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In this guest editor's introduction to this thematic volume on the historical archaeology of Queensland, Australia, I briefly discuss some of the history and archaeology of Queensland in light of some of the major themes currently being investigated. The papers presented in this volume are also introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally when Americans went to work they expected that they would earn a reasonable wage, work in a safe environment, put in a 40 h week, collect paid vacation days, earn sick leave, have the right to organize and receive health and retirement benefits. Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer workers receive these rights and today only a minority of people in the United States work under these conditions. The decline in real wages, benefits, rights and safety experienced by twenty-first century American workers has correlated with a decline in organized labor. Corporations and the right have assailed unions to erode worker's rights and 'increase competitiveness' in a globalized, neo-liberal, capitalist, world. The attacks on unions spring from a monstrous lie, that politicians and corporations gave labor these benefits and thus workers no longer need unions. On the battlefield of public policy, these assaults on organized labor work in a fundamentally ideological way that calls the continued existence of unions into question. In this paper, I will discuss how archaeological studies of labor's struggle can reveal that contrary to the monstrous lie, workers and their families won worker's rights with blood and that solidarity and organization remain essential to maintain these rights. The paper begins with the present state of labor's struggle and looks to the past to consider its preconditions. Archaeologists have studied strikes, the lived experience of working class life and class war to study history backwards and these studies contribute to the labor's struggle for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how doing history backward may allow archaeologists to begin imagining an archaeology of the future. The purpose of such an archaeology would be two-fold: first, to examine the past from the vantage point of the present as a way of better understanding the past as precondition, and second, to critically examine the present with an eye toward imagining how archaeology might be able to influence the future. Drawing on case studies that offer windows on the growth of capitalist production and the continuing impacts of colonialism, this paper seeks to demonstrate the power of using archaeology to link past and present. By focusing on the ideological dimensions of processes such as commoditization and the erasure of indigenous histories I hope to highlight the value of doing history backward and its potential for constructing an archaeology of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, the 150th historical archaeology project was conducted in the central city area of Melbourne. Almost all of these investigations have been undertaken since the introduction of the Victorian Heritage Act 1995. With the Act recently under review, it is timely to look back on the lessons learned by heritage managers and archaeologists over the last 25 years. It is also an opportunity to review current practices to ensure that future site investigations are conducted efficiently and achieve meaningful outcomes. How can information obtained from the previous 150 projects inform and enhance the research frameworks of future work? What can we learn about Melbourne’s historical archaeology that we do not already know? How can community benefits be optimized? This paper will evaluate the successes and failures associated with the implementation of historical archaeology legislation in an urban setting and consider how the past 25 years of archaeology in the city can inform our approach to future opportunities in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have turned to things, it is argued in different contexts by social and cultural scholars. The previously neglected stuff of life is back and now deserves to be embraced and included in our histories and democracies. This paper discusses our efforts to include these others and seeks to reflect on how some of our gestures of inclusion may not be as humble and tolerant as we like to argue. With reference to an ongoing archaeological research of a recently abandoned herring station in Iceland's northwest the paper discusses how the archaeological remembering of this site, and its inclusion in historical narration, can in fact easily result in the active forgetting of things, their fragmented and discontinuous memory and their utter silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To establish historical and archaeological contexts for the case studies presented in this volume, this paper presents a review of the literature on the history and archaeology of almshouses. Because both English and Dutch colonial almshouses were based on European precedents, this paper examines historical research and archaeological work conducted in The Netherlands and England, as well as their North American colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nineteenth- and twentieth-century non-indigenous presence in the Solomon Islands as an example of a maritime industrial frontier. In particular it employs a combination of frontier and maritime cultural landscape theories to consider the material and cognitive elements that inform us about how a maritime industrial frontier was shaped and operated, including the relationships between shipwrecks, maritime infrastructure, nodal points of activity and indigenous agency. The integrated analysis of these elements reveals distinct maritime patterns considered indicative of the broader economic, political and social concerns occurring on this frontier on the peripheries of the Western European World System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Ussher, owner of the Ballysaggartmore estate in west County Waterford in the early 1800s, was one among many notorious landlords in Ireland during the Great Famine of 1847-52. He is remembered to this day in the locality for evicting hungry tenants and demolishing their houses for the non-payment of rents on his small estate, having earlier secured some improvement of land-quality through their labor. Buildings and designed-landscape features of Ussher's demesne remain today, and are capable of an archaeological reading. They speak eloquently, even spectacularly, of the self-aggrandizing values of his social class. Relatively little 'tenant archaeology' survives above-ground on the former estate, and most of the sites of eviction before and during the Famine are unidentified, but the story of their removal, and of tenant resistance-or non-resistance, more accurately-to it, is of some interest to students of the historical archaeology of the period. This paper documents the rise and fall of the Ussher project, illuminating