This thesis examines the role of university museums in the United States and their relationship to academic and local communities as well as their influence on a national and international level. The purpose of this study is to identify how changes in educational, social, and cultural issues have affected the role of university museums in the United States during their almost two hundred and fifty years of evolution. A second goal is to identify which audiences (academic or public) they chose to focus on. Taking a multifaceted approach, this thesis studies three museums from Ivy League institutions: The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Three major research questions are explored: (1) What function or role do university museums play? and how have these changed over time? (2) What were the reasons for the development and growth in university museums? (3) How and why do university museums include or exclude certain audiences? Ultimately, this study provides an in-depth examination of the role and function of university museums in the United States since the 18th century.

Water management strategies are intrinsically associated with the development of complex societies. Traditional approaches have often characterized these strategies as homogenous and monolithic. Recent studies have shown that water management among the ancient Maya was a significant source of power, but the strategies implemented, and the outcomes are highly variable and dependent on the landscape. The case of Holtun, a modest-sized site, adds to the growing body of water management research in ancient Maya archaeology as most water management systems are investigated in large primary centers. Although water resources at Holtun are relatively small, they supported large communities during the history of the site. Holtun developed social complexity during the Middle Preclassic period. The site flourished with some centralized and neighborhood-based water catchment, but most of the springs and water pools remained outside of formal control networks on the outskirts of the site. During the Late Classic period, a monumental group, Group HTN19_20, emerged 1.3 kilometers east of the civic-ceremonial center of Holtun, claiming the territory around the eastern natural water reservoirs. Archaeological excavations conducted in this group indicate signs of status and social power amid similarities and differences from monumental architecture and residences in the site's core. The relationship between this group, its proximity to water, and the civic-ceremonial epicenter of the site is not completely clear. However, its location on the landscape and material remains suggest that water procurement and control were a motivation for its establishment. The emergence of group HTN19_20 in this location on the landscape added complexity to the sociopolitical dynamics of Holtun and may be the result of competing political factions. This differs from findings at many other Maya sites, demonstrating the complexity and heterogeneity of ancient Maya water management strategies and their importance in the development and maintenance of social complexity.

This dissertation investigates the emergence, development, and transformation of centralized political authority within Algonquian societies of the Late Woodland and early Colonial period (A.D. 900 – 1680) southern Middle Atlantic. Sixteenth and 17th century European accounts describe coastal Algonquian-speaking societies of modern day Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina as organized into multi-community polities structured by hierarchical political authority, centralized decision-making and pervasive inequality. However, the hallmarks typically associated with chiefly political organization—monumental architecture, settlement hierarchies, and widespread differentiation in mortuary symbolism—are almost non-existent in the region’s archaeological record. Colonial chroniclers, however, were adamant that the objects most highly valued by the indigenous population, shell and copper adornment, flowed through chiefly lineages—a relationship largely neglected within the regional archaeological scholarship. Ultimately, this dissertation explores sovereignty and the material processes that mitigated relationships of authority and subjection. Drawing on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence, three key avenues of inquiry are pursued. First, the organization of the pre- and post-colonial economy and the ways that the consumption, movement, and enactment of social practices associated with ornamentation influenced the construction of a region-wide political system. Second, the materiality of wealth objects, and the extent to which they could act as social agents in defining and reorienting sociopolitical roles. and finally, the regional organization of production and the potential of new technology (Inductive Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry) to identify shell ornament production locales. The results of these analyses suggest that although individuals and communities consumed and deployed shell and copper ornamentation in a variety of ways, these materials and their association with the human body directed the flow of power across the coastal Algonquian political geography. Through various engagements with shell and copper ornaments, social actors created historical infrastructures that channeled Manitou, or animacies that could inhabit humans and objects, in an effort to bring prosperity and balance to the lived world. This study concludes that pre-colonial notions of sovereignty within the region hinged on the differential ability of individuals to socialize unpredictable, and often dangerous foreign objects. Shell and copper were central to the emergence of the regional political system as burial offerings that differentiated and defined the chiefly lineages from which powerful political actors would emerge. However, this form of sovereignty proved to be unstable and easily subverted. The emergence of new exchange networks and the development of a localized craft industry, both of which occurred within the region during the 17th century, fundamentally redefined relationships of authority and subjection, as sovereignty became distributed across increasingly localized political entities. This is not to say that the violence and large-scale dispossession of Native people were not significant factors in the reordering of sovereign relationships in the wake of colonialism, but that new economic circumstances provided new venues upon which political relationships were negotiated and contested.

