Historic Archaeology

1
Historic Archaeology

• What is it?
• Historic Sites
• Case Studies

2
What is Historical Archaeology?

• Historical archaeology is the study of the
  material remains of past societies that also left
  behind some other form of historical evidence.
• This field of research embraces the interests of
  a diverse group of scholars representing the
  disciplines of anthropology, history, geography,
  and folklore.
• In the New World, historical archaeologists work
  on a broad range of sites preserved on land and
  underwater.

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Historic Sites

• These sites document early European settlement
  and its effects on Native American peoples, as
  well the subsequent spread of the frontier and
  later urbanization and industrialization.
• By examining the physical and documentary record
  of these sites, historical archaeologists attempt
  to discover the fabric of common everyday life in
  the past and seek to understand the broader
  historical development of their own and other
  societies.
• In the old world (Europe, Africa and Asia)
  written records go back much farther and this
  type of archaeology is referred to as classical
  archaeology.

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Development of Historic Archaeology In North
America

• Historical archaeology in the United States began
  developing in the 1930s in response to the need
  for both material remains and documentary
  evidence to restore and interpret sites important
  in early American history, including Jamestown,
  St. Augustine, and Plymouth.
• Colonial Williamsburg had one of the first
  departments of historical archaeology in the
  mid-1950s, and by the 1960s a few North American
  universities were offering courses in the
  subject.
• Today many colleges and universities have
  graduate programs in historical archaeology, and
  field has emerged as a discipline in its own
  right.

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What do Historic Archaeologists Study?

• African American and Native American studies
  explore the impact of European expansion upon
  these groups and issues related to inequality and
  the maintenance of traditional culture.
• Gender studies are concerned with the way the
  division of labor between men and women within
  New World households changed as a result of
  modernization.
• Farmstead studies focus upon the changes that
  occurred within rural households as they became
  increasingly involved in commercial agriculture.
• Urban studies examine the development of cities,
  industries, technology, and their influences upon
  urban groups.
• Maritime or underwater studies explore the
  history of ships and ocean transportation.

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African American Studies

• Since the early 1970s historical archaeologists
  in the South have excavated sites inhabited by
  enslaved African Americans.
• African American studies have been guided by t0
  main questions How did African American culture
  develop from West African origins and what was
  everyday life like for enslaved blacks?
• The persistence of West African traditions in
  material culture have been identified by
  archaeologists in the areas of architecture and
  pottery.

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Slave Cabins

• Slave cabins were usually 16 or 18 feet by 16
  feet with a chimney at one end.
• Sometimes a loft was reached by ladder and used
  for storage or as a sleeping room for children.
• Slave cabins generally were grouped together on a
  "street" with several cabins facing each other
  across a lane.
• Cabins for slaves who worked in the plantation
  house would have been fairly close to the house.
  Cabins for slaves who were field hands were
  located near the fields.

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Slave cabin from Sotterly Plantation, MD (ca.
1840).
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Layout of Mansfield Plantation
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Colono Ware

• In South Carolina during the early 18th century
  slaves constructed West African-style, wattle and
  daub, thatched houses.
• They also made pottery, called Colono Ware,
  derived from West African traditions.
• During the late 18th and 19th centuries elements
  of European material culture, such as
  European-style houses and imported household
  goods, were increasingly imposed upon African
  Americans.
• However, West African derived cultural elements,
  particularly along coastal South Carolina and
  Georgia, persist to the present in areas such as
  language, foodways, music, funeral customs, and
  decorative crafts.

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Colono Ware
12
Native American Studies

• The impact of European colonization upon native
  groups and the way the sexual division of labor
  changed in the historic past are central topics
  in historical archaeology.
• These issues are illustrated by historical
  archaeology conducted in Labrador, Canada.
• During the late 18th century Moravian
  missionaries from Germany established mission
  towns along the Labrador coast.
• This region was inhabited by the Inuit (Eskimo).
  The Moravians sought to convert the Inuit to
  Christianity and persuade them to live in mission
  towns.
• The Inuit were nomadic hunter-gatherers and
  depended upon arctic animals such as seals,
  whales, and caribous.

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Archaeological excavation of an Inuit house
midden in Nain, a mission town

• Illustrates the impact of European culture upon
  the Inuit and the way it restructured traditional
  divisions of labor between men and women.
• European style houses and household items largely
  replaced Inuit material culture.
• However, artifacts from excavation illustrate
  European goods were used in distinctively Inuit
  ways.

