This dissertation examines the creation of space and place in a border region through a historically grounded, multi-scalar approach to spatiality. The work draws upon the pre- and post-contact archaeology of the Lake Champlain Richelieu River Corridor, a historically contested waterway where the states of Vermont, and New York meet the Canadian Province of Québec. This is a region that has played host to countless complex cultural interactions between Native American/First Nation groups and Europeans of various cultural and national identities A tripartite model for multi-scalar study of space and place creation is presented and applied to the political and social history Native and European conflict and comprise. The model stipulates that the construction of space consists of three facets, cognitive, material and social spaces. The interaction between these three aspects of spatial creation allows for places to be constructed and identified as holding cultural significance. The study is multi-scalar in respect to both scope of analysis and time. In respect to scope, archaeological analyses are undertaken at the region, site and artifact levels. The model is multiscalar in respect to time, examining the topics of study diachronically, tracing the production of space through time. Each temporally specific examination begins with a discussion of pertinent social mores and constructs as they effect the cognitive space created. The archaeological record is then analyzed to ascertain how cognitive spaces are manifest on the landscape. This built environment augmentation to the landscape is referred to as material space. Finally, the social space, consisting of the relationships between active agents and their material space is examined. The model postulates that it is the social space interactions between cognitive and material spaces that allows for the construction of place. The work often engages in critiques of an Anglo-centric bias in American history to offer a more balanced approach to the historical investigation of a complex borderzone.

This dissertation critically examines the political and social significance of colonial portraiture by focusing on domestic portraits commissioned for Virginians between the mid-seventeenth century and 1775. Portraiture was a site where colonial and imperial identity was negotiated and expressed. Portraits also supported the construction of social relationships through the acts of representation, erasure, and reception. Chapter one focuses on portraits painted in England for Virginians before ca. 1735 and the use of English portrait conventions to suit the political needs of colonists and to express visions of themselves as agents of empire. This chapter reveals some of the ways Virginians used portraits to engage in transatlantic politics and social networks. Chapter two uncovers the regional preferences for expressing elite, community values centered around gender and family before 1770 in portraits of men, women, and children. It argues that portrait collections had dynastic purposes and visualized women as sexual beings and men as masters over colonial and female nature. Chapter three discusses the influence that enslaved Africans had on portraits of Virginians throughout the colonial period. It argues that the physical presence of enslaved people as audiences caused colonists to erase them from portraiture in order to construct and enforce a plantation complex system of visuality. Planters also disavowed the realities of slavery to emphasize their British civility. The last chapter uncovers the rapid changes in portraiture in the 1770s as colonists and artists confronted imperial crises and responded in diverse ways. The fracturing of gentry planter cohesion and the greater availability of artists changed portraiture in the colony. Virginians left behind the conventionalized nature of portraiture from earlier decades and many began including messages of resistance to imperial policy and partaking in pan-colonial modes of representation. This dissertation combines archival research with visual analysis to shed light on portraiture from a region typically overlooked by art historians. By focusing on a specific region over a long period of time, this project emphasizes the varied and important roles that portraits played in shaping colonial culture and society.

This dissertation argues that colonial Yamasee communities moved hundreds of miles throughout the present-day Southeastern United States, often to gain influence, and maintained traditions such as names they more closely associated with their ethnicity and authority than ceramics. Self-identification by Yamasees in censuses, speeches, and letters for a century and archaeological evidence from multiple towns allows me to analyze multiple expressions of their identity. their rich rhetoric demonstrates the mechanics of authority—they dictated terms to Europeans and other Native Americans by balancing between, in their words, vengeance and mercy. I focus on a letter and tattoo from a warrior called Caesar Augustus who justified his valor and the writings of a diplomat named andres Escudero who justified retribution. Combined, these and other leaders demonstrate the flexibility in their offices of authority. their political rhetoric—both ritual speech understood throughout the region as well as their specific titles and town names—demonstrates continuities between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, multiple movements of Yamasee communities across hundreds of miles demonstrates their agency and connections to their neighbors. These movements allowed Yamasees to dictate terms to Europeans and maintain town names, signs, and rhetoric for centuries. However, as a result of these community movements, Yamasees adopted the ceramic traditions of their neighbors. Considering the authority and ethnicity of Yamasees in their own words allows analysis of continuity and change in Yamasee landscapes of ceramic practice in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. More specifically, I analyzed materials from my own excavations at Mission San Antonio de Punta Rasa in Pensacola, Florida as well as assemblages excavated by the City of St. Augustine Archaeology Program and in South Carolina by Brockington and Associates. I quantify the extent to which Yamasees adopted the ceramic practices of their neighbors, including Guale, Mocama, Timucua, Apalachee, and Creek Indians. In a sense, this material flexibility reflects the very mobility and social connections that allowed them to maintain geopolitical influence. However, given their authority in Spanish documents and at times invisibility in the archaeological record, Yamasees show only indirect connections between authority and daily ceramic practice. Further, these ceramic practices, as well as Yamasee multilingualism, represent hybrid practices between multiple Native American groups rather than the influence of Europeans.

