The purpose of this thesis is to study the development of professional archaeology in Indiana. To begin, an attempt has been made to place Indiana archaeology in the framework of national archaeology. Hopefully this will provide a needed prospectus in understanding the significance of the pattern of development in Indiana. The actual study of Indiana development begins in 1816 with the earliest known performance of archaeology within the state and the reasons why it was undertaken. Following that the development is traced through the 1800's and explanations are offered as to why archaeological interest matured so slowly during the period. In the early twentieth century when the archaeologically related activities transpired more rapidly, the important developmental trends are elaborated and the individuals instrumental in their maturation are brought into focus. The period from 1938-60 is then devoted almost entirely to the activities of Glenn A. Black, the "grand old man" of Indiana archaeology, which included excavation at Angel Mounds and the establishment of a field school and archaeology program at Indiana University. The 1960's are covered by a discussion of the diversifications of Indiana archaeology through the appointment of James H. Kellar to succeed Black at Indiana University, the engagement of B. K. Swartz, Jr., by the Social Science Department at Ball State Teachers College to establish an archaeology program at the school, and the hiring of Robert E. Pace by the Social Science Department at Indiana State Teachers College.The development of archaeological programs in two additional institutions possibly kindled a rebirth of Indiana archaeology. The state still remains outside the mainstream of United States archaeology, but Indiana is probably more typical than atypical in this regard. Since archaeological intellectual theory is developed largely on an individual basis and reflects the individuals involved instead of statewide programs, many states, even those where considerable excavation is ongoing within their boundaries, lag in making current theory operational. All that is really needed in Indiana is a dynamic archaeologist who is willing to express and test fresh ideas and place' the results in print. If this were accomplished, the provincial quality of Indiana archaeology would be lost.Ultimately, though, archaeology within the state must undergo some basic changes if a total view of Indiana prehistory is to be seen. The archaeology program at each of the universities must become dynamic and support a variety of research studies. Temporal-spatial studies need to be made in all sections of the state with all classes of artifacts, and documented cultural sequences must be established as soon as possible so that it will be possible to reconstruct the way people lived in Indiana during prehistoric times. Once this is accomplished, inter-area comparative studies of cultures, trade patterns, and migration routes will begin unveiling the true Indiana prehistory.If archaeologists interested in Indiana archaeology begin doing more extensive research and keeping their colleagues current on their activities through professional meetings, university-supported research reports, and national archaeology journals, there is no reason why Indiana cannot be on the frontiers of United States archaeology. There will be a long path to follow, but the nucleus of interest, financial support, students, and professional leadership is already available. All that is needed is the development of available resources.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2008. / "Publication number: AAT 3333565."

No description available.

<p> This dissertation examines how racial ideologies have historically been entangled with discourses on citizenship and gender difference in the United States. In looking at the case study of the 18^th- and 19^th-century African American community on Nantucket, I ask how these ideologies of difference and inequality were experienced, reinterpreted, and defied by women and men in the past. Whereas New England has maintained a liberal and moralistic regional narrative since the early-19^th century, this dissertation builds on scholarship which has increasingly complicated this narrative, documenting the historically entrenched racial divides in the region.</p><p> Historic African American community philosophies and social ideals are investigated through newspapers, pamphlets, and other records of the time. To address the household and individual scale, an archaeological investigation was undertaken at the homestead of a prominent 19^th-century black family on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House was home to a prominent late-18^th- and 19^th-century African American-Native American family on the island. The materiality of the Boston home&mdash;the artifacts, architecture, and landscape features&mdash;are the basis for making interpretations of the lives of the individuals that once lived there.</p><p> African diaspora theory, black feminist thought, and theories of performativity form the basis for the interpretive framework of this dissertation. The process of community formation and mobilization is considered with regard both for the uniting potential of cultural background and the uniting potential of political and social goals. The diversity of the African diaspora is seen as both an asset and a challenge to the uniting of the community on Nantucket. Race, gender, age, social status, and other vectors of social cohesion all contributed to the experience of intersectional identities. The concept of performativity, which proposes that identities are temporarily stabilized during actions, is also part of the foundation on which identity is theorized in this dissertation.</p><p> The historical analysis which contextualizes this research project focuses on the establishment and perpetuation of African American community ideals in the northeastern United States during the 19^th century. Notions of citizenship and gender ideals were racialized and defined according to white standards. Women and men of African descent, as well as of other cultural backgrounds, were seen by dominant white culture as outside the bounds of citizenship by virtue of not being white and outside the bounds of womanhood/manhood by not being white women/men. Black communities, or communities of color, in the Northeast countered these hostile ideologies with a complex set of strategies for redefining, rejecting, or transforming dominant ideals of womanhood and manhood. Black gender ideologies represented the synthesis of several sets of cultural traditions, economic circumstances, and political goals. While these changed in important ways over the course of the 19^th century, black gender ideals were consistently based on a normative notion of respectability while at the same time critiquing the race and gender ideologies of the society that defined respectability. In addition to this, people of color were increasingly defining a sense of collective identity based on these shared ideas of respectability and uplift and the ways that women and men achieved this in the home as well as in more public spaces.</p><p> This dissertation first examines how the Boston-Micah family of the late-18^th and early-19^th centuries contributed to the founding of the community of color on Nantucket island. African American, Native American, Cape Verdean, European, and people from other lines of descent were a part of this community and in the early-19^th century they united around the identifier of "people of color." Seneca Boston and Thankful Micah were among the first of these people to strike out and settle on the southern edge of town. Through an analysis of their material worlds&mdash;including ceramics, their house itself, and their plot of land&mdash;it is suggested that they were actively negotiating dominant discourses on racial exclusion, citizenship, and gender which excluded people of color from the rights and privileges of full personhood.</p><p> The 19^th-century occupants of the house contributed to the growth, florescence, and survival of the African American community through the boom of the whaling industry on the island, an economic depression, and the resurgence of the economy with the coming of the tourism industry in the late-19^th century. Mary Boston Douglass, Eliza Berry, Lewis Berry, Phebe Groves Talbot Hogarth, Elizabeth Stevens, and Absalom Boston experienced the race and gender ideals of the black community in the northeast, and wider American society, in a variety of ways. An analysis of ceramics, personal adornment objects, and small finds is used to examine their experiences. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)</p>

