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This paper considers the appropriation of Indigenous heritage in northwest Georgia during the mid-20th century. Through this case study of the first state-funded historic preservation project in the state at Etowah Indian Mounds, I apply a recent theorizing on the nature of whiteness, settler colonialism, and the role of heritage in cementing racialized structures of colonial rule. I outline the long history of Indigenous dispossession and settler appropriation in the American South to show how the origins of Indigenous heritage tourism built on an established settler colonial apparatus that deployed race to service commercial and economic development schemes. in this vein, my study highlights state-funded infrastructural development, newspaper reports, commercial interests, and community practice as key nodes in an integrated system facilitating appropriation and solidifying white control over space and place. to tackle this complex interdependence, I formulate a conception of heritage practice drawn from Hargrove's (2009) model of whiteness as habituated cultural practice, and tie this discussion into heritage studies emphasizing the transformation of historic landscapes into white public space. I then contextualize heritage building at Etowah within an evolving tourism economy and New South ideology that positioned white supremacy in relation to modernity, and demonstrate how GHC practitioners utilized archaeology and architecture to reinforce this ideological framework at Etowah Mounds. Tracking trends in the press coverage of ongoing preservation activities at Etowah Mounds, my study charts the gradual production of heritage values tied not to commercial interests but to the site's perceived historical and archaeological significance as Georgia's flagship preservation project. I argue that the repositioning of this site as national patrimony served to legitimate the appropriation and continued possession of Indigenous land, resources, and material culture by establishing ancestral connections between white communities and the region's pre-contact inhabitants.

This thesis utilizes a theoretical and methodological approach that explores subjectivity as the relational, complex, fluid, multidimensional, recursive and intersectional modes in which social subjects are animated (Ortner 2005, 31). I discuss these different aspects of subjectivity construction through a contemporary example from urban Australia and by employing frameworks that underscore the agency of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (Aboriginal or Aboriginal Australians) in constructing and maintaining their own subjectivities through discourses that challenge settler colonialism. I work to intertwine related theoretical approaches such as practice theory as defined by Sherry Ortner, and Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of the distinction of taste and its ties to unequal power relations in contemporary societies (Ortner 1984, 146; Bourdieu 1984, 57). Specifically, my study questions and problematizes the processes that constitute, perpetuate, and hinder the subjectivity formation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People (Aboriginal Australians) in an inner city suburb of Sydney, New South Wales called Redfern. My case study examines the intersection of Aboriginality (as both an ethnicity and as a facet of subjectivity), agency in contemporary urban Australia, and to a lesser extent the role of bureaucracy. I analyze these concepts in terms of their historical and cultural contexts, which complicate and inform contemporary lived experiences of members of Aboriginal communities in Redfern. Specifically, I argue that initiatives aimed at lowering inequality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians as well as attempts at incorporating Aboriginal Sydneysiders into an Anglo-Australian society ultimately perpetuate longstanding tensions involving Aboriginality, agency, and subjectivity. This paper also argues that the adoption, contestation, maintenance, rejection, and construction of Aboriginality are inextricably tied with bureaucratic processes and the agency of Aboriginal Australians in Sydney, which can be seen through examples of initiatives such as this housing development that are aimed at combatting inequality between Aboriginal Australians and Anglo-Australians.

Though there is no shortage of 17th century plantation sites in the Chesapeake archaeology enslaved African populations is incipient, but not yetflourishing. This may be a reflection of the result of those communities’ underrepresentation in the archaeological and documentary records from that time period. Detailed analysis of archaeological sites where Africans were present can reveal the material residues of their lives, even when this material culture is inundated by European materials. This thesis marshals archaeological, historiographic, and ethnohistorical data to use the excavations at the Rich Neck Plantation as a window into the diversity of the 17th century Atlantic world. An interpretation that highlights the composite nature of captive African communities is produced and juxtaposed against interpretations of the same archaeological artifacts and features through the landscape features and material culture of the English land owners. Tandem analysis of the archaeological record through the perspectives of these groups provides insight into the ways their perceptions of their surroundings overlapped and diverged.