The present study of Guana Island in the British Virgin Islands draws upon archaeological, archival, and architectural evidence to examine the material and spatial aspects of everyday life on the social, geographic, and economic margins of the British Empire between 1717 and 1845. Guana’s settlers were yeoman farmers, formerly indentured laborers, and fishermen displaced from other parts of the Caribbean who came to the Virgin Islands for the opportunity to seek their own fortunes in the small island territories initially forsaken by sugar planters as ill-suited for large scale sugar cultivation. Arriving with them, and with increasing frequency over time, were enslaved Africans forced into laboring in the cotton and sugar fields, on fishing boats, and as domestic servants. The present study seeks to better understand how the experience of eighteenth-century Virgin Islanders, both free and enslaved, compared to their counterparts in larger and wealthier Caribbean sugar colonies through a detailed study of households on Guana Island through time. Between the early eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries, Guana’s households underwent substantial transformations in response to the expansion, contraction, and variation of the Virgin Islands’ plantation-based economy. Those transformations included measurable changes in settlement patterns, household composition, built environment, and household industry. at the local scale, the archaeological evidence illustrates how colonial processes are frequently tied to the economic use of the land; while at the regional scale, the archaeological evidence highlights the range experiences within the British Caribbean. The evidence presented herein also complicates long-held assumption that Guana’s colonial history was limited to the island’s occupation by Quakers. Indeed, Guana’s eighteenth century settlement occurred earlier, lasted longer, and included a greater number, and wider variety, of people than previously understood.

American cuisines did not develop in isolation, but instead were influenced by a constant flow of information, individuals, and material culture between the colonies and the rest of the Atlantic world. These, in turn, interacted with the specific agricultural, social, and economic conditions and goals of residents in each colony. Food was a powerful symbol of identity in the English world in the eighteenth century, and printed English cookery books were widely available. What colonists ate, however, also reflected what was locally available, and resources could vary significantly between colonies. Meat usage is one aspect of cuisine that is directly observable in the archaeological record. This study employs a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the utility of printed eighteenth-century English cookery books to model and predict meat usage in the British American colonies, and to explore if or how meat usage and the larger cuisine varied from colony to colony. to do so, archaeologically-recovered faunal materials from sites in colonial Connecticut and colonial Virginia were compared against a model of meat usage constructed from a rigorous textual analysis of several popular printed cookery books and other texts available to colonists in the eighteenth century. The central aims of this research are to establish a baseline understanding of colonial American meat cuisine to allow for assessments of the ways the cuisine of the American colonists varied from their English peers, and to contextualize colonial British America cuisine in the ecological, political, and social worlds of eighteenth century Anglo-America.

This dissertation summarizes all research findings pertaining to 2017-2018 Archaeological Excavations at Camden Farm, Virginia. The goal of the project was to seek out a previously unexcavated Indigenous house site within the property’s “Post-Contact” (i.e.,1646 - ~1720 A.D.) Rappahannock Indian village in order to analyze structural morphology and the suite of artifact assemblages relating to domestic production, consumption, and exchange practices. Findings were compared to a previously excavated house site from the same village, in addition to similar domestic contexts dating between the “Late Woodland II” and “Contact” (A.D. 1200-1650) periods from the Virginia’s James River valley. The results of this comparison suggest that “Post-Contact” Rappahannock households re-negotiated fundamental political-economic relationships that defined elite and commoner class roles for the centuries. Moreover, archaeological evidence suggests that these re-negotiations appear to reflect mediation between long-term historical trajectories of the Rappahannock community and short-term life choices aimed at navigating Virginia’s 17th century colonial landscape. All of these historical developments would not have been possible if not for the work on one key, often-overlooked demographic group: Indigenous women.

This project uses archaeology, architecture, and the documentary record to explore the ways in which one family, the Tayloes, used Georgian design principals as a way of exerting control over the 19th-century landscape. This project uses two Tayloe homes as the units of study and investigates architectural choices at the Octagon House in Washington, DC, juxtaposed with its Richmond County, Virginia counterpart, Mount Airy, to examine architectural features and contexts of slavery on the landscape. Archaeological site reports, building plans, city maps, and various historic documents are used to identify contexts of slavery and explore the relationship between slavery, social values, and architecture at the Octagon House and Mount Airy, as well as look critically at the function of Georgian architectural features in 19th-century society.

Current research on frontiers describe these spaces as zones of meeting, interaction, dynamism, and change. Further, the geographic, ecological, economic, and political processes that are inherent within these locales shape them, rendering them far from static. These current scholars of frontier theory have sought to fight the image of frontier spaces as locations needing civilization, which is how they used to be approached. They have also stressed the presence of frontier locales outside of the United States, which was the focus of Frederick Jackson Turner's seminal work. Leonard Thompson and Howard Lamar, two prominent figures in the New West approach to frontier theory, argue that the only effective way to study frontiers is to do so through the use of comparative studies. While comparative studies are common in cultural anthropological research on frontiers in North America, the extant archaeology done has not taken a comparative approach nearly as often. My study takes steps toward reintroducing a comparative approach to frontier archaeology. examine the way that the actions of frontier inhabitants (including negotiation, conflict, and cohesion) combined with geographic and ecological factors within two specific locations: Smuttynose Island, Maine, and Highland City, Montana. to make the comparison across space and time between these two locations, I analyze them through the framework of informal economy, trade and exchange networks and the negotiation of social capital through commensal politics. I argue that the inhabitants of frontier settlements interact with the processes at work within frontier zones in such similar ways that it materializes in the archaeological record. I explore tavern assemblages left behind by these frontier inhabitants, with a specific focus on ceramics and glass. Through an examination of the drinking spaces within both settlements, I shed light on the microeconomics of these two locales and of frontier spaces more broadly.

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