<p> Neighborhood Politics investigates the role of commoners in the social production of an ancient city. Traditional archaeological approaches examine cities primarily through the lens of elite power and agency. Recent approaches have taken a bottom-up approach to research. Neighborhood Politics explores the ancient city as a product of both commoner and elite agencies, power, and practices. Neighborhood Politics proposes a novel methodology: 'neighborhood archaeology.' Neighborhood archaeology emerges out of household archaeology and community archaeology. In order to fully understand urbanism, neighborhood archaeology examines commoner houses, related buildings, and their inhabitants as complex socio-spatial contexts. Consequently, neighborhood archaeology here highlights the multiple contours and tensions of authority, identity, and space that characterized an ancient neighborhood. Investigations in El Purgatorio's residential district focused on architecture, domestic assemblages, and urban planning in order to understand the diverse social identities, shared practices, and built environment of El Purgatorio's commoners. Investigations examined the social history of the Casma Polity's capital city, the configuration of community there, and local-regional linkages from the perspective of commoners' everyday lives. For El Purgatorio's commoners, social diversity was configured around household composition and labor output. Diversity was materialized in unequal access to space, building materials, and construction labor. Urban hierarchies were concretized during neighborhood feasts that simultaneously created neighborhood solidarity. Elites provided raw materials for the neighborhood economy; but commoners prepared food and chicha for ritual and quotidian consumption, some of which was returned to elites in tribute. Diverse residence and circulation patterns show that the neighborhood was a negotiated landscape created through both commoner authority and the extended authority of elites from the monumental district. Neighborhood Politics highlights the complexity of urban identities, the significance of everyday activities, and the tensions in the built environment of the residential district at El Purgatorio.</p>

<p> Through the artifacts from the Jackson Appleton Middlesex Urban Revitalization and Devolvement Project (hereafter JAM) located in Lowell, MA, this research explores social class in nineteenth-century boardinghouses. This thesis is a two-part study. First, through statistical analysis, research recovers interpretable data from urban archaeological contexts subject to disturbance. Pinpointing intra-site similarities between artifacts recovered from intact and disturbed contexts, data show that artifacts recovered from disturbed and intact contexts in urban environments are not as dissimilar as previously believed. In the second phase using both intact and disturbed JAM contexts, the analysis of four boardinghouse features highlights two distinct patterns of ceramic assemblages suggesting 1) that the JAM site includes artifacts associated with Lowell's early boardinghouse period (1820-1860) in contrast to other late nineteenth century collections from Lowell like the Boott Mills and 2) that material goods amongst upper class mangers versus working class operative were more similar at Lowell's outset. Synthesizing this data with previous archaeology in Lowell, this research shows that over the course of the nineteenth century changes in the practice of corporate paternalism can be seen in the ceramic record. Furthermore, the data suggest that participation in the planned industrial project was a binding element of community interactions, blurring the lines of social class for Lowell's inhabitants in the early years of the Lowell experiment.</p>

<p> The Mount Gilead AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, perched on a mountain in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, has been a focal point of African American heritage in the area for over a hundred and seventy-five years. Though the second church building, dated to 1852, is still standing with its cemetery beside it, very little about its history has been thoroughly explored. Oral histories link the church with the Underground Railroad, a highly clandestine operation&mdash;yet the church itself was built of stone and advertized its location during the height of the movement of self-emancipated people out of the South. While it is said that this rural church community was made up of a hundred families who settled across the hillside, the cemetery itself only has 243 currently marked graves. The antebellum church hosted hundreds of people, black and white, at events held within walking distance of the rumored hideouts of those on the run from slavery. In order to determine the extent of this seemingly paradoxical relationship between secrecy and prominence, and to achieve a fuller understanding of the community during the 19^th century, the church's history is approached from several angles simultaneously. The cemetery itself is identified as a critical location where much can be learned about the composition, achievements, and struggles of the community. Combining archival research (primarily in the US Census, newspapers, and farm account books) with geographic information systems (GIS) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR), a sense of the size, occupations, and personal histories of the community are achieved, yielding a composite view of the general church population and its history between the 1820s and 1900.</p>

