first planned industrial city in New England, was a total departure from earlier forms of urban life in North America. This essay examines the ways in which the ideology of industrial capitalism and the policy of corporate paternalism are reflected in the built environment of 19th century Lowell. Using the Boott Cotton Mills Corporation as a case study, the ways in which corporate policies regulated and permeated the material lives of workers on the job and at home are considered. The analysis draws upon an interdisciplinary body of data but emphasizes the ways in which archaeological investigations can illuminate the contrast between the stated company policy of concern for workers’ welfare and the reality of workers’ living conditions.

Material culture studies and historical archaeology

Material culture is ubiquitous in our everyday lives; we are surrounded by it and arguably can do little without it. The proliferation of new material forms is troubling to some, often forming the basis of debates over globalisation, modernity and the contemporary production of locality. But while it is true that people are regularly confronted with new objects and technologies, without question many understand and embrace them and consciously use them in the creation of multiple and often intersecting identities. As historical archaeology has emerged as a field of study, understanding and interpreting material culture has become more important than simply identifying and classifying excavated objects (cf. Barker and Majewski this volume). In the United Kingdom, historical archaeologists have followed conventions established by archaeologists of earlier periods, typically grouping and describing their finds according to material (e.g. pottery, iron, bone). In North America, where historical archaeology emerged at approximately the same time as archaeologists’ redefinition of their field through the introduction of the scientific method and the search for laws of cultural behaviour, the overwhelming emphasis has been upon classification of finds according to functional categories (e.g. ‘personal’, ‘military’, ‘architectural’: see South 1977a). Until the 1990s, many American historical archaeologists were anxious to develop universal, standardised schemes for artefact classification so that artefacts and assemblages could be readily compared among historical sites. As a result, historical archaeologists were slow to accept alternative approaches to studying artefacts, approaches arising from the field of material culture studies (for a review, see Yentsch and Beaudry 2001). Our goal in this chapter is not to review typological and generalising approaches to artefact analysis; rather, we explore recent developments in transdisciplinary, interpretive material culture studies, and the opportunities they offer for material culture analysis in contemporary historical archaeology.

Artifacts and Personal Identity

Although historical archaeologists have generally neglected to apprehend the potent meanings of personal possessions, the field is stirring. All too often, personal artifacts have been subsumed into broader categories of artifacts, their meanings blurred or diminished. Personal artifacts have been assessed as subgroups classified by material, resulting in a muting of the individual significance of particular artifacts and a preference on the part of analysts to deal with objects recovered in large quantities. Personal artifacts have occasioned individual assessment sporadically, and interest in these artifacts has begun to shift from limited interpretation to more interpretive contextual approaches. In this chapter, we trace the shifts in approach to personal artifacts and explore the ways that archaeologists scrutinize these small finds to understand identity construction. Three interrelated lines of inquiry and influence in archaeology have merged to bring about a shift to exploration of personal items and identity construction. First, the examination of the lives of enslaved African Americans sparked intensive interest among historical archaeologists in examining race and ethnicity. Concurrently, archaeologists sought more effective and complex ways of examining gender in the archaeological record. These trends, as well as emerging interest in considering class, were part of a larger movement within the field—parallel to developments across other disciplines—in the examination of identity. A second important influence was a renewed interest in less commonly examined classes of artifacts, stimulated, in part, by a frustration with traditional modes of material culture analysis to engage with race, gender, and class. Third, historical archaeologists joined with cultural anthropologists in a dedicated interest in the examination of the body and the manifold ways in which embodiment can be examined through material culture. These three influential threads surface in current work in the exploration of identity through personal possessions.

Pollen analysis and urban land use: The environs of Scottow’s Dock in 17th, 18th, and early 19th century Boston

Pollen analysis cannot be used to reconstruct the natural environment during the historical period in New England because Euroamerican land clearance and soil disturbance have biased the record. Land use is recorded among arboreal pollen counts, but the size of the affected pollen source area is difficult to ascertain. Close agreement among documentary, archaeological, and non-arboreal pollen records of land use within specific 17th through 19th century urban matrices and the contrasts between the pollen data from the contemporaneous, adjacent but functionally different Wilkinson Backlot and Bostonian Hotel Sites in Boston, Massachusetts, indicate that non-arboreal pollen spectra sensitively record vegetative response to different kinds of human activities across small horizontal and stratigraphic intervals. The minor pollen types are the most important; hence large sums must be tabulated if patterns of change are to be recognized. Pollen corrosion and concentration measures and arboreal/ non-arboreal pollen ratios contribute to the understanding of matrix deposition processes.

Ceramic studies in historical archaeology

WHY CERAMICS? Ceramic studies have played a central role in the development of archaeology – a fact that is equally true for historical archaeology as for studies of earlier periods. Ceramics represent by far the largest class of artefacts recovered during excavations of historical sites. As in other periods, ceramic materials survive in the ground when objects made from other materials do not, and their archaeological value is very high even though they generally only survive in a fragmentary state. As ubiquitous products prone to stylistic change in response to new fashions and consumer preference, ceramics are readily datable, and often prove the most important diagnostic materials recovered when an archaeologically excavated sequence is being interpreted. In addition to their value as sensitive temporal markers, ceramics have the potential to provide insights into a wide range of other topics: cultural change and colonisation; the identities of groups and individuals; the social and economic status of consumers; the emergence of changing practices relating to the consumption of food and drink; patterns of trade and of local and regional variations in trade; and technological change and industrialisation. The past five hundred years have witnessed massive increases in the production, exchange and consumption of ceramics in Asia, Europe, North America and around the world. In Europe, an intensification of international trade in commodities was a central part of nascent colonialism and the transition from medieval to modern societies, as the Old World was opened up to new commodities from the East and as new markets for new commodities developed in the New World and beyond. A chapter on ceramics could be written from many geographical perspectives. The main focus of the present chapter is European-made ceramics, but discussion of non-European ceramics is interwoven throughout. The development of historical ceramic studies has been primarily a British And North American phenomenon, and the parallel and separate trajectories on either side of the Atlantic are traced in the first section of this paper. The second section provides an overview of ceramic production and technology, primarily told from an archaeological vantage point.

Living on the Boott: health and well being in a boardinghouse population.

Abstract Documentary and archaeological evidence provides a view of conditions of sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition under the boarding house system in Lowell, Massachusetts. The evidence is sometimes complementary but more often contradictory. Archaeological evidence, for example, reveals that public expression of corporate concern for worker welfare often failed to be followed by actions that would improve living conditions in the boarding houses. The archaeological record further reveals that even well‐intentioned efforts by the corporations to improve worker living conditions may have resulted in the inadvertent addition of new hazards to an already unhealthy environment.

Farm Journal: First person, four voices

I weave together evidence archaeological, documentary, pictorial, and imagined to create first-person stories of the men and women who lived at the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, Newbury, Massachusetts, ca. 1780–1820. These are the stories of two merchants, Nathaniel Tracy, Esquire, and Captain Offin Boardman, and of their wives, Mary Lee Tracy, “the great beauty of her day,” and Sarah Tappan Boardman, ill and confined to her bed for much of the year. The sources uncover a mosaic of business success and business failure, of fortunes lost and social position scrupulously maintained.