This study conducts a multi-isotopic bioarchaeological analysis of the Avondale Burial Place (McArthur Cemetery), a recently discovered Emancipation-era African American cemetery near Macon, GA. Stable isotopic analyses were performed on available dental remains in order to reconstruct the diet and demography of the individuals buried at McArthur Cemetery. Specifically, δ18O and δ13C were characterized in tooth enamel and examined in tandem with collaborative osteological and mortuary analyses to reconstruct early-life diet and residential origin. The results suggest that members of the Avondale community buried in McArthur did not experience significant mobility, but rather resided in the area for most of their lives. Overall, these results greatly contribute to the genealogical research of McArthur Cemetery’s descendants as well as the fragmented history of the South by exploring whether the individuals in this community took part in the Great Migration following the Civil War.

The town of Fort Walsh was established in 1875 next to the North-West Mounted Police post of the same name in the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan. Although it may appear to have been an isolated town built during the burgeoning years of the Canadian west, it became a thriving centre of activity with many businesses and people of various backgrounds attracted to this locale. Both the town and the post were abandoned in 1883.<p> Fort Walsh became a National Historic Site in 1968 and in the decades following, many areas were archaeologically recorded and excavated within the town. This thesis analyzed the artifacts of ten of these operations to identify the possible contributors of the material culture. This was accomplished by identifying the types of social (households) and economic (businesses) units that were present in the town from the historical records. A representational artifact assemblage was constructed for each unit and compared to the locales that had been excavated in the town. Analysis of the data led me to conclude that the operations best represented four family households, two Métis family households, three male-only households and one possible male-only household or restaurant.<p> The archaeological and historical information from the town was also combined to reconstruct the layout and settlement pattern of the town. Overall, the town of Fort Walsh was found to lack organization and did not follow any type of pattern which was in contrast to the typical structured pioneer settlements of that time as was seen at the contemporaneous town of Fort Macleod. Many factors may have contributed to the settlement pattern seen at Fort Walsh including topography and access to resources. I argue within this thesis that perhaps it was the large Métis population at Fort Walsh that influenced the layout of the town since there were similarities between the settlement pattern of Fort Walsh and Métis hivernant villages in the Cypress Hills.

The town of Fort Walsh was established in 1875 next to the North-West Mounted Police post of the same name in the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan. Although it may appear to have been an isolated town built during the burgeoning years of the Canadian west, it became a thriving centre of activity with many businesses and people of various backgrounds attracted to this locale. Both the town and the post were abandoned in 1883.<p> Fort Walsh became a National Historic Site in 1968 and in the decades following, many areas were archaeologically recorded and excavated within the town. This thesis analyzed the artifacts of ten of these operations to identify the possible contributors of the material culture. This was accomplished by identifying the types of social (households) and economic (businesses) units that were present in the town from the historical records. A representational artifact assemblage was constructed for each unit and compared to the locales that had been excavated in the town. Analysis of the data led me to conclude that the operations best represented four family households, two Métis family households, three male-only households and one possible male-only household or restaurant.<p> The archaeological and historical information from the town was also combined to reconstruct the layout and settlement pattern of the town. Overall, the town of Fort Walsh was found to lack organization and did not follow any type of pattern which was in contrast to the typical structured pioneer settlements of that time as was seen at the contemporaneous town of Fort Macleod. Many factors may have contributed to the settlement pattern seen at Fort Walsh including topography and access to resources. I argue within this thesis that perhaps it was the large Métis population at Fort Walsh that influenced the layout of the town since there were similarities between the settlement pattern of Fort Walsh and Métis hivernant villages in the Cypress Hills.

