Historical Archaeology

Archaeologies of the British in Latin America

Historical Archaeology and Environment

Daniel G. Roberts Award for Excellence in Public Historical Archaeology: The U.S. Forest Service Passport in Time Program

Historical Archaeology of Early Modern Colonialism in Asia-Pacific: The Southwest Pacific and Oceanian Regions

The Shore is a Bridge: The Maritime Cultural Landscape of Lake Ontario

John L. Cotter Award in Historical Archaeology: John M. Chenoweth

Haven to the East, Haven to the North: Great Barrington and Pittsfield, Massachusetts Abstract In the first decades of the 18th century, people of African descent accompanied Dutch and British settlers into the Berkshires. In 1783, Massachusetts abolished slavery by judicial decree. In the first federal census in 1790, Massachusetts and Vermont were the only states in the Union that recorded no captive Africans, at least officially. Therefore, these states were seen as havens for those fleeing captivity in slaveholding states. Although Whites transferred their “common sense” understanding of captive Africans to the free population, African Americans created “homeplaces,” as two archaeological assemblages in Massachusetts reveal. The boyhood home of W. E. B. Du Bois in Great Barrington and the Reverend Samuel Harrison Homestead in Pittsfield demonstrate how families were able to create domestic harbors within racialized space. Additionally, issues of identity formation, in a nation that was creating an American identity that was not inclusive of all, are addressed.

Domestic Ideals and Lived Realities: Gendered Social Relations at the Moors House, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1848–1882 Abstract Two families—the Moors and the Balls—occupied a 19th-century house on the main street of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Archaeological assemblages associated with each of the households showed disconnects between gender ideals (notably the cult of domesticity for which the architectural style of the house itself is iconic) and the realities of poverty, raising children, and life cycle. In this article, I explore how variations in the materiality and spatiality of gender ideologies were more than simply deviations from middle-class cultural norms. Rather, they represented active negotiation of dominant ideals and the construction of alternate meaningful gender relations and forms of domesticity.

Glass Cabinets and Little Black Boxes: The Collections of H. H. Wilder and the Curious Case of His Human-Hair Samples Abstract Harris Hawthorne Wilder, a professor of zoology at Smith College, was trained in anatomy and physical anthropology in Germany at the end of the 19th century. He taught at Smith College, a private liberal-arts college for women, from 1892 to 1927. Not unusual for the times, his interests in archaeology and anthropology were very broad. He excavated sites in what can be considered, at best, dubious ethical circumstances and created a wide-ranging collection of artifacts, human remains, and anatomical specimens. One of the more curious collections was of human-hair samples, which included “specimens” from students at Smith College, his own family members, and a small subcategory he referred to as “ethnics.” We chart his proclivity for collecting many items of an anatomical, archaeological, or anthropological nature, and focus on his human-hair samples to contextualize the nature of these collections in terms of late 19th- and early 20th-century views on race, ethnicity, and gender in anthropology. We take the position that to understand this collection more fully it is essential to know the life and times of its collector, including his role in the academic history of the Connecticut Valley, and we suggest that Wilder himself was conflicted as to its meaning and purpose.

An Interview with Garry Wheeler Stone