In 1842, Presbyterian missionaries Robert and Catherine Sawyer moved to southeastern Liberia, West Africa to establish a mission at the bustling port of Settra Kru. Robert Sawyer died suddenly in 1843, leaving behind a daily journal that documented his turbulent emotional state during the move. His journal also indicates that the Sawyers brought medicines and housewares with them, and preliminary archaeological surveys at the site of Settra Kru revealed the presence of imported materials that may be associated with a nineteenth-century expatriate site. Together, these sources not only reveal Sawyer’s negative emotions and biases about moving to what he saw as a “strange and sickly country,” but also hint at complex emotional-economic exchanges between the missionaries, town inhabitants, and itinerant traders who frequented the port. This paper examines how the missionaries experienced mobility as both a physical and emotional undertaking, shaped by their implicit role as colonial agents.

Matthew Clavin’s 2015 book Aiming for Pensacola focuses on “fugitive slaves” who came to Pensacola, Florida seeking freedom. Drawn by the large population of free people of color and the coastal location, Pensacola provided opportunities for the self emancipated to blend in with the local free population or escape the American South. It is this narrative that guides much of the current public interpretation and understanding of enslavement in Pensacola. However, this interpretation often leaves out the difficult and emotional experiences of the self emancipated and ignores the stories of the enslaved people brought by force to Pensacola. In this paper, I will examine the tension in the public interpretation of enslavement in Pensacola between the stories of those who came by choice and by force, explore how these differences can be seen archaeologically, and trace out how the movements of the enslaved left a legacy on the city.

In a unique form of archaeological mobility, in 2002 the community of Rollinsford, NH brought the ca. 1701 Colonel Paul Wentworth House home. It had witnessed the development of the town from Wentworth’s sawmills to a bustling industrial milltown before being moved to Dover, MA in 1936 by a Wentworth descendant. With the end of the family line, it was nearly demolished before a small non-profit organization formed to repatriate the house. It was replaced next door to its original location and for over 20 years the Association for Rollinsford Culture and History (ARCH) sought landowner permission to conduct archaeological research. A partnership among ARCH, Strawbery Banke Museum, and a new landowner resulted in a successful excavation. The belongings recovered and our new understanding of the layout of the yard and its outbuildings, including a carriage house described as slaves’ quarters, will help ARCH better interpret and memorialize the house.

This paper examines the emotional landscapes of fishermen since early 17th-century to nowadays in the Atlantic, focusing on the emotional consequences of sea mobility and the absence of family ties. Stemming from historical documents and archaeological remains, this paper explores the displacement and loneliness experienced by men who were seasonally separated from their homes.
Fishermen longed for home. Historical and archaeological records demonstrate those feelings. These emotional feelings are materially observed in the unusual quantity of drinking vessels. These remains suggest not only the hardship of subsistence labour in an unfamiliar, harsh environment, but also the strategies people used to fight their displacement and loneliness. Using examples from different parts of the Atlantic (e.g. Newfoundland, Portugal and the UK), this paper wants to challenge the traditional interpretations that exclude emotions from the lives of past individuals, contributing to a wider understanding of emotional resilience and longing in maritime colonial contexts.

This communication examines the emotional dimensions of forced mobility experienced by individuals transported from the Portuguese colonies to Europe to participate in colonial exhibitions during the 20th century. Though no formal records confirm whether they remained in Europe, photographs document their transport, presence and display in exhibitions in Portuguese cities. These individuals, likely brought against their will, were staged as representations of colonial “otherness” in profoundly racialized and stereotyped contexts. Through visual analysis of these photographs, this study explores expressions of fear, sadness, resignation, confusion, or resilience as emotional traces of displacement. By interpreting these images as affective artefacts, this presentation considers how coerced transits across imperial geographies left emotional imprints, both visible and obscured. In doing so, it highlights the entanglement of movement, material culture, and affect in colonial performance and recovers partial, yet powerful, glimpses into the inner worlds of those made to embody empire.

The Sazerac cocktail is an iconic drink of New Orleans – so beloved as to be declared the official cocktail of the alcohol-rich city. The artifacts at the heart of this narrative evoke a deep pining for a home left behind for the call of gold. Rye whiskey and tumblers are not unexpected in a booming Western gold mining town; Sazerac aromatic bitters, however, are an anomaly amongst the landlocked Highland Mountains, roughly 2,100 miles from home. This paper examines the pull on the palate that one’s home evokes and tracks the unexpected journey of a New Orleans cocktail from the Crescent City to Highland City (1866-1900) in western Montana.

Archaeological excavations located at least two of the settlement’s ten saloons. This assemblage highlighted the arduous steamship journey taken by Peychaud bitters, Gulf oysters, and French Champagne up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and then by beleaguered mule to Highland Gulch.

From the journey of coming out, to the movement away from one’s natal home, to a gender transition, LGBTQ+ people take many types of journeys that are shaped by desire, dreaming, and self-realization. LGBTQ+ people may move from their birth home into a more accepting community and in addition often shift from hiding themselves in the heteronormative world, to “come out” into a new identity, a meaningful spatial metaphor. Transgender people often journey from living in the role of their assigned gender at birth to inhabit a new category aligned with their identity. How can archaeologists contribute to discussions of queer place-making, gender transition, and migration? Alongside my theoretical framing, I bring in case studies from 19^thand early 20^th century America to explore the ways LGBTQ+ people journeyed in the past, endeavoring to build new selves, new lives, and new worlds.

