Conference Agenda

The Kru of Liberia are famous in history for their maritime activity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These sailors were integral parts of the British and American antislavery blockade, and they sailed on vessels in every ocean across the planet, forming new communities called ‘Kru Towns’ in major port cities like Liverpool, Cape Town, Accra, and Freetown, among others. However, the identities and stories of Kru sailors were often misunderstood, deliberately misinterpreted, and misrepresented by colonial and shipboard authorities. Kru maritime history started long before the nineteenth century, when Europeans began to craft racialized narratives about them. A new historical-archaeological project in the Kru homeland of Sinoe County, Liberia seeks to complicate historical narratives about the Kru using material culture and oral history. This poster relies on firsthand archaeological data and historical analysis to build, for the first time, a complete and visual timeline of the Kru history.

In 2024, we returned to St. Croix’s Maroon Country to search for additional evidence of self-liberated Crucian habitation sites in St. Croix’s northwest hills. This effort builds upon our previous research that found tantalizing evidence for Maroon settlements on flat areas along the steep slopes of the Caledonia Valley. In a year of intense rain, the dense rain forest was difficult and unforgiving; however, the conditions we encountered enhance our understanding of the Caledonia Ghaut’s ecology and resources, such as accessibility of water and likely food sources, that were available to self-liberated Crucians.

As women began enrolling in universities across the United States in the early twentieth century, traditionally masculine spheres became the site of an emerging femininity. Single-sexed spaces organized gendered behavior. One such space was the college dormitory. The Digges House, most notably studied as the site of Williamsburg’s Bray School, served as an off-campus dormitory for women at William & Mary between 1926 and 1944 under the name Brown Hall. This project employs artifact analysis of the small finds, glass, and ceramics found in a well dating to the women’s occupation of the site as well as documentary analysis of records illuminating the social world the women navigated. Grounded in anthropological theories in discipline, gender, agency, and household archaeology, this project will offer an engendered interpretation of a brief moment in the site’s past.

The Castleton Hidden History Project was established in 2021 to highlight a diverse and inclusive history of the town of Castleton, Vermont through interdisciplinary historical, archaeological, and geographic research. Investigations to date have focused on Granger House, a well-preserved 19th-century home located in the heart of the Vermont State University-Castleton campus, with the goal of creating an interactive museum dedicated to community outreach and experiential learning. Since its inception, the project has emphasized undergraduate engagement through integrated coursework, paid internships, and participation in all aspects of research and museum planning. Student interns have collaborated in archaeological excavations, archival research, 3D imaging and modeling, architectural studies, artifact analyses, community outreach, and museum design. This poster presents the early results of these investigations and highlights the ways in which collaborative research can strengthen curricula, support student engagement, and build connections to the local community.

Despite cultural resource management (CRM) employing over 80% of archeologists in the workforce today, the realities of the field and employment within it are rarely taught at the undergraduate level. This poster investigates the author’s own university education and contrasting experiences in academia and now, as an individual employed in the CRM industry. To frame this discussion, I critically reflect on the theoretical frameworks used in my undergraduate thesis to discuss heritage tourism in light of recent developments in antiracist archeology, and more broadly the archeology of slavery. This is compared to my experiences working in CRM with complex datasets related to late-19th and early-20th century tenancy in Texas. Of particular interest are the theoretical frameworks underpinning artifact analyses and historical research. Finally, the poster reflects on our civic responsibilities as archeologists, and how these aims both intersect and are at odds with our professional responsibilities in contract archeology.

In the 1970s, the emergence of public archeology, a discipline within archeology aimed to engage the participation of the public, led many to raise questions about the public’s role in the proper stewardship of cultural materials. The public is encouraged to not only be viewed as the audience, but as equal partners alongside archeologists. With final reporting, analyses, and curation of objects requiring specialized skills, broad participation in the final stages of projects has been limited. Generally, archeologists are viewed as the arbiter of significance in the collections management process and the public’s role is challenged as their participation does not often lead to meaningful input into our understanding of the site or material. Using a post-processual theoretical framework, this poster will present an analysis of the conflicting interpretations of significance and questioning of authority in relation to cultural materials encountered in Texas Historical Commission (THC) affiliated public archeological projects.