<p> This dissertation examines a period in the late expansion phase (A.D. 1400-1650) of pre-contact Hawaiian society when formidable changes in ritual and social organization were underway which ultimately led to the emergence of Hawai.i as a powerful complex chiefdom in East Polynesia. Remotely located towards the northwest were two geographically remote and ecologically marginal islands called Mokumanamana and Nihoa Islands. Though quite barren and seemingly inhospitable, these contain over 140 archaeological sites, including residential features, agricultural terraces, ceremonial structures, shelters, cairns, and burials that bear witness to an earlier occupation and settlement efforts on these islands. This research demonstrates that over a four hundred year period from approximately ca. A.D. 1400-1815, Mokumanamana became the central focus of chiefly elites in establishing this island as a ritual center of power for the Hawaiian system of heiau (temples). These efforts had long lasting implications which led to the centralization of chiefly management, an integration of chiefs and priests into a single social class, the development of a charter for institutional order, and ultimately a state sponsored religion that became widely established throughout the main Hawaiian Islands. The ideological beliefs that were developed centered on the concept of the cord (.aha) as a symbolic connection between ancestors and descendants came to be a widespread organizing dimension of Hawaiian social life. Through commemorative rituals, the west was acknowledged and reaffirmed as a primary pathway of power where elite status, authority, and spiritual power originated and was continually legitimized. </p><p> This research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach in combining ethno-historical research with archeology as complimenting ways of understanding the Hawaiian past. Through these approaches ritual power is established as a strategic mechanism for social political development, one that leads to a unified set of social beliefs and level of integration across social units. Ethno-historical analysis of cosmogonic chants, mythologies, and oral accounts are looked at to understand ritualization as a historical process one that tracks important social transformations and ultimately led to the formation of the Hawaiian state religious system. Archaeological analysis of the material record is used to understand the nature of island settlement and the investments that went into developing a monument at the effective edge of their living universe. A strong regional chronology is created based on two independent chronometric dating techniques and a relative ordering technique called seriation applied to both habitation and ceremonial sites. An additional number of techniques will be used to track human movement as source of labor, and the transportation of necessary resources for survival such as timber resources through paleo-botanical identification, fine-grained basalt through x-ray fluorescence, and food inferred through the late development of agriculture.</p><p> The results of this study indicate that Mokumanamana and Nihoa islands were the focus of ritual use and human occupation in a continuous sequence from ca. A.D. 1400- 1815, extending for intermittent periods well into the 19th century. The establishment and maintenance of Mokumanamana as a ritual center of power was a hallmark achievement of Hawaiian chiefs in establishing supporting use on these resource deficient islands and pushing towards greater expressions of their power. This island temple was perhaps one of the most labor intensive examples of monumentality relying heavily on a voyaging interaction sphere for the import and transportation of necessary outside resources to sustain life. It highlights the importance of integration of ritual cycles centered on political competition (and/or integration) and agricultural surplus production through the calibration of the ritual calendar. The creation of this ritual center of power resulted in: (1) a strong ideological framework for social organization and order; (2) a process in which a growing class of ramified leaders could display their authority and power to rule; and increased predictability and stability in resource production through forecasting- all of which formed a strong foundation for the institutional power of Hawaiian chiefdoms.</p>

