This presentation details a zooarchaeological and historical analysis of a horse skeleton. While originally excavated from the possible location of the nineteenth-century Laughton Trading Post outside of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, the specimen was later stored unstudied in a university teaching collection. The time and explanation for the horse entering the archaeological record is subject to debate, but the horse’s living use and condition, including osteological changes related to work performed, may be representative of the critical role of horses in the early Chicago area. Elaborating upon the skeletal data with historical records, this study investigates multiple hypotheses regarding the horse’s life history within the setting of the Laughton Trading Post and into the early twentieth century. To achieve full data value from the analysis, this study used an exploratory process to connect the horse to its original context, potentially emphasizing the benefit of reexamining legacy collections.

The second season of Michigan Technological University’s excavations at the Delaware Mine, a copper mine located in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, focused primarily on the compressor house. Built in an attempt to allow the mine to more efficiently mine copper, the compressor house was in use for less than a decade before Delaware’s underground mining ceased. The excavation’s central aim was to reveal structural and use patterns within the building’s interior. Archaeologists revealed sections of the house’s boiler room and various portions of the walls, providing evidence of the building’s separation of the boilers from the compressors, the location of machinery, and insight into the compressor house’s mine rock construction. The results presented here are preliminary, as they are part of a larger thesis project.

The development of relationships between Europeans and Indigenous peoples throughout the fur trade was a significant factor in the European settlement of modern-day Maine. Despite the abundance of research into the fur trade, many questions remain about how Europeans chose where to settle and how Indigenous peoples adapted to their new neighbors. This research utilizes GIS to analyze the spatial relationships between European settlements and Indigenous sites with an archaeological presence of fur-bearer remains. By analyzing the spatial relationships and landscapes that define these sites, we can make inferences about European and Indigenous relationships in Maine, from the start of the contact period and throughout the fur trade. This project demonstrates how considering pre-contact Indigenous sites and activities in tandem with post-contact interactions can clarify the changes brought about by European settlement in the Americas.

Alfred Street in the Brush Park neighborhood of Detroit has witnessed the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic changes, inequalities, and policy-driven tensions within Detroit through time. These changes are often articulated through the lens of a select few and remove the voices of entire populations’ lived experiences that helped shape the city. This research seeks to amplify community voices through data visualization. Critical insights into neighborhood change between 1860 and 1950 were gathered from census data, archival research, and archaeological artifact analysis. The output maps, created using ArcGIS, are stark visuals that relay a complex and storied history of a neighborhood through time. They provide a visual reference for the archaeological artifacts, enhance contextual conversations about Detroit’s change through time, and facilitate an opportunity to amplify those who have been underrepresented.

Turtle soup is synonymous with New Orleans’ cuisine. Its deep history is enshrined in historical cookbooks and newspapers, and it remains a staple of menus at modern, high-end restaurants like Commander’s Palace and Galatoire’s. However, despite its cultural and historical importance, turtle soup, and the turtles from which it is made, remain largely unstudied by archaeologists. In this poster, we present the first comprehensive analysis of turtle remains from over 10 archaeological sites in NOLA, with an eye towards identifying trends in historical taste preferences, turtle harvesting strategies, and human impacts to historical turtle populations. To this end, we combine taxonomic identifications from zooarchaeology, zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS), and ancient DNA (aDNA) with carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur stable isotope compositions and turtle size estimations produced via linear regression models to trace long-term continuity and change in turtle use and turtle historical ecology over 200 years of the city’s history.

Glass bottles and bottle fragments recovered from historic archaeological sites provide information on trading patterns, domestic uses, and alcohol consumption. For instance, the shape, color, and thickness of vessels can provide insights on how they were used and what they likely contained. During the eighteenth century, olive-green glass was generally used for wine and alcohol, whereas blue-green glass was used for miscellaneous storage of medicines, cosmetics, condiments and other liquids. To explore this further, the collection of bottle glass fragments found at Fort St. Joseph, an eighteenth-century mission, garrison, and trading post located in present-day Niles, Michigan, was analyzed for each of the buildings identified thus far, providing insights on the trade and usage of glass at this important historic site.

Throughout the 19th century enslaved and emancipated African American craft workers were major producers of alkaline-glazed stoneware vessels first developed in Edgefield, South Carolina. Alkaline-glazed stoneware was initially developed by the Landrum family at Pottersville in Edgefield County, in an attempt to create affordable, locally produced imitations of the more expensive European ceramics. Through the production of utilitarian stoneware vessels, Black potters were enmeshed in local and regional economic networks. Following the Civil War, African American potters trained at Pottersville and other production sites throughout Edgefield County took control over the distribution of their wares, and many travelled elsewhere in the state to establish their own production centers. This project analyzes historic ceramics from sites across South Carolina to increase understandings of the shifting dynamics of commodity exchange networks between African American potters and tenant farming communities amid the changing social and political environments of the 19th century.

Excavations conducted by the First Colony Foundation on Roanoke Island from 2008-2010 uncovered a number of glass beads associated with the Roanoke Colony. These excavations, in the Hariot Woods, likely uncovered materials related to the 1585 Hariot/Gans workshop at Fort Raleigh. Here we present an elemental analysis of these glass beads using laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). With these analyses we evaluate the temporality, origins, and global itineraries of the glass beads recovered from Roanoke Island, comparing these data with our analyses of the glass beads from the Jamestown colony. Our analyses support the attribution of the Roanoke Island beads to the 16^th century.

Established in 1970, the Tennessee Division of Archaeology hired its first historical archaeologist in 1974. Realizing that few historic-period archaeological sites had been recorded in Tennessee, he initiated a program of archival research and site recording in three test counties. This led to the development of thematic surveys that focused on one particular type of resource. A few examples include potteries, Civil War military sites, frontier stations, gunmaker shops, and Rosenwald Schools. The Division of Archaeology worked closely with the Tennessee Historical Commission and used federal survey and planning grants with the goal of assessing the potential eligibility of sites for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Using this system, the Division of Archaeology has added hundreds of historic-period archaeological sites to the site database that provide specific and contextual data integral to identification, preservation, and data recovery in the federal compliance process.