Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has recently gained traction amongst academic researchers and cultural resource managers due to reasonable equipment costs and software processing advancements. Archaeologists have applied GPR within various methodological approaches, focusing on GPR's ability to map multiple soil types, concentrate an area of interest for archaeological testing, or gain knowledge with attention to site preservation. More recently, non-invasive practitioners of GPR have called for an advancing discussion of GPR results. The trajectory of this call aims to focus the interpretation of historical groups and events through GPR results and move beyond traditional geoarchaeological prospection practice. My research assessed a nuanced approach at the New Quarter site near Queen's Creek in Virginia by combining GPR, archaeological excavations, soil augering, radiocarbon dating, and historical research. The New Quarter site is an Early Archaic to Early 20th-century site, with the majority of known archaeological features and material culture associated with the 18th century Burwell family slave quarter referred to as New Quarter. In 2006, test units exposed a subfloor pit feature associated with an enslaved dwelling. My research focuses on the subfloor pit location as it is an ideal candidate for testing GPR to survey the limitations and characteristics of a building structure while comparatively discussing previously identified regional 18th century slave quarters. The results and discussion of my research demonstrate the success of utilizing GPR to identify geologic and anthropogenic clayey soils at the New Quarter site and provide further information on enslaved family formation in Virginia’s plantation landscapes through space and architectural form.

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is the main subsistence crop across much of Polynesia; however, its production via traditional methods is becoming increasingly rare. This study explores taro cultivation in Rurutu, Austral Islands, French Polynesia where traditional farming practices have persisted from pre-European contact times to the present. Specifically, we investigate if pre-European contact Rurutu fits Kirch’s ‘Wet vs. Dry’ hypothesis describing the relationship between environmental variables, agricultural choices and productivity, and the development of socio-political complexity across Polynesia. We use Landsat imagery and geospatial suitability analysis to determine the location of 13 dormant taro systems on Rurutu. We then estimate the island's pre-contact population and population distribution using probable annual yields of taro as proxy data. Our results show significant intra-island differences of taro production on pre-contact Rurutu. We suggest Rurutu conforms to the ‘Wet vs. Dry’ hypothesis as the island’s largest taro yields and thus largest pre-contact populations are in socio-political districts that practiced wetland agriculture. Lastly, we discuss how our foundational data can contribute to ongoing conversations regarding food sovereignty in Oceania and beyond.

During the 18th century, New York City was developing rapidly, and it required a significant source of labor to keep pace. The solution, like the century before, was to increase the forced migration of enslaved Africans. The growth in this population, as one would expect, needed a system of control that would maintain the status of the growing English mercantile class. An intricate system of violence evolved various physical, structural, and cultural components to accomplish this goal. This research sheds light on this system of control. Using Galtung's theoretical construct, the Triangle of Violence, this research revisits the fracture data from the African Burial Ground pathology database along with available historical documentation of New York colonial statutes, Common Council ordinances, and newspaper advertisements. The goal was to determine how the three types of evidence reflected the changing level of violence directed towards the city's enslaved African population. All four of these sources provided information about the interplay between the physical, structural, and cultural forms of violence and how they reflected the growing tensions and hostility of free colonists after the century's significant historical events. The evidence suggests that structural and cultural violence reached its peak during the middle of the century, and physical violence culminated towards the end (post-1776). This phase accounts for the highest overall fracture and perimortem fracture rates for the population. It also includes the most individuals exhibiting three or more perimortem fractures. Strong evidence that interpersonal violence increased for the African Burial Ground population after 1776. This evidence is collaborated by the targeted analyses of evidence regarding mechanical stress, non-specific infection, and nutritional inadequacy. While exhibiting variation through the century, all generally increase in severity in the later phase. All indicators that environmental insults, physical, political, social, and cultural, increased over the century for the African Burial Ground population.

This Master’s thesis examines the materialization of ideology and the impacts of sociopolitical transformation on stone monumental architecture in the pre-contact inland ‘Opunohu Valley. The principal unit of analysis in this research project is the secondary center, defined as an elite-ritual and political site aggregate of temples, or marae, in association with shrines, specialized houses, terraces, and other forms of specialized architecture like council meeting platforms and archery platforms. The secondary unit of analysis is the marae, a sacred place of worship to the indigenous Mā‘ohi people and the most frequently occurring archaeological structure in the inland ‘Opunohu Valley. This study employs multiple lines of evidence across multiple scales and performs original GIS methodologies and statistical analyses to broadly understand architectural variation, specifically marae elaboration, and differences in settlement patterns across five secondary centers (ScMo-124/-125, ScMo-129, ScMo-106, ScMo-103, and ScMo-15). Recognizing that ideology and social status are materialized and signaled in diverse ways through space and architecture, this study considers how both the physical and cultural environment shape secondary center formation and define site location and marae elaboration. At the site-specific scale, marae are evaluated on the extent to which they share similar elaboration styles, orientations, visibility affordances, elevations, and aspects. At the broader inter-secondary center level, site-type frequencies, densities, and overall site clustering patterns are examined. These lines of evidence reveal the ways religious ideology, ontology, and sociopolitical elite identity are materialized through space, place, and monumental architecture at each secondary center. While competing Mā‘ohi elites associated with each secondary center all played a part in institutionalizing social hierarchy and transforming ritual practices in the interior ‘Opunohu Valley, they did so in differing ways. Ultimately, this study recognizes how emergent elites forged their own unique social identity and ritual authority through the settlement patterns and architectural elaborations at secondary centers.