the social violence that was often unleashed from landlord culture through the agency of Improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le Morne Brabant is an important mountain landscape in the living memory, colonial history, and national identity of Mauritius. This paper presents a kind of salvage project to understand Makak, an elusive, 'mythic' settlement along Le Morne's northern coast. This detailed analysis brings together wide-ranging oral, written, and material evidence to show that Makak is an informal place name for an area first settled by French colonists in the 1700s, then by several prominent 'Free Colored' families in the 1800s, and finally depopulated as residents were forcibly removed in the 1940s. The investigation suggests that Makak is a serial settlement, which seemingly was not eking by at the edge of the Indian Ocean, but thrived as a multicultural community, tapped into global trade networks. The project thus provides a new way of framing Le Morne's history and heritage, while also providing a potential research model for the nascent field of Mauritian historical archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have largely embraced the idea that our discipline is political; that from its inception it has been intimately linked to capitalism and implicated with nationalist, colonialist, imperialist, sexist and racist agendas. Archaeologists have always validated our existence by the social relevance of our work, often with varying success. We believe that the best method may be to study history backward: to begin with the present result and look to the past to consider its preconditions. Bringing these understandings forward again allows us to project this potential into the future and examine the present complete with its ties to the past. This dialectical connection of past, present and future provides an important perspective on the long-term historical study of the social relations of capitalism. In this paper, we provide the larger theoretical context to elucidate these issues that form the foundation for this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an historical archaeological examination of the socioeconomic relations of the Chinese and European communities of Cooktown in north Queensland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It looks at the social landscape and production, exchange and consumption of material culture to show that the Chinese were not a disengaged group, as depicted in conventional understandings of colonial life, but integral to the town's socioeconomic fabric. This close relationship arose out of a process of negotiation between Chinese and Europeans which responded to the strengths, weaknesses and resources of their individual business networks, and the particular conditions of Cooktown's frontier environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of archaeological site formation processes, although routinely undertaken for prehistoric sites, is only carried out in historical archaeology in a limited way. Understanding the processes which formed the archaeological record of a site is an important first step towards developing justifiable inferences about past behavior and past societies regardless of the age of the site. This paper identifies and examines the cultural and non-cultural processes that formed the archaeological record at the Commissariat Store, Brisbane. The history of the site, from its construction in 1829 as part of the Moreton Bay penal settlement to the present, is examined and the expected impacts and processes on the archaeological record are identified. Archaeological evidence from the salvage excavation of the site undertaken in 1978 and 1979 is analyzed to identify the cultural and non-cultural site formation processes. This study identifies the presence of cultural formation processes including discard, loss, abandonment and re-use from an examination of the historical and archaeological evidence. Non-cultural formation processes at work in the site include faunalturbation, floralturbation, flooding, and aquaturbation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indo-Hispanic interaction is an essential issue in the colonial period in the Caribbean, but its study is currently marginalized as an offshoot of pre-Columbian archaeology. This state of affairs denies the indigenous contribution to the past and present ethnocultural composition of the region and privileges a colonial approach in scholarship. This paper reviews important aspects of the history of archaeological research on contact and colonial interaction in the Greater Antilles and its theoretical underpinnings. It also presents two recent archaeological case studies that show different facets of the interaction processes using new methodological approaches: El Cabo, Dominican Republic, with evidence of early contact, and El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba, a context of interethnic interaction under colonial conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zooarchaeological works in the city lack of a specific theoretical and methodological framework to understand its faunal assemblages. The different analyses were done in most cases following procedures that had been developed for hunter-gatherer contexts. In this paper, we evaluate some questions related to this issue, encompassed in the acquisition mode and the characteristics of the archaeological record. Finally, an example from two sites in La Boca, Buenos Aires city, Argentina is given in order to understand some of these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the walled landlord villages of the Tehran Plain in terms of hierarchy and control, and how these structures are created and expressed through the spatial landscape of the villages. Drawing on original fieldwork, the ways in which landlords used the physicality of the villages to maintain and reinforce control over farmers is explored. We suggest that the 'success' or at least longevity of the land tenure system in Iran prior to the later twentieth century can be attributed at least in part to the buildings and spaces of the villages themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of historical archaeology to make a significant contribution to our understanding of Queensland's recent past is hindered by factors including few practitioners, limited publications about historical archaeological research and a need to establish its relevance beyond the archaeological community. There exists great opportunities in Queensland for researchers to explore a diverse range of research topics of which only some are beginning to be investigated through historical archaeological enquiry. This paper investigates the current state of the discipline in Queensland, the challenges practitioners face today and into the future, and the avenues down which historical archaeologists may make significant contributions to our understanding of Queensland's recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, US border policies have worked