Archaeology belongs in the schools. Students and teachers both find it interesting, and it has been shown to be an effective vehicle for teaching a wide array of topics and skills. However, there are at least two serious reasons why it is important for students to understand what archaeologists do and why: (1) an informed public is a potential ally in identifying, protecting and managing endangered archaeological resources; and (2) archaeology as a mode of inquiry can help students understand the social construction of the world in which they live. Archaeologists and educators have been working together to develop materials to help teachers use archaeology in their teaching. Some excellent materials are now available for middle and junior high school teachers. But if students are to take archaeology seriously as a tool for social analysis, they need to be exposed to a more mature understanding of it in high school. Interviews exploring the ways in which archaeology is currently understood and used in all aspects of the curriculum in one high school indicate that teachers use it to capture students' interest, or to reward them for learning some other subject. Teachers do not use archaeology to teach analysis and interpretation of evidence, or critical thinking skills, or the role of human beings in the creation of social systems. Since very few teachers have received formal education in archaeology, they do not associate these goals with archaeology as a discipline. Teachers' sources of information about archaeology are television, newspapers and general circulation magazines. These popular sources do not provide them with the understanding they need to recognize archaeology as a tool for intellectual and social analysis. Archaeologists should take advantage of more professional channels for reaching teachers with serious material linking archaeology to the various disciplines traditionally taught in high schools. To reach high school students with a more sophisticated understanding of archaeology, we need first to present that knowledge to their teachers as fellow professionals.

This dissertation presents a study of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, popularly known as the Shakers. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis that integrates anthropology, social and religious history, and biography in an exploration of the dynamics of material culture in the maintenance of, and challenges to, relations of gender and social power in a sectarian communal society. This dissertation explores how the United Society manipulated spaces, symbols and rituals during three crisis periods in order to reproduce their communities and specific social relations through time, as well as the various roles members played in supporting or resisting such efforts. This dissertation also explores how the Shakers represented their distinctive landscapes to each other through their art work, prayers, and poetry. These "imagined landscapes" reflect the circumscribed worlds determined by gender, celibacy and spiritual hierarchy. Such alternative media identify domains within the Shaker material and spiritual worlds that were contested at different times by men and women, and leaders and common members.

This work explores the impact of the “vanishing Indian” paradigm on historical, museological, and anthropological interpretations of Native American Indian peoples along the Quinneticook—the middle Connecticut River Valley of west-central Massachusetts. The seventeenth century documentation of the region’s Agawam, Nonotuck, Pocumtuck, Quaboag, Sokoki, and Woronoco people is surprisingly dense, but their presence after that time is poorly understood. Sophisticated systems for reckoning and maintaining Indigenous governance, trade, kin relations, and inter-tribal alliances, and various means of preserving localized knowledges, were in operation long before colonial settlement, and survived after colonization. The records of this activity and the movements of Native families to other locales were obscured, during the nineteenth century, by local White historians. Accurate understandings of local Native histories have subsequently been difficult to reconstruct, given the lack of ethnographic information in Euro-American records, the flawed representations of Native people and events in local town histories, and the failure to recognize the lineal descendants of middle Connecticut River Valley Native families among today’s Western Abenaki populations. I suggest that the “invisibilizing” of the valley’s Native peoples is a trick of misdirection, caused, in part, by the research interests of three local collectors: geologist Edward Hitchcock Jr. of Amherst College, antiquarian George Sheldon of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and zoologist Harris Hawthorne Wilder of Smith College. These men unearthed numerous Native individuals from local gravesites, and amassed thousands of artifacts, portraying the skeletal remains of dead Indians as “real,” while representing their descendants as “unreal” remnants of the presumably more authentic Native past. This project, therefore, discusses the ways in which local Native histories and oral traditions were marginalized, ignored or colonized, at the same time that Native bodies were being exoticized, fetishized, and commodified. One means of decolonizing the valley’s Native history is a four-part process that: first, reveals the discursive processes that disconnected living Native peoples from their own histories; second, investigates the physical interferences of archaeological collectors; third, articulates the persistence of Native families over time by linking oral traditions, family names, and material evidence; and fourth, begins to repair some of the damage done by restoring and repatriating the scattered archaeological collections. To illustrate the impact of misrepresentation on local Native histories, I discuss the appearances, in various documents over time, of one local Native family lineage (from Shattoockquis to Sadochques to Msadoques to Sadoques), and their repeated efforts to make their presence known to Deerfield historians. This case study directs attention to some of the Indigenous knowledges and territorial understandings that could be used to construct more accurate regional narratives. In sum, this work aims to demonstrate how decolonizing methodologies can reveal heretofore missing connections, while establishing a more equitable social venue within which the real work of restorative history can begin.

