The City of Boston Archaeology Program is undertaking a project to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), a pivotal event in the American Revolution. This initiative focuses on historically underrepresented groups in Charlestown – women, children, people of color, Native Americans, etc. – affected by the battle's aftermath. Research conducted from 2023-2024 includes a reconstructed census, digitized resident loss claims, and a new 1775 property map. These efforts will culminate in a 3D reconstruction of Charlestown's 1775 landscape and multiple archaeological investigations. These investigations aim to pinpoint the 1775 redoubt, potential mass burial sites, and other historically significant locations that will illuminate the diverse experiences and contributions of Charlestown's residents during this critical moment in history.

Prior archaeological studies of ordinaries primarily focused on determining the material correlates of the ordinary or how the ordinary functions as a liminal space, often because of alcohol. There is a recent trend of interrogating ordinaries as a place of strategic decision making, but not at the household level. The Bakers patented Baker’s Choice in 1677 and leased what would become Baker’s Ordinary in 1678 in the center of St. Mary’s City, Maryland. A comparison of the character of those two assemblages, in combination with the historic record, highlights the strategic decision making of the Baker family to increase their social, political, and economic capital. They chose to invest in their ordinary and to strategically leverage the unique social opportunities afforded to them because of it. Ultimately, the Baker family accrued generational wealth, elected government positions, and the ability to lobby the governing colonial elite while serving them.

In South Asia, historical archaeology as a discipline is still in its early stages of development. Issues have been raised with determining its scope and grappling with the legacy of archaeology as a colonial institution. What, then, are the toolkits used by historical archaeologists that can be useful to study the more recent past of the western Indian Ocean? This paper explores this through observations from preliminary survey work conducted in Chaul, a colonial outpost set up on India’s western coast in the 16th century. As one of the earliest Portuguese urban experiments in Asia, it was characterized by a dense and highly stratified social landscape, where communities of different religious, economic and ethnic identities cohabited. Focusing on inequality and settlement organization, this paper discusses some of the complex – and often contradictory – aims and practices that characterized Iberian expansion into the western Indian Ocean.

This presentation seeks to challenge dominant narratives surrounding the Great Hunger in Ireland (An Gorta Mór, 1845-1852) by focusing on the understudied topic of marine resource acquisition. Most historiography of the Famine emphasizes the potato blight, British colonial policies, and/or the resulting socioeconomic devastation. However, these subjects largely omit the daily survival strategies and acts of resistance employed by the Irish populace, particularly in their interaction with the marine environment. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from historical archaeology and social history, this study explores how coastal communities turned towards the sea as an essential resource for nutrition, self-sufficiency, and resistance against oppressive conditions imposed by the crop failures and British colonial rule. By critically engaging with the role of material culture and spatial control in primary accounts, we argue that marine resources played an important role in the everyday survival of Irish communities.

This paper examines lithic materials recovered at Coan Hall by archaeological field schools under the direction of Dr. Barbra Heath. Coan Hall (44NB11) has been identified as a Late Woodland and middle 17th-century English site. At the start of its historical occupation, both colonists and Indigenous peoples inhabited it. Located along the lower Potomac River valley, Coan Hall provided little for its inhabitants if they wanted to access lithic sources. Despite this, lithics ranging in type are present within the site. A pXRF analysis was conducted to provide insight regarding the sources of lithics found at Coan Hall. This analysis is a first step in interpreting lithics found in 17th-century contexts at 44NB11.

In the mid-19th century, the Arikara, followed by the Mandan and Hidatsa (MHA), began utilizing Euroamerican cabin-style architecture alongside and instead of earth lodges. By the late 19th century, cabins became the primary domestic structure. However, the archaeological record on cabins is lacking compared to the archival and ethnographic records. The existing record mainly consists of reports summarizing findings and detailing construction methods rather than interpreting Native life. Building from the data provided by these reports, this paper aims to produce a more comprehensive portrayal of Native life during the mid-to-late 19th century, a tumultuous period of settler colonialism on the Plains. Through the combination of other sources (ethnographic, archival, photographic) with archaeology and the use of methods like critical fabulation, this paper uncovers stories of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara resilience and survivance to redress salvage narratives of change and loss.

In 1983, Kathleen Deagan defined the Spanish Colonial Pattern from material recovered from early St. Augustine. This pattern was later refined at Puerto Real, Haiti. It states that the Spanish adapted to the new world by retaining some Spanish traits while incorporating traits of non-Hispanic society. Does this apply to other nations’ early colonial efforts? An analysis of the material recovered from the 17th century site of Charles Towne, North Carolina examines whether the English followed a similar pattern of colonization in the Americas.