<p> Cemeteries of the enslaved on many plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries were places where communities could practice forms of resistance, and develop distinct African-American traditions. These spaces often went unrecorded by elites, whose constructed landscapes were designed to convey messages of their own status and authority. In their oversight of these spaces, however, elites failed to notice the nuanced meanings the slaves themselves instilled in the landscapes they were forced to live and work in. These separate meanings enabled enslaved African Americans to maintain both human and cultural identities that subverted the slave system and the messages of inferiority that constantly bombarded them.</p><p> This thesis focuses on the archaeological study of the Slave Cemetery at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Here, methodological and theoretical principles are utilized to study the area that many enslaved workers call their final resting place. Through the use of this space, it is hypothesized that Mount Vernon's enslaved community practiced distinct traditions, instilling in that spot a sense of place, and reinforcing their individual and communal human identities. This thesis will also investigate the cemetery within its broader regional and cultural contexts, to attain a better understanding of the death rituals and culturally resistant activates that slaves at Mount Vernon used in their day-to-day battle against the system that held them in bondage.</p>

<p> Rediscovered in the 1930s by the Mantle family, Mantle's Cave contained excellently preserved feather bundles, a feather headdress, moccasins, a deer-scalp headdress, baskets, stone tools, and other perishable goods. From the start of excavations, Mantle's Cave appeared to display influences from both Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan peoples, leading Burgh and Scoggin to determine that the cave was used by Fremont people displaying traits heavily influenced by Basketmaker peoples. Researchers have analyzed the baskets, cordage, and feather headdress in the hopes of obtaining both radiocarbon dates and clues as to which culture group used Mantle's Cave. This thesis attempts to derive the cultural influence of the artifacts from Mantle's Cave by analyzing the feathers. This analysis includes data from comparative cave sites displaying cultural, temporal, or site-type similarities to Mantle's Cave. In addition to the archaeological data, ethnographic data concerning how Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, and northern Mexican peoples conceive of and use feathers will be included. Lastly, theoretical perspectives on agency, symbolism, and the transmission of cultural traditions will be used in an effort to interpret the data collected herein.</p>

<p> Land and water use at archaeological sites is a growing field of study within Mesoamerican archaeology. In Mesoamerica, similar to elsewhere in the world, landscapes were settled based partially upon the characteristics of the environment and the types of food and water resources available. Across Mesoamerica, landscape concepts were also important to religious beliefs and ritual activity in a manner that may have had the potential to influence the power dynamics of a site. This thesis focuses on the management of water at the site of Takalik Abaj in Guatemala during the Middle to Late Preclassic periods (c. 1000 B.C. - A.D. 250) in order to analyze potential ritual and political functions of the water management system. Using spatial data within GIS, this thesis examines the flow of water across the site as directed by its topographical features. The archaeological record of Takalik Abaj and comparisons to water management systems at other Mesoamerican sites are also used to investigate the functions of the water management system. Thesis findings suggest that the water management system of Takalik Abaj was multi-faceted and that ritual functions tied to the control of water may have contributed to the identities and power of the elite.</p>

<p> The Metropolitan Railroad Company Site in Roxbury (Boston), Massachusetts, was first excavated in the late 1970s by staff of the Museum of Afro American History. Researchers recovered nearly 20,000 artifacts related to the site's life as a horsecar street railway station and carriage manufacturer from 1860 to 1891, its subsequent conversion into an electric street railway until around 1920, and finally its modern use as an automobile garage. Using the framework of behavioral archaeology, this project uses GIS-based spatial methods and newly collected documentary evidence to reexamine the site's assemblage of horse accoutrements and carriage manufacturing byproducts. Artifact distribution maps overlaid on detailed historic maps reveal that carriage manufacturing ceased concurrent with street railway electrification, but horse harness craftsmanship continued on to serve in new capacities, highlighting nuances in the narrative of technological change onsite and connecting the life histories of materials to historical actors involved with these transitions.</p>

<p> Deposits of coal silt are significant because they provide archaeologists a baseline for investigating changes in pre-industrial and post-industrial landscapes in Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1790s, miners extracted coal from seams near the surface with a pick and shovel. Over the next 120 years, coal mining evolved into a booming industry. In 1917, production peaked at over 100 million tons. By 1950, geologists discovered reserves of crude oil and natural gas, leading to the overall decline of the anthracite coal industry. Today, coal is no longer a dominant part of the local economy. Coal mining generated enormous quantities of waste, including small pieces of unburnt coal and other non-economic materials. Waste from mines entered the Susquehanna River, mixed with naturally occurring sediments, and formed deposits of coal silt along the banks and mid-channel islands of the river. To understand the effect of coal silt on the river, I use processual archaeology to characterize and examine the Anthropocene - an informal geologic era defined by human induced changes to Earth's ecosystems. What led to unburnt coal in the Susquehanna River? When did unburnt coal enter the Susquehanna River? I use data collected during a ten-week internship to answer these questions and define the occurrence and chronology of deposits of coal silt along the river. Archaeologists generally agree deposits of coal silt date to the late nineteenth century, but fine-tuning the date of deposition is not easy (Stinchcomb et al. 2013). To help solve the problem, I investigated two archaeological sites along the river - Fort Halifax and Calver Island. This thesis highlights reasons why archaeologists should take deposits of coal silt seriously. Considering the importance of energy to human economic and social life and the urgency of addressing contemporary energy problems, this thesis draws on evidence from the stratigraphic record to incorporate anthropological and archaeological perspectives for studying the past, present, and future of energy development and industrialization. </p>