<p> The Town Creek mound site, located in Montgomery County, North Carolina, is classified as Mississippian based on the archaeological evidence for intensive maize agriculture, the presence of complicated stamped ceramics, and the presence of an earthen platform mound. In my research, I studied hinterland sites within a 40-km radius of the mound site to determine how Mississippian settlement patterns in the surrounding region changed through time. I used ceramic analysis and the presence and absence of diagnostic artifacts to create an occupational history of hinterland sites. I also used spatial analysis to delineate polity boundaries and compare spatial patterns to others established in the region. When ceramic and spatial data were combined, patterns emerged suggesting that fewer hinterland sites were occupied during the height of Town Creek&rsquo;s occupation, and more hinterland sites were occupied when Town Creek&rsquo;s population was dwindling. These patterns suggest that as people moved away from Town Creek, they were relocating within the mound site&rsquo;s immediate vicinity. Spatial analysis also showed a break in hinterland sites at 18 km during all of Town Creek&rsquo;s occupation, indicating that the administrative center at Town Creek had an influence of at least 18 km.</p>

Between 1790 and 1865, the Jamaican political economy experienced a series of structural crises which precipitated changes in the relations of production on the island. Faced with changes within the global circulation of capital, groups of Jamaican elites, using their positions of privilege within the socio-economic hierarchy of the island, attempted to manipulate the socio-economic upheavals of the nineteenth century to maintain and reinforce their wealth, power, and status within Jamaican society. Within this context, large-scale coffee production, first using slave- and then later wage-based labor systems, was introduced to Jamaica for the first time. The introduction and development of this industry in one coffee producing region, the Yallahs drainage of the Blue Mountains in the southeastern quadrant of the island, are considered as manifestations of the global change that was affecting Jamaica at the time. A crucial component of the socio-economic manipulations of the nineteenth century was the introduction and negotiation of new social spaces. Two sequential phases of negotiation were experienced and have been interpreted: the introduction of coffee production under slavery, and the reorganization of labor/capital relations following emancipation. The intentions behind, and the often contested results of, the elites' attempts at restructuring the logic of accumulation during these phases of manipulation are interpreted by examining the historical, cartographic, and archaeological records. These various data sets are considered to be manifestations of three interrelated dimensions of space: the cognitive, the social and the material. By examining plantation space in this theoretical context, this dissertation interprets the way new spaces were designed and intended by elites to reinforce new social relations, and how such manipulations were resisted by the African-Jamaican majority in the Yallahs region.

In this thesis I explore the archaeology of Southern New England by examining two places on the Native American landscape. I argue that archaeology should focus on studying entire landscapes to understand the total range of human effects present. The ethnohistoric record provides illuminating details to our understanding of the Native American landscape. The method I employ in this dissertation to exemplify how best to study the archaeology of the past Native landscape is soil micromorphology. This method, by providing a detailed view of soil microstructure, enables archaeologists to recognize very discrete alterations to the landscape otherwise undetectable. My analyses suggest that the landscape is not easily divisible into cultural and non-cultural, site and non-site or feature and non-feature areas. Rather, the entire landscape is more appropriately viewed as a continuum of areas with low to high evidence of cultural disturbance.