International Journal of Historical Archaeology最新文献

Documentary evidence indicates dogs at Jamestown were famine food during the terrible winter of 1609–10 CE. This analysis highlights what these remains can tell us about the interactions between Native Virginians and European colonists, as well as early life in the fort for both colonists and dogs. This paper (1) documents the composition and taphonomic history of the dog remains, (2) determines animal body size and age, and (3) highlights the nature of human butchery. Our results indicate most Jamestown dogs have Indigenous ancestry, were primarily medium sized and younger in age, and served as a food source during the fort’s initial settlement.

The Droke Family Burial Ground in Bentonville, Arkansas, was explored archaeologically in 2000, resulting in the discovery of just three graves. Although a slight data set, the graves’ material culture, location, and time range combine to offer enormous insight into key historical events and cultural trends of the mid-nineteenth century. Although two major nineteenth-century phenomena, the Beautification of Death Movement and the Upland South Cemetery tradition, were potential influences in its creation, the expedient founding of the burial ground and its abrupt abandonment was likely due to a third force – the upheaval of the Civil War.

Taking a bioarchaeological approach that puts human skeletal remains in context with historical records, we reconstruct the experiences of three women who lived in the West during the 1800s and early 1900s. Telling the stories of one woman from a homestead outside the city of Las Vegas, Nevada and two women recovered from a sand dune near Walters Ferry, Idaho, we offer insight into what life was like for those who ventured west in search of new identities and roles in developing industries. Our analysis includes documentation of pathological conditions, activity-related changes, and trauma in comparison to other historic cemetery samples from communities growing in this region. Through examination of the skeletal data from these diverse data sets, patterns emerge regarding the health profiles of these women. In particular, the results show that the pathological conditions observed on the three women from Nevada and Idaho align with those documented in the published literature and provide insight into their risk of morbidity and trauma.

The commodification of native resources was central to the genesis of colonial markets. Many self-sufficient polities inhabited the preconquest Andes and did not rely on regular market exchange. The discovery of the Potosí mines motivated migration and urban growth to a level never seen before: for the first time, a large urban community needed a regular supply of commodities. The Native communities of the surrounding region produced part of the food and resources consumed in Potosí. The Andean fishing communities of Tarapacá (northern Chile) form one such case. This work addresses the creation of the first modern Andean commodities by analyzing the archaeological and documentary remains of an early seventeenth-century colonial fishery at the mouth of the Loa River, exploring its occupants, spaces, daily praxis, and the social mechanisms involved in seafood commodification. Results show the degree to which the fishery depended on the labor of Native Camanchaca fishers, their techniques and technologies and the actions of powerful entrepreneurs, but also on the persistence of Andean ceremonial and political arrangements. Commercialization and the market expanded through the preservation of fish for deferred consumption and the strategic movement of the resource through multiple distribution channels and communities.

This article presents the discovery in Ruszów (German: Rauscha, today in Poland) of 103 stone epitaphs from a demolished monument commemorating the inhabitants of this village – German soldiers who died during World War I. After World War II, Poland received part of Germany’s territory in exchange for lands lost to the Soviet Union. Forced deportations followed the change of borders. Polish displaced persons in the new territories found a foreign cultural heritage, which they often treated as hostile – due to the vivid memories of the German occupation. In such circumstances, the monument in Ruszów was destroyed. The village inhabitants remembered this and decided to change it by initiating community archaeology to research the monument’s relics. The universal right to remember the dead, which, in their opinion was violated in the act of destroying the monument, was the motivation for their actions. It prompted the scientists helping them to reflect on the various aspects of community archaeology.

The strategic importance of the Azores Islands resulted in the formation of a vast post-medieval underwater cultural heritage, consisting of shipwrecks and anchorages. This paper will discuss the scientific potential of this heritage through a presentation of the main shipwreck sites, specifically focusing on two historic ports of the archipelago’s central group where archaeological activity has been particularly intense: Angra, on Terceira Island, and Horta, on Fayal Island. The former was the main port of call for Portuguese and Spanish navigation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the latter was an important Atlantic port for British navigation from the end of the seventeenth century onward and for American fleets during the nineteenth century.

Iron forging and gunpowder productions were important enterprises in eighteeth-century Mauritius, then known as Île de France. Two sites are tangible testimonies of these industries: one at Balaclava and the other at Pamplemousses. The Powder Mill at Balaclava was part of an arsenal and produced gunpowder from the 1740s to 1774. The Powder Mills in Pamplemousses, commonly known as Moulin à Poudre, was a gunpowder production site between 1775 and 1810, from where the site gained its name. This second site was initially established as an iron forging factory in the 1740s, simultaneously with the gunpowder mill at Balaclava, and then converted into a gunpowder production industrial site in 1775. Since the initiation of systematic archaeological research in 2016, the sites continue to provide critical insight into eighteenth-century enslavement, military history in the Indian Ocean, and local technological advancement. Through a description of the findings, this article illustrates how the local landscape and environment were modified and adapted on a massive scale to accommodate both the industry of iron forging, and, subsequently, gunpowder production.

Between 1833 and 1877 the Tasman Peninsula (Van Diemens Land/Tasmania) operated as a restricted penal zone for British convicts transported to Australia. The main penal settlement was situated at Port Arthur, with a series of substations spread across an area of 660 km² (250 mi²). At its mid-1840s peak over 3,000 male convicts, military, and free resided on the peninsula. The vast majority of the men were engaged in diverse industrial activities, ranging from manufacturing to resource extraction, as well as the associated tasks of transport and communications. Archaeological and historical evidence demonstrates that this multiscalar penological industrial landscape was coordinated by an interlinked system of audio and visual signaling. Activity within settlements and the immediate economic hinterland was synchronized by bells, while more distant or topographically difficult sites incorporated visual signaling with time balls and semaphores. A GIS analysis of soundscapes and viewsheds shows that the latter afforded coordination of labor across the hinterland, as well as rapid complex messaging between different stations and beyond, while also spreading a net of time compliance and surveillance across the penal peninsula.

Recent stabilization work at the Ludlow Massacre Site National Historic Landmark revealed new insights into memorialization activities over time. The site commemorates a battle between striking miners and the Colorado National Guard which culminated in the destruction of a striking miners ‘tent colony by fire causing the deaths of two women and eleven children in a cellar. The United Mine Workers of America erected a monument and preserved that cellar in cement sometime after 1918. Unexpected finds encountered during preservation work on the cellar raise issues related to collective memory, memorialization, and scale. These finds offer new understandings of changes made at the site by the strikers and the UMWA since the massacre in 1914.

Reverend Thomas Bridges’ Yagan-English dictionary (1879) has hitherto been little explored outside of linguistics but is highly valuable as a complementary source to archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile). The dictionary contains 22,800 entries and yields rich information concerning the marine lifeways of the Yagan and their and intimate knowledge about Fuegian seascapes. The idea behind this paper is that environments have strong bearings on linguistic vocabularies. Treating words as archaeological objects that map onto landscapes, we identify important landforms for Yagan marine foragers and Norwegian fisher-farmers in a comparative study of word frequencies in Bridges’ dictionary and Ivar Aasen’s Norwegian dictionary (1850). Moreover, we explore in detail how marine lifestyles and Fuegian seascapes emerge in Bridges’ dictionary and discuss the dictionary’s relevance for historical archaeology in Tierra del Fuego.