<p> The Great Dismal Swamp, located in Virginia and North Carolina, was a landscape of resistance for enslaved Africans who fled to its interior maronnage settlements. But how did the enslaved workers who were forced to participate in the slavery-based capitalist economy find avenues to perform acts of resistance within these circumstances, and were they able to interact with or facilitate maroons and refugees escaping through the swamp? This research questions the role of material culture consumption as a form of resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp by exploring the historical and archaeological records of Dismal Town, Site 44SK70, and Jericho Ditch Work Camp, Site 44SK506, where enslaved men and women lived and worked during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The Dismal Swamp Company (1763-1814), headquartered at Dismal Town plantation along the Washington Ditch, was one of the first corporations to exploit the swamp&rsquo;s natural resources. Its successor was the Dismal Swamp Land Company (1810-1871), headquartered at the sawmills at Jericho Town, with work camps spread throughout the swamp including the work camp on the Jericho Ditch. Opportunities for and tactics of resistance changed as the company changed its name and transitioned from a slave-owning, plantation-style labor system of agricultural production to a more industrialized, slave-leasing, task-based system of lumbering and shingle production. Because material culture plays a role in power-laden social relationships, the consumption and use of materials culture can constitute resistance on both an individual and collective level. This <i>resistive consumption</i> can take many forms, self-determination and persistence in expressions of cultural identity, or the ability to legally purchase freedom for one&rsquo;s self or family with saved wages, or even the ability to supply and facilitate fugitives within the GDS through redistribution in an internal economy. This research will prove that resistance can be a pervasive, persistent, and hidden range of practices and tactics used by people in their everyday lives through the seemingly mundane choices of how to cook and serve food, prescribe medical treatments, and acquire clothing and personal items.</p><p>

This dissertation considers the role biography can play in analyses of past landscapes and, conversely, how those landscapes can help us better understand the lives of individuals. It focuses on one person, David Ruggles—a blind, African American, journalist, doctor, businessman, and antislavery activist—and a specific landscape, that of western Massachusetts during the mid-19th century. The questions that guide this dissertation concern the extent to which understanding past landscapes can reveal the previously unconsidered dimensions of the lives of people who experienced them. The landscape is considered through multiple scales in this dissertation. It draws on historical research as well as the modern-day Florence, Massachusetts landscape to reveal how Ruggles' experience was mediated by his race, physical ability, and social position. It also incorporates ethnographic data obtained from questionnaires and in-depth interviews to interrogate the role knowledge of local history plays in contemporary life. This research makes important methodological contributions to the field of historical archaeology. First, it demonstrates the utility of a biographical approach to analyses of the landscape and the past. Second, it highlights a dimension of the human past that is often overlooked in historical archaeology: the lives of people with disabilities. Third, in considering the life of a blind man, it recognizes that the landscape is experienced multi-sensorily and, furthermore, that the experience of walking through the landscape implicates one in a multitude of socio-historical processes that alter the landscape and influence the circumstances in which people interact. Finally, the ethnographic data reveal how knowledge about historical landscapes and the people who inhabited them come to be combined with contemporary experiences and interests to create new meanings and understandings.

This dissertation reports on the research related to childhood growth and sex ratios of the children from the Eighteenth century New York African Burial Ground (NYABG) cemetery population. NYABG is the largest archaeological cemetery population of enslaved Africans in North America. A total of 349 individuals comprise the baseline sample for the construction of stationary paleodemographic tables. One hundred ninety-six individuals under 25 years of age comprise the sub-sample for which analyses related to questions regarding childhood sex ratio, growth status, and childhood labor are undertaken. A morphological technique for sexing immature skeletons is tested for the first time in this project. The results of this test are then utilized in the construction of the sex ratio composition for this segment of the NYABG. Growth is assessed by examining stature estimates and standardized long bone lengths for individuals in relation to skeletal indicators of biomechanical stress, generalized pathologies, and major indicators of nutritional status. Research questions related to the life experiences of these children in a colonial slave regime are explored by incorporating historical information and the results of the analysis of growth and development and sex ratio structure within a biocultural framework. This framework integrates modes of production, as put forth by Wolf (1982), to increase the explanatory dimensions of the biocultural theoretical model.

