Anthropology

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Start date: 2010Subject: search.filters.subject.American history

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    The Archaeology of Enslaved Children in Antebellum America
    (2024) Lee, Samantha Jane; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation is the first archaeological study that centers on the lives and experiences of enslaved children in the nineteenth century United States. I utilize a combination of archival research, oral histories and nineteenth-century slave narratives, as well as an archaeological artifact analysis component to provide innovative and necessary ways to understand how children experienced enslavement and how they may be represented archaeologically. This dissertation addresses the ways in which faunal and plant remains may be representative of the hunting, fishing, and foraging activities of enslaved children. A comprehensive summary of the work and labor that enslaved children were responsible for at early ages highlights the abundance of possibilities for artifact interpretations. Additionally, a critical analysis of archival documents and slave narratives demonstrates that not only were enslaved children considered a staple of the domestic slave trade, they were raised in virtually the same way and according to the same methods across the American Lower South, suggesting a childrearing protocol widely shared both publicly and privately between enslavers.
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    LOST LABOR: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE INTERPRETATION OF IRISH CANAL WORKER HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY AT THE CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO CANAL
    (2022) Hauber, Samuel; Palus, Matthew M; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal would not exist without the labor of thousands of Irish immigrants in the 19th century. Through a framework of labor history, critical archaeology, and public history this study sought to improve interpretation of these canal workers. Archaeological and visitation data were analyzed to form recommendations for improvements to the parks interpretive materials on this subject. Labor history may have begun with the intent to balance historical narratives which had previously focused on powerful individuals. But continuing the trend of narrating specific groups experiences within history limits the perspective on these groups and perpetuates the issue of narrow, marginalizing, perspectives on complex history. The archaeological record from the C&O Canal construction can fulfill the parks interpretive mission through critical archaeology and labor theory. The interpretive potential of the archaeological findings, combined with the knowledge of visitation trends, form an exciting opportunity to build upon an evolving interpretive art which began with Freeman Tilden.
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    THE CLOISTERED INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE OHIO & ERIE CANAL: AN ANALYSIS AND INVENTORY OF THE CANAL WITH A THEORETICAL LANDSCAPE ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPROACH
    (2022) Waugh, Mason Richard; Palus, Matthew M; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The period of the 1820s and 1830s experienced a burst of canal construction across Ohio. The Ohio & Erie Canal connected the Cuyahoga River to Akron, and thence southward to Portsmouth along the Ohio River. The opening of the canal allowed early settlers within Ohio to easily transport products, effectively lowering the costs of goods and increasing the profitability of businesses utilizing the thoroughfare. Towns near the canal flourished as commodities previously difficult to obtain were now brought from long distances. These improvements that the Ohio & Erie Canal brought, as well as the context and significance of the canal, have been thoroughly documented in historical literature. A few intact portions of the Ohio & Erie Canal are currently included on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) and listed on the Ohio State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) online Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping system. Several Cultural Resource Management (CRM) compliance surveys have also identified and documented canal remnants. However, most portions of the canal are not inventoried or listed on the SHPO online GIS mapping system. Few components of the canal are listed on the NRHP and within Scioto County there are only two locks represented on the NRHP. The general location of the Ohio & Erie Canal is well documented on historical maps; however, the placement of stream crossings and ancillary components (culverts, weirs, bridges) are poorly understood or perhaps cloistered, communicating little to the outside world as they are currently known. A series of plat maps was recorded in the early 1900s by the Canal Commission of the State of Ohio. Plat maps of the Ohio & Erie Canal in Scioto County were obtained for this project and were provided by the Ohio History Connection (2022). No large-scale effort to my knowledge has been made to georeference the plat maps of the Ohio & Erie Canal and analyze archaeological potential using Historical GIS (hGIS), which uses historical documents such as plat maps to answer questions about the past or to inventory canal features based on their location. To address the lack of recorded ancillary structures on the southern descent of the Ohio & Erie Canal, a total of 35 separate portions of the canal plat maps were georeferenced to the modern landscape to identify archaeological potential, ancillary structure locations, and to support recommendations for new contributing resources to the NRHP-listed historic districts. Seven separate categories of ancillary canal components or features which could be extrapolated from the canal plat maps were assigned GPS coordinates. The seven categories consisted of aqueducts, buildings, bridges, culverts, inlets, locks, and waste weirs. These components represent 70 individual features correlating to what was indicated on the canal plat maps through stations 1770-2660 in Scioto County. The inventory of these features breaks down the Ohio & Erie Canal component types and lists coordinates to increase accessibility of the information for future researchers and planners. A cross comparison of the portions of the canal currently listed on the NRHP and the SHPO online GIS mapping system is also completed and contained in this thesis. With the previously inventoried canal components and the newly georeferenced portions of the canal analyzed, this thesis assists further studies in assessing archaeological potential along the canal. Lastly, a recommendation is made suggesting which ancillary components along the canal could be contributing elements to the discontinuous or incomplete NRHP listing. This thesis attempts to provide interested researchers a better understanding of the ancillary components of the canal and how these components should be evaluated for NRHP eligibility. The Ohio & Erie Canal was not simply a historical waterway providing transportation of commodities, but also an early historical engineering feat containing a culmination of various structures whose design was to maintain water levels and one of the first mass engineering attempts in Ohio to manage the landscape and communities around the canal. Culverts along the canal are not only important, but they are also necessary for understanding how the Ohio & Erie Canal operated, how it adapted to certain topographical challenges, and were essential to the functioning of the canal. Removing culverts along the canal would not have allowed the canal to function due to the necessity of proper water levels. The public dissemination of the georeferenced data included in this thesis is intended to be a lasting benefit to gongoozlers, historians, researchers, and planners alike. As such this data will be made available by allowing the georeferenced maps and associated layers available through ArcGIS Pro. The map package in ArcGIS Pro is available upon request by contacting the author of this thesis.