Since they were declared extinct in 1956, the history of the Sinixt First Nation has been rendered invisible on the Canadian landscape. The Sinixt’s traditional homelands spanned from present day Revelstoke, BC to present day Kettle Falls, WA. Archaeological sites on this landscape, such as the Slocan Narrows Pithouse Village in British Columbia, serve as visible traces of Sinixt presence on their traditional homelands through time. Quartzite tools, likely sourced from Kettle Falls, remain the most common type of tool found at Slocan Narrows, thus offering insights into Sinixt historical activities. Previous studies on quartzite from this region have been purely morphological in their analyses. Because morphological analysis is not sufficient to infer lithic tool function, I employ use-wear experiments and analysis to better understand quartzite tool use and Sinixt activities at Slocan Narrows. For the present study, I created an experimental assemblage of 22 quartzite tools to scrape deer hide, cedar, or both. I examined all 22 experimental tools and select quartzite tools from excavations at Slocan Narrows under a microscope to identify use-wear patterns on their edges. Results suggest that quartzite tools had multiple uses throughout Slocan Narrow’s history, showing the tools’ versatility.

Richmond, Virginia, located along the fall line of the James River, was an important political boundary during prehistory; was established as an English colonial town in 1737; and was a center of the interstate slave trade and the capitol of the Confederacy during the nineteenth century. Although Richmond holds a prominent place in the narrative of American and Virginia history, the city’s archaeological resources have received incredibly little attention or preservation advocacy. However, in the wake of a 2013 proposal to construct a baseball stadium in the heart of the city’s slave trading district, archaeological sensitivity and vulnerability became a political force that shaped conversations around the economic development proposal and contributed to its defeat. This dissertation employs archival research and archaeological ethnography to study the variable development of Richmond’s archaeological value as the outcome of significant racial politics, historic and present inequities, trends in academic and commercial archaeology, and an imperfect system of archaeological stewardship. This work also employs spatial sensitivity analysis and studies of archaeological policy to examine how the city’s newly emerging awareness of archaeology might improve investigation and interpretation of this significant urban archaeological resource. This research builds upon several bodies of scholarship: the study of urban heritage management and municipal archaeology; the concept of archaeological ethnography; and anthropological studies into how value should be defined and identified. It concludes that Richmond’s archaeological remains attract attention and perceived importance in part through their proximity and relation to other political and moral debates within the city, but that in some cases political interests ensnare archaeological meaning or inhibit interest in certain archaeological subjects. This analysis illuminates how archaeological materiality and the history of Richmond’s preservation movements has created an interest in using archaeological investigations as a tool for restorative justice to create a more equitable historic record. Additionally, it studies the complexity of improving American urban archaeological stewardship within a municipal system closely connected with city power structures.

The Saint John River emerges from tributaries in the highlands of the state of Maine, arcs north and east into the province of New Brunswick, then winds southward, through vast marshlands, before it empties into the Bay of Fundy. For part of its journey, it forms the international border between Canada and the United States. This river, the Wolastoq, and its large drainage basin and tributaries, forms the heart of the homelands of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) First Nation. For many hundreds of years before contact with Europeans, and well into the 19th century, the Wolastoqiyik navigated the land- and waterscapes of Wolastokuk, developing a suite of sophisticated watercraft technologies, as well as wayfinding techniques. These movement practices have left a legacy in the landscape, apparent on historic maps in placenames, and evident archaeologically in the remains of portage routes. Portages, trails or roads over which canoes and goods would be carried, connected stretches of navigable water along the coast and between interior rivers. These trails permitted travel in any direction across the Maritime Peninsula. This network of portages and waterways constitutes a cultural landscape that reflects the movement of Wolastoq'kew people over generations. Interpreting the archaeological signatures left by traditionally mobile peoples remains a challenge for archaeologists. Trails and roads, while representing an opportunity to observe movement in the archaeological record, challenge traditional notions of the site with their large spatial scales and linear, networked forms. Portages, which shifted locations according to seasons and water conditions, add an additional layer of complexity. New interpretive frameworks are needed that account for the way Wolastoq'kew people have understood and navigated this landscape. This dissertation addresses this problem by investigating how ideas about landscape and wayfinding are retained in and expressed through Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, the Algonquian language spoken by Wolastoqiyik. It aggregates and assesses a corpus of historic toponyms first collected at the turn of the 20th century, just as canoe travel was beginning to decline, by three scholars working in Maine and New Brunswick: Edwin Tappan Adney, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, and William Francis Ganong. Passamaquoddy-Maliseet toponyms are richly descriptive, reflecting a detailed ecological and geographic knowledge of Wolastokuk, its seasons, tides, and flows. In addition, the toponym corpus describes an understanding of the landscape that is connected to movement through it, from the perspective of a person out on the water. This dissertation demonstrates the value of turning to language to better understand the Wolastoqwey landscape, and contributes to broader anthropological conversations about the relationship between human practice and landscape conceptualization.

