HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY最新文献

Fort Roberdeau was a lead mine in central Pennsylvania during the period of the American Revolution. Scant information exists on the original position of the fort, the location of mining activity in the area during the period of the Revolution, or artifacts from this period. Subsequent farming, mining exploration, and the placement of the current replica fort (erected 1976) obscure the landform and hinder identification of Revolutionary-period mining activities. As a means of locating where the mining activities occurred and the original position of the fort, this study integrates historical, geological, geophysical, geochemical, geomorphological, and archaeological data. Geological mapping identified potential areas of past mining, and geophysical resistivity surveys verified at least one Revolutionary-period mine, since the location and dimensions of the subsurface anomaly match historical records. The positions of period metallic artifacts in conjunction with a road and corner of the original fort (identified with LiDAR and thermal imagery) place the original fort near the current replica.

Human bone fragments were discovered during archaeological monitoring of earth moving on Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia. Later mitigation recovered bones in situ—two skeletons and seven amputated limbs. Interdisciplinary research affords an unusually detailed level of interpretation, including identification of the remains as Union soldiers wounded during the Battle of Second Manassas (28–30 August 1862). The reconstructed narrative includes military and personal markers of identity, as well as causes of death and injury, and establishes a window from 1 to 6 September 1862 when the pit was dug. Records of Union surgeons make future personal identification of the amputated limbs possible and confirm the pit’s location as a key treatment center after Second Manassas, a battle that marked an inflection point for combat military medicine by highlighting the urgent need for improved systematic recovery and treatment of the wounded.

During the 19th century, the British Empire constituted an economic and political presence in the Mediterranean that was felt far beyond the borders of her colonies Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, and Cyprus. One way this may be archaeologically investigated is through the presence of mass-produced British earthenware; another is the development of locally produced imitation ceramics, which were often initiated with British economic, technological, and artisanal input. Drawing on archaeological discoveries across the region, this article marks the first assessment of British earthenware in the Mediterranean. It explores the impacts of British earthenware and its imitations as vectors of empire, enabling consideration of the polycentric colonial encounters that occurred both within colonies and crypto-colonially beyond.

Cholera was one of the great killers of the 19th century. The pandemic waves that took place between 1823 and 1899 caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Mediterranean region and across Europe. However, the excavation of cholera cemeteries is very rare. This article presents the results of excavations at the cholera cemetery of Benabbio, a mountain village near Lucca (northwest Tuscany) in which cholera broke out in the late summer–early autumn of 1855, causing 46 deaths in a population of around 900 inhabitants. The excavation made it possible to detect for the first time the material characteristics of a cholera cemetery. The findings provide a new source for anthropologically reading the reaction of a community facing the mortality crisis, which fluctuated between acceptance of regulations imposed by the authorities and local strategies of resistance.

The following article considers the imperial as experienced through the daily lives of peasants in southern Syria during the early Ottoman period. Control of critical resources was a flashpoint in the relationship between the state and village communities; thus, it is through the lens of land use that peasant dependency and agency in the face of the Ottoman state can be best evaluated. Two archaeological sites in Jordan and Israel provide data for detailed investigation of patterns noted in the scholarly literature. After a critical assessment of the contributions of archaeology to the large field of (overwhelmingly text-dominated) Ottoman studies, I turn to three areas of peasants’ lives that reflected, to different degrees, encounters with the imperial: land tenure and land use, household consumption, and material culture.