to funnel undocumented migration into remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where deadly terrain and temperatures make border crossing most dangerous. This weaponization of the desert finds some cover, we argue, behind the scalar projects of state-centered maps emphasizing vast geography and gross statistics over personal pain and trauma. Counter-mapping against these projects, we draw on archaeological and ethnographic data from the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), and geospatial data for thousands of deceased migrants across southern Arizona, to witness how migration, as both socio-historical process and humanitarian crisis, emerges from human-scale strategies and experiences of suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melbourne was a major global city in the nineteenth century. Founded by pastoralists in 1835, the settlement grew explosively following the discovery of gold in 1851, and within a decade the population had reached half a million people. New settlers and new wealth brought a boom in housing construction, manufacturing, civic institutions, and transport and communication infrastructure, as the city became the leading urban center in Australasia. The structure and fabric of the city today expresses much of its colonial development, when “Marvellous Melbourne” was among the most remarkable metropolitan centers in the Asia-Pacific region. In the last ten years, the intersection of more rigorous heritage protection and a boom in large-scale urban development means that there has been a fluorescence of historical archaeological work carried out in Melbourne, especially in the central business district. We draw upon this extensive archive of material to highlight the results of major archaeological discoveries that have occurred in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historic documents are a useful tool in understanding post-contact archaeological sites. Documents can show different forms of interaction between Europeans and Native Americans and chronicle events that are invisible in the archaeological record. Using interactions between the Lower Creek and Westerners as a case study, a sample of 300 historic documents, written between 1620 and 1840, were analyzed and quantified. Results indicate that this method of quantification reflects historic events seen both in the documents and archaeological records and measures the level of interaction between Native Americans and colonialist through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four unusual artifacts reflecting an unambiguous connection with a particular politician or political movement have recently been recovered from archaeological sites in Southern Ontario. These items reflect socio-political issues from the homelands of immigrant families. Politically charged items carry meaning for the user and also serve to forge bonds and create divisions within the community. Recently discovered artifacts relating to the Irish Repeal movement and the British Great Reform Act of 1832 provide examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are there traditions of folk ritual practice in Australian historical contexts, and are they observable in the archaeological record? Studies from the US and UK have documented a range of practices suggesting the persistence of British and European traditions of folk magic well into the twentieth century and previous historical work has identified numerous examples of ritual concealments in Australian buildings. In examining over 4,500 Australian historical archaeological sources, however, we found very few examples of possible folk ritual practices. This raises the question of why such practices are not being captured by current archaeological recording methods. As counterpoint, a general model is constructed from US, UK and Australian work that raises intriguing possibilities for the situating of superstitious behavior in Australian historical archaeology, including the contexts in which people might be more prone to practise such behaviors and how they might be materially identifiable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the W.E.B. Du Bois Homesite in Great Barrington Massachusetts is traced from the present to its earliest inhabitation after the arrival of Europeans and African captives. Social processes of class and race operating at different time scales have constrained the ways the members of Du Bois's maternal relatives, and more recently private foundations and the public institution of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have made use of the property. The Homesite figures in Du Bois's memories of his childhood and was a source of pride during his 26 years of ownership. Telling its story backwards provides insights into how larger social and ideological forces affected individual actions, observations that provide guidance for future commemoration efforts at this National Historic Landmark site honoring the accomplishments of W.E.B. Du Bois. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 American presidential election led some to believe that an era of possibility had finally dawned. But change remains elusive, and questions about how to advance social justice causes persist in the age of Obama. Critical examinations of past social movements help answer these questions, and to this end I offer research on Smithfield and North Elba, two New York towns imagined as utopias by reformer Gerrit Smith (1797-1874). While some have emphasized a narrative of utopia realized, research on the artifacts, landscapes, and texts associated with them has revealed past struggles and knowledge of what hinders future imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revitalization of the City of Binghamton has been seen as a key element for economic recovery of the central New York region. Recently, civic leaders have favored neoliberal strategies. Supporters justify these strategies based on notions of community well being. They also assume that government sponsored creative destruction will counter-act the inherent tendency within capitalism to seek spatial fixes. Archaeological research on the history of landscape transformations in Binghamton demonstrates the depth of capitalist spatial fixes that have contributed to Binghamton's current economic crisis. The resulting exploitation of labor and the working class was often obscured by ideologies associated with individual achievement or social reform. Thus, the history of capitalist social relations as it was written in the city scape of Binghamton echoes contemporary conditions and has the potential to inform critiques of these conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The town of Bova (Calabria, Italy) is a post-medieval montane community that remained inaccessible well into the twentieth century. Archival research, field survey, and spatial analyses provide a foundation for investigating the effects of social and political restructuring on the economic and social development of the community. Attitudes