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    More Than the 'Physical Remains of Yesterday's Industry:' A Case Study of the Clayton Cotton Mill
    (2021) McCoy, Abigail; Palus, Matthew M.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The historic Clayton Cotton Mill located in Clayton, North Carolina, operated from the early- to mid-twentieth century. This research investigates the quality and quantity of data that is recovered from twentieth century industrial sites when investigators utilize the methodologies and research interests of labor archaeology. It also examines how labor archaeology informs questions relating to race, paternalism, and child labor, and how labor archaeology’s methodologies highlight the potential public value of the resource.The initial archaeological investigations conducted at this mill were focused on traditional industrial archaeology research questions and concluded that the resource was not eligible for listing on the NRHP without considering research avenues associated with labor archaeology. The goal of this project is to evaluate this resource through the lens of labor archaeology, identifying valuable information that adds to a more complete understanding of the resource and would have been lost if the original recommendation was accepted.
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    Creating Anthracite Women: The Roles of Architecture and Material Culture in Identity Formation in Pennsylvania Anthracite Company Towns, 1854-1940.
    (2019) Westmont, Victoria Camille; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Coal company towns are defined by the experiences of the men who owned and the men who worked in the mines, broadly ignoring the women and families who also inhabited and toiled in these spaces. In the Northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite region, women undertook a variety of methods to change their social positions through the renegotiation of their gender, ethnic, and class identities. Performing ‘proper’ middle class American gender expressions, including through the adoption of culturally-coded objects, provided working class women with greater social power and cultural autonomy within the context of systemic worker deprivation and ubiquitous corporate domination. Drawing on identity performance theories, material culture theories related to gender, class, and migration, and theories of the built environment, I examine how women established identities based in and reinforced by material culture and spatial organization Drawing on archaeologically recovered material culture, oral histories, archival research, and architectural data, I demonstrate the ways in which working class women used cultural norms to elevate themselves and their status within their communities. Women were able to balance their needs with ubiquitous gender oppression within working class industrial society by mastering the tasks assigned to women – responsibilities as mothers, familial ministers, household managers, and feminine matrons – and using those positions to pursue what they needed for their own survival. These identities were further negotiated and enforced by the built environment. By examining household decorations, house floorplans, house lot spatial organization, and company town layouts as a whole, I discuss how workers and company town architects used the built environment to exert and subvert ideas of power, control, and self-determination. This research reveals that the process of identity formation amongst working class women in the anthracite region was a careful and complicated conversation between national level cultural influencers, industrial directors, and company town social trends. As women sought out and exploited new ways of exercising discretion over their otherwise structurally circumscribed situations, they gained social leverage and influence that has been consistently ignored in modern retellings of their lives.
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    “THE REAL DISTANCE WAS GREAT ENOUGH”: REMAPPING A MULTIVALENT PLANTATION LANDSCAPE USING HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS (HGIS)
    (2019) Skolnik, Benjamin Adam; Leone, Mark P.; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation uses the tools of historical Geographic Information Systems (hGIS) to locate and describe mid-nineteenth-century plantation landscapes in Talbot County, Maryland. The methodology described here combines historic maps, historic and modern aerial photography, LiDAR-derived elevation data, historic census data, and textual descriptions. It also uses them in conjunction with an ongoing archaeological research project at Wye House, the ancestral seat of the Lloyd family and site of enslavement of Frederick Douglass, near Easton, Maryland in order to further develop ways for archaeologists, historians, and other researchers to work with cartographic and spatial data in a digital framework. This methodology can be used across multiple scales to survey remotely individual sites or even entire counties for potential archaeological resources. Furthermore, it examines the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, not only because he was a witness to these landscapes, but also because he can be read as a social theorist who addresses issues of race and racialized landscapes throughout his writings. Lastly, it uses these sources of data to consider Dell Upton’s spatial hypothesis regarding racialized plantation landscapes. Taken together, this study of mid-nineteenth-century Talbot County, Maryland represents one way to identify and recover lost sites of African American heritage that would otherwise remain lost.
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    Reordering the Landscape: Science, Nature, and Spirituality at Wye House
    (2015) Pruitt, Elizabeth; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation draws on literature and theoretical frameworks of gardening and social ordering that examine early Euro-American and African-American material culture as they came together on the plantation landscape at Wye House. Located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the plantation was home to the Welsh Lloyd family and hundreds of enslaved Africans and African-Americans. Using archaeological and archeobotanical remains of garden related buildings and slave dwellings, this project acknowledges the different possible interactions and understandings of nature at Wye House and how this gave shape to a dynamic, culturally-based, and entangled landscape of imposed and hidden meanings, colonization and resistance.