This dissertation argues that working oxen, horses, and mules contributed to the physical and social landscapes of eighteenth-century plantations in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry. This research embraces an animal landscape approach, exploring how humans and animals were both active agents in shaping animal husbandry strategies, social interactions, and power negotiations on plantations. This exploration utilized archaeological and historical sources, predominately faunal assemblages from Oxon Hill Manor, Maryland, Mount Vernon, Virginia, Drayton Hall, South Carolina, and Stobo Plantation, South Carolina; articulated equine skeletons from Jamestown Island, Virginia, and Yorktown, Virginia; and probate inventories from plantations within the eighteenth-century Upper Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Working oxen and equines were identified from the archaeological record through pathological and osteometric analyses. Probate inventories supplied complementary information on the number of working oxen and equines in each region and the types of labors these animals performed. In the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, laboring oxen and equines were essential to the plowing and carting required by the shift from tobacco to mixed grain production. Working livestock were husbanded in a manner which relied on producing excess grains which could then be fed to the livestock. In the eighteenth-century Lowcountry, oxen were used sporadically throughout the region to ready fields or to cart products. Horses in the Lowcountry were essential to personal transportation, as many wealthy planters frequently travelled between their multiple estates. Compared to the Chesapeake, livestock in the Lowcountry was husbanded in a more passive manner; working animals were corralled while some of the non-working livestock ranged freely in the woodlands in their natural herd structures. In both regions, interactions between humans and animals combined with the physicality of the plantations to create landscapes of domination and resistance. In the Chesapeake, planters depended on working livestock to increase their wealth and to symbolize that wealth to others. In the Lowcountry, livestock represented large landholdings, and planters used horses to symbolize their mobility and active involvement in those landholdings. In both regions, enslaved laborers relied on working livestock to increase their mobility and their standing within the enslaved community. Additionally, enslaved individuals worked with animals to subvert the social order of the day through active and passive revolt. Rather than being static members in the background of human activity, working oxen and equines actively contributed to the economic, cultural, and social spheres of eighteenth-century plantation life.

The “slave village” occupies an important place in New World plantation archaeology, though one in which the variation of experience and the internal social organization have yet to be thoroughly addressed. Through archaeological investigation, this dissertation explores the social dynamics and institutions created by enslaved people to negotiate their domestic circumstances. In many plantation settings, enslaved people lived in dedicated villages or the rear-yards of plantation houses. their domestic boundaries were prescribed, but the life they created within those boundaries was by and large a product of their own sense of sociability, domesticity, and ingenuity. The ways in which people created, divided, and decided on the everyday tasks of life, and positioned themselves in relation to others, reveals much about the domestic strategies they created to navigate and negotiate the conditions of enslavement. I develop this research through an archaeological investigation of three related sites in northern Jamaica. Each site represents domestic spaces of enslaved people tied to Good Hope estate, a 2000-acre sugar plantation that operated from the mid 18th through the early 19th century. Upwards of 500 enslaved people labored at Good Hope at any one time, living between these three separate sites. While most of the enslaved labor force lived in a central primary village, the second smaller village and the urban quarters housed the plantation’s enslaved domestic servants. Archaeological investigation of these three sites provided the data necessary to understand enslaved domestic life as it concerns household organization, consumer choices, the implications of labor roles, physical and social mobility, and the degree to which the plantation’s laboring population organized itself into a distinct enslaved community. This pursuit of community, as a social process, developed and maintained through everyday dwelling, guides this research. By revealing the “enslaved community” as constrained from the outside, though socially constituted from within, this dissertation develops methods, measures, and socio-cultural insight into how forcefully aggregated populations develop social institutions to navigate the often horrific conditions imposed from the outside. Together, this study demonstrates how slavery was an attempt to dehumanize, but failed in that project. Innovative and strategic measures allowed a systematically exploited group of people to reclaim humanity through a social world carved out by and for enslaved people in the dwelling space of the plantation regime.