This dissertation examines components of Hawaiian household economies to understand how people on the remote Nā Pali Coast of Kaua'i Island, Hawai'i, maintained continuity in domestic life well into the late nineteenth century. It focuses on two case studies, notably a series of house sites at Nu'alolo Kai and Miloli'i, two neighboring communities on the western end of Kaua'i's remote Nā Pali Coast. This research situates Hawaiian house sites of the post-contact period in the tradition of household archaeology in Polynesia more broadly. However, it considers patterns of material change in colonial settings through a framework that emphasizes persistence over progressive models of change. Moreover, it highlights the ability of people in Hawaii's hinterlands to respond to the spread of foreign goods and ideas in different ways. The study utilizes archaeological data to investigate a series of grass-thatched house or hale sites at Nu'alolo Kai and Miloli'i. The Nu'alolo Kai data was obtained from an analysis of legacy collections, as well as compiled from published and unpublished analyses. The Miloli'i data was acquired through new excavations I directed at Miloli'i in 2016 and 2017. Using individual house sites as case studies, this project models household economies in an isolated region of Hawai'i and compares these economies to case studies from more central locations in the archipelago. The research demonstrates that nineteenth-century Nā Pali Coast households continued to rely on food production at the level of the household, even as they gradually incorporated small numbers of foreign goods into household economies. Rather than using new materials and practices to recreate households in the image of outsiders, however, nineteenth-century residents of the Nā Pali Coast used foreign goods to create a distinctive version of Hawaiian domesticity. My dissertation argues that, rather than committing themselves to wholesale participation in the market economy, Nā Pali Coast households were able to strategically fashion for themselves a place on the margins of the market economy. While the remoteness of this region constrained participation in Hawai'i's emerging market economy, it also engendered resilience and autonomy during a time of large-scale social and political change in the archipelago. While this dissertation focuses on a remote region of Hawai'i, its primary findings, that Nā Pali Coast households maintained a strategic separation from the market economy in the nineteenth century, has implications studies of colonial-era change and continuity in other parts of Hawai'i and Polynesia.

My dissertation research at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation places landscape at the forefront of analysis in order to tell a story of power and conflict over rights and claims to belonging in one of the most profitable British colonies during the era of emancipation. I spent years completing archaeological and ethnohistorical research at this popular national heritage site to learn how the transition from slavery to emancipation occurred on the ground, and to provide a comparative analysis of the tenantry system as it developed locally in the Caribbean region. I conceived the concept of a landscape of racialized ownership to stress the interconnected processes of dispossession and racialization attempted through the enclosure movement, which led to the formation of a landless working class on both sides of the Atlantic. By excavating processes of dispossession and local responses to it through the lens of anthropological archaeology, I make explicit complex relationships among boundaries, belonging, law, and private property in land. In doing so, I investigate connections between peoples who are differently marked by global forces—including slavery, abolition, industrialization, and capitalism. Specifically, my analysis of the tenantry system and enduring chattel house shows how the cultural terms of belonging are historically interwoven with property relations. Property, and how it is culturally constructed, is almost entirely absent in scholarly studies of people that were at best considered victims in colonial property regimes. I argue that archaeologists can, and indeed should, analyze property ownership by African Diasporans with anthropological and Africanist centered approaches to expose how racial identities and property rights continue to operate in the present-day.

This thesis investigates shell tool use in the Society Islands. Shell scrapers are widely recognized artifacts in Polynesian archaeology and are strongly associated with vegetable scraping. However, ethnohistorical sources describe Pacific Islanders using shell scrapers for a wider range of activities. This thesis demonstrates that shell scrapers had more diverse functions than is attributed to them by archaeologists. This study includes research using ethnohistoric sources to better understand the ways in which shell was used by Pacific Islanders, including their use as expedient tools. An experimental use-wear program is implemented to investigate the development of use- wear patterns on Turbo shells when used as scrapers on various contact materials. Finally, the experimental use-wear analysis results are used as a proxy to analyze possible use-wear patterns on 23 potential Turbo scrapers excavated from archaeological sites in the Society Islands to determine if these shells were used as tools. The overarching goals of this thesis is to demonstrate that Turbo shells were used as scrapers and to refine our ability to identify and interpret expedient technology in the Society Islands.