Historically, there has been significant interest in examining pre-contact and historic sites of conflict. Recent studies in historic conflict archaeology have contributed to scholars’ understanding of military sites, specific battles, and sites of sieges and encampments. Archaeological excavations at the 18th century Fort Stanwix in Rome, New York have uncovered a rich assemblage that has facilitated the reconstruction of the fort; however, it is a careful analyses of the artifacts recovered during this process that can help scholars explore life at the fort. Integrating archaeological, historical, and documentary evidence, this paper analyzes the spatial and typological distribution of ceramics at Fort Stanwix. It examines the way the officers and rank-and-file soldiers negotiated power relations as well as the ways that material culture is imbricated in the maintenance of “military order” at this isolated fort. Assuming officers and soldiers maintained strict discipline, scholars may expect to find structures with particular material types and forms of ceramics that signaled status; however, this study confounds the standard assumption. Instead, a careful analysis of the ceramics suggests that even though officers managed to maintain order at Fort Stanwix, the officers and soldiers may have occupied the same structures and did not necessarily rely on ceramics to demarcate status. Ultimately, this study provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which armies maintained discipline in isolated forts and encampments during the 18th century.

Archaeology in the Hawaiian Islands predominantly focuses on pre-contact and immediate post-contact contexts, while largely ignoring post-1870 phenomena. The scarcity of studies examining these settings points out the rich opportunities for investigating dynamics that influenced Hawaiian sugar plantation laborer perceptions of power, authority, and class relations on 20th century Hawaiian plantations. Part of the Hawaiian sugar planters’ strategy to dominate the political governance of Hawaiʻi and the social dynamics of the plantations was the establishment of racial hierarchies. Planters reinforced such hierarchies by promoting divisions and segregation and by establishing places of power in the form of managers’ and luna (overseers) residences. These physical structures served as materializations of planter control reinforcing planter hegemony. This paper analyzes spatial and documentary data from the Pacific Sugar Mill, the Honokaʻa Sugar Company and the Onomea Sugar Company plantations on Hawaiʻi Island using a Marxist lens. Another theory that is employed to explore how planter hegemony materialized on the sugar plantation landscape of Hawaiʻi is Foucault’s notion of the “panopticon.” I expected to find structures of power in locations supporting the surveillance of laborer camps. However, my analysis suggests that Hawaiian sugar management strategies opposed this expectation. Viewshed analyses indicate that managers and luna had limited surveillance capabilities from their homes, thus contradicting the possibility that an overt direct visual surveillance was an active management strategy. These findings also suggest that laborer camps located closer to structures associated with plantation management were under more direct surveillance than more isolated camps based on their position within the racial hierarchy. Additionally, this investigation indicates that the surveilled areas enjoyed more access to facilities located in the core of the plantation such as stores, schools, and hospitals. Ultimately this analysis of three 20th century sugar plantations in Hawaiʻi highlights the materialization of planter hegemony on the landscape by underscoring the relation between spatial and social distance in the context of racial hierarchies.

There is a dearth of literature on the archaeology of childhood. Historical archaeology, by its unique nature as a discipline, can use a combination of written documents, the archaeological record, and oral histories to interpret past lives. Historical documents and correspondence of the Associates of the Late Reverend Dr. Thomas Bray attest to the establishment of The Bray School, a school created for free and enslaved African American children in eighteenth-century Williamsburg, Virginia. Appointed schoolmistress Mrs. Ann Wager played a significant role in what the children were being taught. An abundance of slate pencil fragments found on the Bray School site and oral histories contradict what is found in the written record.