Teachers Pay Teachers is a leading online marketplace for educational resources, with over 4,000 materials about archaeology. Most of these lessons were created by professional teachers, not archaeologists. This study evaluates a sample of free archaeology lessons to determine their accuracy and quality. Additionally, we advocate for professional archaeologists to share their lessons on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers, complementing traditional formats and enhancing accessibility for educators.

The Bracero Program was the largest guest worker program in US history, being active between 1942 and 1964. Over its 22 years of operation, the program brought millions of Mexican American men to work as cheap labor, primarily on farms and railroads. These large groups of men were forced to live in close proximity to each other in state run processing facilities and camps. This poster will explore the social relations developed between the braceros in these private, segregated, homosocial spaces using Nicole Guidotti-Hernández's transnational approach to affect and intimacy. I draw on Leonard Nadel's Texas-focused photography archive of the program and architectural maps from intimate bracero spaces, like camps, to explore, through the lens of historical archaeology, the adapted dynamics the men experienced in this modified private sphere. This work is the first step in an archaeological investigation into the daily lives of “braceros” in Texas.

Archaeological excavations spanning over twenty-five years at Fort St. Joseph, an eighteenth-century mission, garrison, and trading post, have uncovered over 1400 ceramic sherds. Creamware, faience, pearlware, and stoneware among a variety of others can impart valuable knowledge about daily life at the fort, socioeconomic status of residents, and overall access to materials. In addition, some ceramic types can be associated with specific time periods such as when they were developed and popularly used, providing information about dates and trends over time. This research will examine ceramic sherds recovered archaeologically from Fort St. Joseph that have not yet undergone analysis, building on previous research examining French faience. Specifically, the different ceramic types will be analyzed to provide further information on the varieties present and what they may indicate about the daily lives of those living in the western Great Lakes Region.

The Travis site (44JC0900), located on Jamestown Island in James City County Virginia, is a Colonial era plantation site, and is one of many historic and indigenous sites in danger of inundation due to land subsidence and climate change-driven sea level rise. Those climate change effects pose threats to the site’s integrity. The project is focused on understanding the daily habits and livelihoods of the enslaved Africans who lived on the property. The evidence found at the Travis site demonstrates the many challenges and brutal conditions faced by the enslaved Africans and African Americans there as well as the tools they used to survive and overcome them. Material culture associated with labor performed by African Americans has been recovered at the site, and the archeological team is working to interpret that evidence before it is erased by climate change.

The 1985 Jamaica National Heritage Trust Act establishes the legal framework for sites of historical significance to be declared worthy of preservation. The ambiguous language used in the JNHT Act makes Jamaica’s Cultural Resource Management a matter of opinion left to those who sit on the JHNT advisory board. Archaeology practiced in Jamaica has overwhelmingly examined sites of colonial contact and occupation, centering the colonial powers of Spain and England as overwhelming, dominating forces. This has led to a precedent in which the material culture of colonial societies is preserved, while the history and material culture of Jamaica’s African and Indigenous populations is destroyed. My poster will depict ethnohistorical facts, and display how Jamaica's modern-day Maroons are fighting a new war, one centered around issues of land rights, global warming, the lack of heritage management, and the laissez faire approach taken on State sanctioned development projects.

Since the City of Austin acquired the 147-acre property in the late 1990s, the Stephenson Nature Preserve & Outdoor Education Center (SNPOEC) has provided a space for Austinites to appreciate and steward the “nature, wildlife, and ecosystems of Central Texas.” A rich cultural history of Central Texas, however, also lies beneath the preserve’s urban forest canopy. Building upon archaeological theories of landscape and environmental historian William Cronon’s generative troubling of “wilderness,” this poster highlights recent efforts to document historic and cultural resources within the SNPOEC, a preserve managed by the Austin Parks and Recreation Department. More specifically, we outline the preliminary results of archival and cartographic research tracing the historical ties between the SNPOEC and Kincheonville–a multiracial agrarian community founded by formerly enslaved African Americans shortly after the U.S. Civil War. An outline of plans for future investigations, interpretation, and outdoor education at the SNPOEC will also be presented.