<p> This study focuses on how secular, governmental, and ecclesiastical Hispanic Empire institutions influenced the response and resistance of San Francisco Native American groups from 1769 to 1846. This project draws on late 18th and early 19th century primary Spanish documents and secondary sources to help understand the context of indigenous people's adaptive and response behaviors during this period as well as the nuances of their perspective and experience. Using both electronic and physical documents from a number of archival databases, primary Spanish documents were translated and correlated with baptismal and death mission records. This allowed for formulating alternative perspectives and putting indigenous response and resistance into context. The results of this study indicated that when acts of resistance to the colonial mission system led by charismatic Native American leaders are placed into chronological order, it appears these responses did not consist of isolated incidents. Rather, they appear to be connected through complex networks of communication and organization, and formal Native American armed resistance grew more intensive over time.</p>

<p> Individual burials are always representative of both individuals and collective actors. The physical remains, material culture, and represented practices in burials can be used in concert to study identities and social personas amongst individual and collective actors. These identities and social personas are the result of the interaction between agency and structure, where both individuals and groups act to change and reproduce social structures. </p><p> The three burials upon which this study is based are currently held in the collections of the Milwaukee Public Museum. They are all indigenous burials created in Wisconsin in the 19^th century. Biological sex, stature, age, and pathologies were identified from skeletal analysis and the material culture of each burial was analyzed using a Use/Origin model to attempt to understand how these individuals negotiated and constructed identities within a colonial system.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Folklore, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-05, Section: A, page: 2108. Adviser: Beverly Stoeltje. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 9, 2008)".

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0650. Adviser: Janet Dixon Keller. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 420-453) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2007. / (UMI)AAI3271644. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2960. Advisers: Claudia L. Johnson; Jonathan Lamb.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4308. Adviser: Nils Jacobsen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 449-494) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

The dissertation research addresses questions and issues concerning the study of Afro-American biohistory. Afro-American health and lifestyles were investigated from an integrative bio-cultural framework that interrelates demographical, historical, socio-cultural, and biological factors. The central focus of the dissertation research was the bio-social experiences and conditions of free, urban dwelling Afro-Americans in 19th century Philadelphia. The First African Baptist Church cemetery population, interred circa 1823-1841, studied represents a sample of that Afro-American community. Theoretical considerations centered around the questions and approaches to the study of health and disease patterns in historical Afro-American populations in the Americas. Methodological considerations centered on the contributions of physical anthropological methods (skeletal biology, paleodemography, paleopathology, histology and bio-cultural modeling) in assessing the health of historical Afro-American populations. Skeletal biological methods included paleodemographic and paleopathologic (including histologic) assessment of health and disease status. The objectives of the research were to: (1) provide a synthesis of the relevant questions and issues regarding Afro-American health and illness prior to the twentieth century; (2) propose a protocol and framework for studying Afro-American health and lifestyles in the Americas; (3) begin to reconstruct the lifestyle(s) of 19th century urban Philadelphia Afro-Americans and of the First African Baptist Church (FABC) cemetery population in particular; (4) undertake a comprehensive health status assessment of the FABC skeletal material. All adult (100%) FABC dentition (n = 51) available for study exhibited enamel defects; of these 84.3% had multiple defects. The peak period of onset of hypoplasias was ages 2.0-4.0 years, most probably associated with the weaning period and infectious disease. Infectious disease rates (25.3%) were lower than other Afro-American skeletal series. The incidence of trauma in the FABC population was low (17.3%), with the majority occurring in older males. The highest mortality (25%) was for infants ($<$1 year). Life expectancy at age twenty was 24.7 years. FABC skeletal population, as representative of the FABC congregation members and free Philadelphia Afro-Americans, were generally healthier than their slave or emancipated counterparts. Stress indicators point to episodes of nutritional and disease stress which affected fetal growth, infants and younger children, reproductive age females and young adult males who may have been at greater risk due to early entry into the labor force.