Nineteenth-century Senegal was the stage for a series of migrations across the Sahelian landscape. These included forced migration via slave caravans or as a result of famine and warfare; particularly later in the century, these migrations were linked to individuals moving from place to place for work, whether seasonally or permanently. The Mission of St. Joseph in Ngazobil was a key hub, way-point, and destination for hundreds if not thousands of individuals moving across the Senegambian landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper considers material and archival signatures of the emotional experience of those migrations, asking: How did people maintain identities across great distances? How did people affectively craft new identity together in a new place? What material practices index affective ties to place or the hope through which new arrivals committed to life in a foreign place?

Although the 1777 Battle of Ridgefield was technically considered a British victory, it was an American victory in terms of inspiring impassioned support for the Patriot cause during the early years of the Revolutionary War. Considering battle as a form of movement or mobility, this paper will address the many emotions felt by both soldiers and townspeople during the Battle of Ridgefield, including fear, panic, courage, anger, and compassion. Additionally, this paper will discuss how battlefield archaeology may be utilized to understand the variety of complex human emotions experienced by combatants and civilians during active warfare. Finally, the Battle of Ridgefield also presents an interesting case study in the challenges of conducting battlefield archaeology in a highly modified suburban landscape whose very identity continues to be deeply informed and shaped by the historic battle, and how these sentiments are embodied materially in the present town landscape.

In Chaul, a former Portuguese enclave on India’s western coast, colonial architecture is highly visible, yet unevenly integrated into the rhythms of contemporary life. Ruined fortifications, repurposed houses, and altered sacred spaces reveal shifting engagements with a colonial past that is rarely discussed. What does it mean to inhabit spaces built through colonial violence, particularly in a multiethnic, multireligious community where the impacts of that violence were unequally distributed? Drawing on architectural mapping, archival research, as well as long-term personal engagement with Chaul, this paper explores spaces that have moved from being tools of imperial expansion to sites of simultaneous pride, conflict, commodification, as well as quiet indifference. I argue that these often contradictory afterlives offer a more nuanced understanding of postcolonial heritage - one that centers everyday engagements with materiality and evolving community-place relationships.

The project Le naufrage de la flotte Walker (1711): Archéologie d’un lieu de mémoire maritime brings together scholars from various discipline to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Admiral Walker’s fleet wreckage in the Saint-Lawrence estuary in 1711.

Since 2023, the ship logs have been transcribed and analyzed to address the fleet’s trajectory from Boston to Egg Island Reef, where eight to ten ships were lost on the night of September 2^nd to 3^rd 1711. Many details were lost and personal perspectives were overlooked in favor of a single narrative written by Walker nine years later.

From a single perspective retained by the meagre historiography on the 1711 event, this project provides multivocal narratives. It brings human voices back from the strategic-military discourse that glossed over the journeys that led to the loss of 1,500 lives, and it sheds new light on the archaeological remains.

Planners of the National Order of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, “reorganized” in April of 1916, cast Virginia Colonial Governor, Alexander Spotswood’s expedition over the Blue Ridge Mountains in the company of such discoveries as Columbus’ landing in 1492 and Lewis and Clark’s crossing of the continent in 1803-1806. The 1716 "Golden Horseshoe Expedition" has been remembered in many ways over the subsequent 300 years. The retellings of this journey has evoked emotional connections to the crown, to nascent nation and its expansion, to state pride and even to family connections. This Presentation will survey primary accounts of the 1716 journey over the mountains and then examine the retellings and commemorations of the journey over the subsequent 300 years.

This paper explores the emotional landscapes of domestic space through the lives of three women in Portugal between 1880 and 1920. Drawing on parish records and recent archaeological excavations, it reconstructs the lived experiences of a licensed prostitute at 12 Rua do Vale (Lisbon), a seamstress at 2 Rua das Fangas (Coimbra), and a factory worker living in impoverished conditions in Rua D. Dinis. Each case reveals distinct relationships with domestic space: the prostitute’s home doubled as a site of labor and intimacy; the seamstress’s household organization reflected both care and productivity; and the factory worker’s material absences speak to hardship, resilience, and emotional deprivation. By discussing gendered uses of space and material culture, this paper contributes to an understanding of how emotions were entangled with daily life. These narratives reveal the domestic sphere as not only physical but also deeply emotional, shaped by labor, survival, and the shifting conditions of womanhood.

After World War II, the Italian government launched the Riforma Fondiaria, a land reform program designed to place land in the hands of impoverished families in southern Italy. Nearly 70 years later, the countryside of Puglia and Basilicata reflects the program’s failure through scores of abandoned farmhouses scattered across the vast fields. Photographer Steven Seidenberg and I collaborated to record the Riforma’s buildings, material culture, and landscapes---and their contemporary reuse---to explore the development, displacement, and mobility of precarious communities in the 20th and 21st centuries. Our work highlights the impact of an aestheticized view on the interpretation of the past. The viewer is guided to an emotional position and empathic interpretation of the lived environment, the use of space, and the ways that humans travel through and live within those spaces, bringing an affective dimension to the past that is too often missing from archaeological endeavors.

Opened in 1930, the Schvitz Health Club is the only remaining historic bathhouse in Detroit. In 2020, a fully intact mikveh—Jewish ritual bath—dating to c. 1918 was uncovered beneath the ladies’ locker room, pointing to the building’s earlier role as a Jewish Community Center. This paper explores this lesser-known dimension of the Schvitz’s past and situates it within broader patterns of migration and neighborhood change in Detroit’s Jewish community, particularly the sale or abandonment of communal institutions as the population shifted from the metropolitan core to Northwestern Detroit in the mid-20th century. In doing so, it considers how communal spaces—religious, recreational, and social—are repurposed, layered, and sometimes forgotten over time as cities and the communities within them evolve.