The most influential communities in modern Caribbean history have been the enslaved Africans and their descendant populations. As such, historical archaeology in the Caribbean has often focused on black lifeways under British, Dutch, and Spanish colonial powers. The utilization of various research strategies have included but not restricted to ethnoarchaeology, historical documents, material culture, oral history sources, settlement patterns, stable isotopic study, and burial practices. As one of the first historical faunal studies of the French Antilles, my work attempts to provide a contribution to the study of slave foodways. This dissertation examines the interrelationship between foodways and identity formation during the early modern French transatlantic expansion. My material evidence, exemplified via faunal remains, was retrieved from the slave village at Habitation La Mahaudière, once a prosperous sugar plantation in Guadeloupe established during the mid-18th century, whose domestic occupation spanned over 150 years and is currently a well-preserved archaeological site that offers the potential for understanding diachronic social and cultural processes of the French plantation system. My zooarchaeological results in combination with primary and secondary sources that discuss colonial subsistence practices will assist in establishing how slave foodways and French Antillean identity is created by and shaped one another. / text

Prostitution has recently received increased attention in historical archaeology, but studies pertaining to this topic have been driven by artifacts instead of theory and therefore have been unable to address broader social and economic issues, as is the goal of the field. The approach developed here moves significantly toward this goal in the study of prostitution in the 19th-century mining West.World-systems theory is established as an organizing framework for the study of prostitution in the mining West, a vital internal periphery of the United States and a site of sudden, intense cultural collision due to the expansion of the capitalist world-economy. Prostitution is situated within the context of women's informal labor in peripheries to demonstrate how prostitutes supported formal labor in the mining West and therefore contributed to the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism.The archaeological approach attends to the cultural collision by recognizing gender, ethnicity, and class as active, interacting, and shifting constructions emphasized to assign oneself or others as appropriate to spaces, activities, or interactions and seeking to identify processes of identity formation through manipulated behaviors and symbols. It additionally calls for archaeologists to look at how each construction organized society through the other two.The approach concludes with the development of relevant research questions under the headings of negotiating with and navigating around Victorianism. The former attempt to understand the range of experiences of prostitutes in a way that listens to the "voices" of both prostitutes and Victorians, i.e., through a negotiation, to better realize the personal agency of prostitutes. The latter relate to the labor and economic contributions of prostitutes to the capitalist world-economy, to better recognize and understand their historical agency.Implementation of the approach occurs through its application to recently excavated data from a red-light district in late 19th-century Prescott, Arizona. The results demonstrate that the historical-archaeological study of mining-West prostitution, with the benefit of organizing theory, has excellent potential for providing information on economic processes surrounding an important form of women's labor in a periphery and on social processes that characterized an intercultural-frontier periphery associated with a hegemonic Victorian core.

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This dissertation uses historical and archaeological evidence to examine changes in the landscape of two Middle Atlantic Jesuit plantations in order to understand the role that these places played in the development of rural communities. Between 1637 and 1919, the Society of Jesus established and managed eleven large estates, which provided financial support for Indian missions, colleges, and the infrastructure of the Catholic Church in America. These sites sat at the intersection of the capitalist American plantation system and the Jesuits’ ever-expanding network of missions. Religious goals and their means of economic support became irrevocably entangled in ways that supported the development of tightly-knit Catholic communities and led to the plantations’ economic failure in the mid-nineteenth century. Using archival research, archaeological survey, and the contextual analysis of Roman Catholic devotional objects, this dissertation examines how processes of landscape transformation on Jesuit estates structured and displayed social relations among surrounding communities. Analysis focuses on changes in agriculture, labor systems, built landscapes, and socioeconomic networks at two specific estates, St. Inigoes in southern Maryland and Conewago in central Pennsylvania. By examining the spatial distribution of structures and activity areas in an archaeological GIS, contextualized with historical data on agricultural production, laborers, and Jesuit finances, this dissertation shows how the plantations were representative of local agricultural and economic trends. Their religious orientation, however, made the properties distinctive, shaping the development of human relationships and creating subtle differences in the ways that people interacted with material culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, plantations were remembered as sacred places, and as the home of supernatural presences. Devotional artifacts excavated on Jesuit plantations and nearby sites provide evidence of spiritual beliefs, community networks, and missionary outreach. These objects, used within the context of community life, mediated relationships between humans and deities. Their presence at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American Indian sites demonstrates connections between the plantations and the Jesuits’ Indian missions in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Religious material culture from nineteenth- and twentieth-century African-American sites on and near Jesuit properties shows the tenacity of Black Catholicism despite slavery, racism, and segregation within the Church. / 2021-12-06T00:00:00Z

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