The historical ecology of Tidewater Virginia from the Late Archaic to Early Colonial eras (ca. 1200 BC–AD 1600) indicates human-environmental dynamics that modified the landscape and simultaneously impacted the histories of Native groups in the region. I consider Algonquian Tidewater Virginia through the perspectives of historical ecology, taskscapes (a model of the landscape interweaving space, time, and human activities [Ingold 1993, 2000]), and gendered landscapes to explore the intersections of place, labor, and time. The Middle Woodland (ca. 500 BC-AD 800) is an important time period in my discussion. During this era, the region’s archaeology suggests shifts towards more sedentary life ways and a greater focus on estuarine resources (Gallivan 2011, 2016). I include comparative examples from earlier and later contexts to trace changes in social organizations, practices, and plant use. Archaeobotany is my primary line of analysis, and connections between people and plants over time is central to my discussion. I include carbonized macrobotanical remains, phytolith residues from sediment, and phytolith and starch grain residues from artifacts. I support this archaeobotanical evidence with archaeological material culture and utilize ethnographic and ethnohistoric inferences to ascribe social and cultural connections to these data. The focal site in my dissertation is the Kiskiak site (44YO2) located on the York River in Yorktown, Virginia. The site includes a significant shell midden feature that captures archaeological stratigraphy from the Late Archaic to Early Colonial eras. In order to complement and supplement the archaeobotanical remains from Kiskiak, I include archaeobotanical samples from the Gouldman Oyster Shell Midden site (44WM0304) in Westmoreland County on the Potomac River (bolstering evidence for the early part of the Middle Woodland period) and Werowocomoco (44GL32) (supporting evidence from primarily the Late Woodland to Early Colonial eras) located in Gloucester County on the opposite bank of the York River from Kiskiak. The types of plants identified from distinct chronological time periods illuminate long-term anthropogenic landscape modifications, changing subsistence strategies, and a variety of daily tasks and activities. The recorded plant species and corresponding archaeological material culture as informed by ethnographic and ethnohistoric descriptions indicate demographic pluralities and task diversities carried out by men, women, and children. The archaeobotanical remains are also useful for tracing the history of tropical cultigens and horticultural practices in the region. Through the taskscape framework and sequential botanical evidence, I discuss social landscapes and histories of Tidewater Algonquian groups.

This thesis explores the extent to which three North Carolina museums, the North Carolina Museum of History, the Cape Fear Museum, and the Maritime Museum at Southport, represent the state’s history of naval stores. Being a crucial part of North Carolina’s past that is frequently ignored in the formal education system, naval stores should be highlighted in museum exhibits about the state’s history and heritage. A critical analysis of these exhibits shows how these representations form a significant part of civic engagement and suggests improvements that would enhance the education of audiences about the importance of naval stores to the historical development of the state.

This doctoral dissertation is aimed at determining changes in seafarer-thing relationships—which I define as entanglements—from 1624 to 1880 at two saltpans on two islands of the Venezuelan Caribbean. Three sites with four occupational phases will be discussed: one site with two occupational phases (Dutch, 1624–1638; Anglo-American, 1638–1781) on the island of La Tortuga, and two sites each comprising one occupational phase (multi-component, c. 1700–1800; Dutch Antillean/US American, 1810s–1880) on the island of Cayo Sal, in the Los Roques Archipelago. More specifically, this research seeks to determine how the development of European capitalism and consumerism impacted entanglements involving seafarers and things during short-term and seasonal events of salt cultivation and raking at the saltpans, while concomitantly exploring how seafarers navigated and shaped such multi-faceted phenomena. to answer this research question, a multiscalar spatiotemporal framework is formulated, which involves three spatial scales: the local, regional and supra-regional; and three temporal scales: the short-term, medium-term and long-term. as regards the theoretical framework, the spatial characteristics of entanglements beyond the site are primarily analyzed by developing and operationalizing the concept of itineraries of things. Diachronic change through time in entanglements will be explored by means of the concept of assemblages of practice. as an interdisciplinary historical archaeological project, this dissertation research employs the documentary record, oral sources and an analysis of the archaeological remains and their depositional contexts systematically excavated at the saltpan sites of Punta Salinas (TR/S) on La Tortuga Island, as well as Uespen de la Salina (CS/A) and Los Escombros (CS/B) on Cayo Sal. The archaeological excavations at these seasonal and temporary salt-raker campsites have brought to light the diverse material belongings of 17th- through 19th-century seafarers from Anglo-America, France, the Netherlands Antilles, Bermuda, and the Low Countries, among others. The exhaustive vessel-level analysis of the thousands of recovered things combined with the examination of written descriptions of personal possessions and practices at sea, aids in understanding where these items came from (their itineraries) and, more importantly, how assemblages of practice (involving seafarers and things) were enmeshed in the everyday practices of salt cultivation, fishing, dining and drinking. By inserting the assemblages of practice into the three-scale perspective of space and time and by critically comparing them, this dissertation endeavors to diversify our understanding of the recursive relationship between everyday seafarer-thing entanglements evidenced in assemblages of practice and the “big given” of the large-scale and long-term phenomena of capitalism and the attendant growth of consumerism.