Hillier and Hanson proposed a syntax of space to understand the built environment in their 1984 book The Social Logic of Space. This syntax is expressed through a matrix or flow diagram (an access map) which represents access and movement within space. As a representational tool, access maps have been under-used, even in historical archaeology.

With practical additions to Hillier and Hanson’s concept and by using theories of space and performance, we can better understand the built environment and how it shaped social relations. Case studies, drawn from a sample of nineteenth-century English soup kitchens, will show how social groups and materials moved and interacted within buildings in different ways. Places that appear different can produce access maps that are remarkably similar in terms of access and performance. Other buildings that are superficially similar, provided a very different experience because of the way access was, or was not, controlled.

Arriving in the early 19^th century, Irish laborers built the first canals and mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Recently completed excavations at the former site of the Patrick Keyes Store in Lowell – a collaborative project between the Fiske Center of the University of Massachusetts Boston, Queens University, Belfast Northern Ireland, the College of William and Mary, and the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Science at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell – unearthed parts of the ancillary structures associated with the store and as a rear yard area of a tenement building. All these structures are connected to the Acre – the city’s Irish community during the 19^th century and nearby St. Patrick’s Church. This paper summarizes the results of this research through the lens of intersectionality. It compares the materiality of the 19^th century Acre with other groups of workers in Lowell, that raise questions concerning notions of Irish American identity.

This paper looks at identifying and characterizing late 19^th century sites occupied by the Western Shoshone in northern Nevada’s (USA) Great Basin Desert. Much of the regional literature on ethnohistoric sites focuses on identifying early contact sites, which for the Great Basin begin around the 1840s, and the mixing of certain ‘prehistoric’ and ‘historic’-era artifacts. However, research aimed at later-era ethnohistoric sites note an increased blurring of traditional ethnic markers, making indigenous sites harder to identify and separate from sites occupied by Euro-Americans. For example, one researcher noted a near-complete absence of debitage on ethnohistoric sites dating after 1880. I focus on three regions in north-central Nevada with a rich collection of ethnohistoric sites and highlight one particular artifact as an example of this blurring and how it reflects on larger changes to traditional indigenous lifeways.

In 1835, Pierre Louis Vasquez established Fort Vasquez in the South Platte River Basin to trade for bison products with the Indigenous groups of the region. Though this fort was not the first instance where Indigenous people of this region encountered Euromericans and their enterprises, it did mark the beginning of an era of Euromerican settler-colonialism that would permanently affect the dynamics of the region. An artifact from Fort Vasquez that conveys this shift is FV-1-512, an amber glass projectile point lodged in a bison bone. This paper takes an approach informed by Janet Spector’s What This Awl Means to understand how the data extrapolated from just one artifact can convey a detailed story of use. Drawing from archaeological collections and sites similar to Fort Vasquez, ethnohistoric research, and Indigenous ledger art, the proposed paper explores a robust method for researching similar post-contact artifacts.

During the summer of 2021, I reanalyzed the privy assemblage associated with the Teager/Weimer site located in Arlington, Washington. Within the assemblage, there is a Heinrich Fiehn Ocarina from the late 19th century, which represents a unique artifact well suited to the biographical method of analysis. The biographic approach allows us to explore the dialogue of meaning between material culture and the behaviors and beliefs surrounding them. Using this Ocarina as a narrative vehicle, I will discuss conceptualizations of capitalism, consumption, and globalization in the burgeoning town of Arlington, Washington in the early 1890s. I will also situate this object and these ideologies in the larger framework of colonialism throughout the world. This presentation represents just a small portion of my larger master’s thesis research on this assemblage and exemplifies the ongoing utility of legacy collections and value of public engagement in conducting meaningful archaeological research.

In Quebec’s Lower North Shore, the village of Rivière-Saint-Paul is on the periphery of the world’s major industrial centers. Part of a globalized world defined by industrial and capitalist expansion since the nineteenth century, its maritime spaces concentrated regional labor forces and transformed resources wrested from the sea, such as cod, seals, and whales. The local descendant community firmly bases its sense of place and history on this period of industrial activities. I examine nostalgia as an emotion that fosters the local history of the fishing industry and the archaeological imagination associated with its ruins. Within the current deindustrialized context, nostalgia becomes a resource and a commodity, a new form of capitalist extractivism. Through an archaeological ethnography approach, I examine industrial heritage and the role that nostalgia and imagination, encouraged by a collaborative digital archaeological project, play in the persistent resonance of the past in the present.