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Zimbabwe is a country in southern Africa that was formerly known as Rhodesia and was established in 1890 by European settlers. Zimbabwe gained independence from the colonial regime in 1980 and has a rich historical background. This study serves to understand the use of archaeology in two selected Form 3 Zimbabwean history textbooks. The study was a case study with embedded units of analysis situated in the interpretivist paradigm analysing how and why archaeology had been used in Zimbabwean school history textbooks. Content analysis of each unit was employed to better understand this concept and the transdisciplinary relationship between historians and archaeologists is conceptualized in the textbooks. What emerged from the analysis was that archaeology was indeed made use of to explain the prehistory of Zimbabwe, it was just the depth of the archaeological content that differed between the two textbooks sampled. Archaeology was used in a nationalistic manner to show that prior to the arrival of Europeans, Zimbabwe did indeed have a thriving culture with city states, craftsmen and international trade contrary to the Eurocentric views that native Zimbabweans were primitive. In this study, it was shown that without archaeology the prehistory of Zimbabwe would remain fragmented and mixed up in romanticised versions of Great Zimbabwe being built by the Queen of Sheba or being connected to the mines of King Solomon and never really giving credit to the native inhabitants of Zimbabwe who were the true architects of a nation as great as that of Great Zimbabwe. In the light of the recent political transformations in Zimbabwe, it was however evident that the history textbooks have changed, relying less on archaeology and more on a patriotic form of history filled with oral traditions and earlier historical writings of the Arabs and Portuguese traders and explorers of old. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Humanities Education / MEd / Unrestricted

<p>Rock art documentation often draws from a range of recording perspectives, in which each framework facilitates different recording goals, preconceptions, and methods. As a result, each recording project collects different types of information from a rock art panel. The intricate and visually striking rock art murals painted on rockshelter walls in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwestern Texas demand and benefit from the application of artistic, avocational archaeological, and professional archaeological documentation frameworks. </p><p> This research provided a case study that analyzed different recording projects of the Rattlesnake Canyon mural (41VV180), a Pecos River style pictograph panel located in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. I applied a critical theoretical framework and the concept of &ldquo;capta&rdquo; to review and analyze the rock art documentation perspectives, methods, and materials collected from three major recording projects of the Rattlesnake Canyon mural. I focused on projects completed by artist Forrest Kirkland, the Texas Archeological Society (TAS) avocational archaeological Rock Art Task Force (RATF), and an illustration of the Shumla Archaeological Research and Education Center&rsquo;s (Shumla) recording process, to examine differences between artistic, avocational archaeological, and professional archaeological recording frameworks and methods. </p><p> This case study demonstrated the ways in which the specific framework or perspective of a recorder influenced the methods selected for documentation and the types of information collected during rock art recording. The results of this critical analysis showed that the different recording projects shared a similar goal: to preserve the Rattlesnake Canyon mural for future generations and continued archaeological study. The three different projects, however, drew from distinct recording frameworks that influenced the overall conception of the panel, the methods selected for recording, and the types of information collected. </p><p> In this case study, I suggested that rock art researchers, specifically those from a professional archaeological framework, value the incorporation of different perspectives and methods into rock art documentation. The inclusion of varied perspectives and methods brings different skillsets and expertise to rock art recording. In addition, each recording project gathers different kinds of information from rock art murals that can be used in different ways by subsequent recorders, researchers, and land managers. This critical analysis of previous rock art recording projects also demonstrated that existing rock art documentation legacy materials continue to serve as productive resources for further research, management, and public education purposes. </p>

Univ., Diss. (Nicht für den Austausch)--Tübingen, 1999.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - James Cook University, 2004. / Typescript (photocopy) Appendices: 391-513, [9] Bibliography: 347-390.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Glen Doran, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Anthropology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 26, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 205 pages. Includes bibliographical references.