William Hampton Adams

Trade Networks and Interaction Spheres-A View from Silcott

The people of Silcott, a small farming community in southeastern Washington, participated in six major trade networks: local, local-commercial, area-commercial, regional, national, and international. These networks are examined through the ethnographic, historical, and archæological data. Remarkably, the regional, national and international networks are best studied through the archæology, whereas the local networks and the area commercial networks are best examined through the ethnography. These networks bound Silcott into an integrated community, while at the same time they linked Silcott to the national economy via the various networks.

Commodity flows and national market access

Commodity flows represent the pattern for manufactured goods reaching the customer. This article presents the application of a commodity flow model to data from archaeological sites in Mississippi, Washington, and New York, in order to relate those sites within a developing national market and transportation system.

Machine cut nails and wire nails: American production and use for dating 19th-century and early-20th-century sites

The commonly cited sources used by archaeologists for dating nails have been rendered outdated by later research. Machine cut and headed nails date from 1815 onwards, while wire nails date from 1819 onward. Historical archaeologists need to avoid the simplistic use of invention dates and patent dates and focus instead on the mass-production dates. There can be a significant amount of time between an invention and its first production, and even greater time until production figures are significantly high enough to affect the archaeological record. Usually wire nails are ascribed an 1850s beginning date, but that date is both too early and too late. While some wire nails were produced in 1819, no significant quantities were produced in the United States until the mid-1880s. Thus, we need to extend the manufacturing date back some 30 years with the caveat that the effective manufacturing date range begins in the 1880s. By examining production figures for wire nails, a model is generated for dating sites built of machine cut nails. This model is then examined using data from dozens of sites in the USA and Canada. Just as important, the model provides clues to recycling activity and access to different manufacturing sources.

Recycling bottles as building materials in the Pacific Islands

In a recent article, David Burley investigated the use of beer bottles as grave decorations in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga. Burley concluded that these should not be viewed in a symbolic framework, but instead that the bottles were merely convenient building materials. The custom of marking a grave with bottles is much more widespread, for it is found on the islands of Yap and Palau in the western part of Micronesia, and in the Solomon Islands of Melanesia. In Micronesia, bottles are used to mark paths and planting beds as well as graves. This article explores, briefly, some of the issues involved in recycling bottles.

Preparation of line drawings from photographs

Visual presentation of data is essential in archaeological reports, but because of inadequate funding and/or available artistic talent, too few reports are illustrated sufficiently. This article describes a method whereby good quality line drawings can be produced inexpensively with only a modicum of illustrative skills. While the technique itself is not innovative, its widespread use would be. The purpose of this article is to provide a summary of the technique so that others may be encouraged to use it.

Free recall of trigrams following their presentation in a short-term memory task

Ss free recalled items they had previously separately verbally recalled in a standard short-term memory task. Free recall was examined as a function of: (1) order of item presentation, (2) length of retention interval, (3) presence or absence of an instructional set to recall all items, and (4) activity during the intertrial interval. Significant effects due to order of item presentation, intertrial-interval activity, and interactions between order of presentation and intertrial-interval activity and between presentation order and instructions were found. A recency effect appeared in all instances, but a primacy effect was obtained only when Ss were forewarned of free recall. The effect of intertrial-interval activity was most evident with the last item. Rehearsal of the item produced better recall than either counting or doing nothing, but counting produced better recall than doing nothing.

The Effect of Instructional Set and Intertrial Activity on Retention in a Short-Term Memory Task

These experiments investigated the effects of intertrial activity and instructional set on recall of consonant trigram stimuli in a short-term memory task. Subjects either: (a) sat silently during the intertrial interval; (b) overtly rehearsed the prior item during the intertrial interval; (c) overtly rehearsed the prior item under a set that they were to recall all items; (d) were given the set and engaged in a neutral counting activity during the intertrial interval; (e) counted during the intertrial interval with no set. Overt rehearsal and set, singly and togther, depressed recall over a 3- and 18-sec retention interval and largely eliminated differences in recall between the two intervals. Counting during the intertrial interval depressed recall of the initial and middle items.