This thesis describes the physical, social and economic ordering of Mafuyana (Garikai), an urban township in Maphisa, a rural growth point in Matobo District in Matabeleland South province, Zimbabwe. It explores the ways in which this ordering informs the social construction of childhood. The township was constructed as part of Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle, a housing program that served to rehouse victims of Operation Murambatsvina both of which occurred through Zimbabwe's tradition of restoring order from informal settlements for modernist planning strategies. The configuration of Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle compares to the colonial framework of low-cost African housing that has historically been neglected by its municipal authorities. This neglect leads to infrastructure that is hazardous to infants. The evolutions of rural dwellings in southern Africa since the 19th Century and labour migration under colonialism – which characterised the scattering of peoples and the formation of new communities – were determined according to available resources, the physical nature of regions, the models of kinship and daily activities of rural life. Children in these contexts formed the basis of family construction, and also in Maphisa where parents or caregivers value them as a social investment during their ageing years. However, the introduction of urban infrastructure in rural Maphisa produces a framework that residents find challenging when performing their traditions of rural life in the process of raising children. The debilitating infrastructure in Mafuyana resulting from poor planning has caused residing families to face physical hardship in their dwelling. In order to habituate children into a harsh world, infant rituals associated to rural life ways in Matabeleland are performed by residents – some of which challenge modernist health discourses of cleanliness and orderliness. When makeshift endeavours on fragmented housing fail to meet their satisfaction, some residents resort to migrating – either within the township or beyond its boundaries in search for better dwelling. This scenario reflects that settling in such an ordered space lacks permanence, because locals struggle to ‘fit' into its makes, despite their efforts. The dissertation argues that the modernist developmental ordering of the growth point's township influences the developmental ordering concerned with the children that reside in it. Furthermore, examining this developmental ordering of children gives an indication on whether the housing in which they live enhances life for the growing human being.

This project takes the Iron Age tumuli of the Kanak Su Basin in Yozgat, Turkey as a case study for the application of geospatial methods to reconstruct past perceptions of a mortuary landscape. The tumulus fields – landscapes heavily modified by monumental burial mounds – of central Anatolia present an opportunity to investigate how burial practices reflect and create places of collective memory, territorial identity, and the social order. Understanding the nature of Iron Age settlement in the Kanak Su Basin remains an ongoing subject of study in central Anatolian archaeology, especially in regard to how the large, short-lived city of Kerkenes interacted with the existing long-term settlement history in the basin. This project seeks to understand the role of the tumuli in this landscape by investigating the relationship between the settlement pattern and the burial mounds along axes of proximity, visibility, and accessibility using spatial statistics, viewsheds, and least cost pathways. The spatial distribution of mounds suggests which sites might have participated in constructing tumuli and the possible motivating factors in their location. Larger sites in the study area appear to have participated more frequently in tumulus construction. This analysis also allows us to reconstruct the more general experience of living among the mounds, whether one participated in the practice or not, and results suggest the tumuli were located to increase the number of people who perceived and interacted with them.

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Population mean stature and patterns of health are often linked in anthropological studies, yet few studies control for the multifactorial nature of achieving adult standing height. This thesis explores the intersection of health and stature by analyzing the skeletal remains of 161 adult individuals from the archaeological site of Kuelap, in the eastern slopes of the northern Peruvian Andes, and also tests current biometric methods for estimating stature from skeletal remains. This Chachapoya site dates to the Late Intermediate Period (AD 900 – 1470) and Late Horizon (AD 1470 – 1536) and resides in the high altitude sub-tropical forests of the Andes. An anatomical method of stature estimation was applied to a subsample of 36 individuals and linear regression formulae were created, proving especially effective for the tibia and calcaneus in this sample. These new formulae produced more accurate results, regardless of sex, when compared to traditional estimates and suggest that sexually specific formulae are not necessary in studies of stature. However, sexual dimorphism in skeletal elements did produce an effective method of sex determination from individual appendicular elements and was tested successfully on commingled remains. This investigation produced valuable formulae for estimating both sex and stature from isolated remains in the Chachapoyas region. The results established that interregional variance in stature is consistent, but mean stature is strongly affected by environmental pressures. This study highlights the ineffectiveness of using stature to assess the relative health of geographically distinct populations, but demonstrates the possibility of culturally specific health interpretations. The formulae for sex and stature estimation created in this study have provided a glimpse of the intersection between culture, environment, and health in human biological diversity.