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Native use of European goods

• For example, numerous European ceramics such as
  tablewares possessed oil discoloration from being
  used as lamps.
• Previously, the Inuit had made lamps from
  soapstone. Also, bowls made in Europe comprised
  the bulk of the imported tablewares, indicating
  that stews, previously consumed from soapstone
  bowls, continued to be the main fare of the
  Inuit.
• The Inuit also mended European ceramic vessels by
  drilling and tying the pieces together with
  sinew, a practice previously conducted with
  soapstone vessels.
• Concerning changes in the division of household
  labor, European goods such as metal and firearms
  increased the efficiency of hunting and
  reinforced male activities.
• Conversely, the incorporation of European
  household goods by Inuit women increased the
  time and labor needed to maintain the household
  and in turn encouraged sedentism.

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Exchange items
16
The Five Points Site

• Archaeologists and historians rediscover a famous
  nineteenth-century New York neighborhood.
• Named for the points created by the intersection
  of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets, the
  neighborhood was known as a center of vice and
  debauchery throughout the nineteenth century.

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Descriptions of Five Points

• Outsiders found Five Points threatening and
  fodder for lurid prose.
• Describing a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens
  wrote
• "This is the place these narrow ways diverging
  to the right and left, and reeking every where
  with dirt and filthThe coarse and bloated faces
  at the doors have counterparts at home and all
  the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very
  houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams
  are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken
  windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have
  been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs
  live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters
  walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and
  why they talk instead of grunting?"

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Five Points Excavation

• The archaeological excavation of the Foley Square
  courthouse block provided the opportunity to
  examine the physical remains of life in this
  infamous place.

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Five Points Excavation
20
Five Points in 1827 as depicted in Valentine's
Manual, 1855
21
The Pearl Street Tanneries

• A 1785 map shows the courthouse block divided
  into eight lots that belonged to George and Jacob
  Shaw, tanners.
• Taking advantage of the moving water of the
  eastern outlet of the Collect Pond and standing
  water in the surrounding swamps, the tanners
  sited their operations along the sill of land
  that eventually became Pearl Street.

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Tannery Artifacts
Iron hook for moving hides around
Cattle bones
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The Hoffman House

• While the Hoffmans ate on fancy Chinese porcelain
  dishes, other citizens complained loudly about
  the industries that were polluting the nearby
  Collect Pond.
• In addition to the tanneries, slaughterhouses,
  breweries, ropewalks, and potteries contributed
  to making the neighborhood less than desirable.
• Despite these conditions, artisans continued to
  live here in order to be near their businesses.
• The Hoffman bakery (managed by a sequence of
  tenants) remained in business on Pearl Street
  well into the 1850s the widow Hoffman lived on
  the property until circa 1830 when the Five
  Points had already achieved its notorious
  reputation.

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The Hoffman Assemblage
25
Irish Tenement and Saloon

• Newly arrived immigrants worked in a variety of
  skilled and unskilled jobs, including
  construction, carpentry, masonry, dressmaking,
  printing, housekeeping, and hat making.
• Men, women, and even children contributed to the
  family income which hovered around 600 a year,
  enough to put meat on the table at most meals and
  buy fashionable household goods and clothing.
  
• For working-class men, life included membership
  in fraternal orders, trade unions, and fire
  companies as well as the camaraderie of the many
  local grog shops.
• Women formed strong support networks in the
  tenements, sharing the burden of child care and
  domestic responsibilities.

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Irish Tenement Artifacts
Kids toys
Soda Bottles
Medicine Bottles
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Biases

• We have to be careful not to let the biases of
  nineteenth-century observers, men like George
  Foster who were outsiders to the neighborhood,
  prevent us from hearing the voices of the actual
  residents who lived there.
• The Five Points artifacts speak for those whom
  Walt Whitman described in 1842 as "...not paupers
  and criminals, but the Republic's most needed
  asset, the wealth of stout poor men and we will
  add women who will work" (the Aurora).

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Underwater Historic Archaeology

• The Thomas Wilson was a riveted-steel, single
  propeller freight-carrying steamship.
• The Wilson was built during the winter of
  1891-1892 at West Superior, Wisc., and was
  launched April 30, 1892.
• The wreck of the Wilson is historically
  significant as the best known surviving example
  of the earliest whaleback steamships. Whalebacks
  were a distinctive type of Great Lakes bulk
  freighter designed by Captain Alexander McDougall
  for the transportation of grain, iron ore and
  lumber in the late 19th century.
• On June 7, 1902, the Thomas Wilson was outbound
  from Duluth Harbor carrying a cargo of Mesabi
  iron ore. It collided with the Hadley, killing
  nine of the twenty man crew.

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The Thomas Wilson
Diver taking photos