of laxness, disinterest, or ignorance have been attributed to inhabitants of this region. They can be interpreted as projected upon the citizens of Bova and others in southern Calabria by those in more urban centers to the north. Potentially, they reflect preferred survival strategies in the face of shifting imperial control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lavras do Abade research is a historical archaeological study about a gold mining village in midwestern Brazil that was destroyed by an environmental conflict at the end of the nineteenth century. This article concerns the history and archaeology of Lavras do Abade and consists of a post-disciplinary intersection of documentary and material sources about the site. In addition, only this type of reconstruction of a long-term event permits the scientific analysis of all the possible causes and consequences of this ecological contention. In this way, historical archaeology can be used to transpose a simple narrow view of the reconstruction of the past and offer insights into understanding similar unrest and group conflict today and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pastoralism was the mainstay of the developing economy of Queensland. The men and women who owned the pastoral properties were mainly from upper and middle class English and Scottish families. One such family, the Somersets, occupied Caboonbah, a pastoral property in the Brisbane Valley of Queensland in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Excavation of the rubbish gully associated with the homestead provided material evidence of how this family adhered to the tenets of middle class family life while living in an isolated rural area and contending with the fluctuating fortunes of life on the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Textile remains were discovered during a salvage excavation at the site of the North Brisbane Burial Ground, a nineteenth-century cemetery in the city of Brisbane, Australia. Ninety-six textile samples were collected at excavation, comprising 39 twill weaves, 17 tabby weaves, one haircord weave, one satin weave, three knitted fabrics, one piece of felt and 34 masses of loose wool packing. Most of the woven textiles recovered were coffin coverings or coffin linings. Similarly, the majority of non-woven textile samples were also associated with coffins and their dressing. Five of the identified textiles were likely to have been fragments of garments worn by the deceased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within institutions, a separate social world comes into existence. Gender is a crucial shaper of relations in this new world, defining status, relationships to others and personal identity. Understanding the gendered conditions of, and responses to, institutional care is an important social contribution of historical archaeology to contemporary society. Research on the Peel Island Lazaret in Moreton Bay, Queensland, uses a model for engendering archaeology, with modifications pertinent to historical archaeology. Analysis builds on the work of others who have investigated the ways in which men and women of the confined and confining classes experienced institutions and interacted with each other. This study also extends beyond these approaches in exploring the areas of 'interpersonal agency' and relationship building, and the ways in which disadvantage minimization was mediated by the structuring principle of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preliminary historical archaeological research on Lizard Island in far north Queensland is enabling the Queensland Government to develop more effective management strategies for on-site interpretation of the historical precinct of Watsons Bay. Although popularly associated with the north Queensland colonial heroine Mary Watson, the Bay can now be understood as a large multilayered cultural landscape with meaning to a wide variety of groups. The common aspects of the three known beche-de-mer operations that occupied the Bay between 1860 and 1881 and the nature of the emerging archaeological record afford many opportunities for scaled archaeological research. It further highlights aspects of historical archaeological theory and the relationship between the discipline and the historical record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographs and documentary accounts relating to Geronimo's 1886 attempted surrender at the Cañon de los Embudos site are used to explore the archaeological nature of structure or hut imprints. These primary written and visual sources provide a basis for understanding the extremely unobtrusive nature of these shelter remains. Archaeological footprints from this site today reveal that house construction patterns are consistent with mobile groups in general when under circumstances similar to those at the surrender site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the excitement generated in Britain since 2007 by the York Archaeological Trust's excavations of the city's Hungate neighborhood, which Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree characterized as a 'slum' in his pioneering poverty survey of 1901, derives from the unexpected volume and variety of material evidence uncovered about life in a poor community within a modern industrial city. Such material evidence and its often uncertain relationships to other historical data can enhance analysis by complicating understanding of the past, rather than echoing conventional wisdom. Findings from Hungate can thus contribute to nuanced understandings of urban social disadvantage not only at the neighborhood level in this one particular British city, but at the larger scales of analysis that encompass the growth of cities and interacting urban regions in Britain and around the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These understandings have contemporary relevance for a world in which over half of humanity now lives in urban areas, as misconceptions about 'slums' continue to undermine efforts to reduce urban inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the mid-nineteenth century, east-central Vermont supported two major copper mines and their associated villages. In order to wrest thousands of tons of copper from the earth these mines, the Elizabeth and Ely mines, hired and housed thousands of miners, laborers, and their families. Both mines pursued the same resource in the same environment during the same period, but the Ely Mine developed a centralized village, while the Elizabeth Mine housed its workers in isolated housing clusters. The causes of these differences in worker housing can be traced to differences in scale, setting, and managerial philosophy, and can be analyzed within the larger historical context of Improvement and the larger ethnographic context of paternalism in mining communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume on the archaeology of urban poverty arises from a three-day symposium hosted by York Archaeological Trust and the University of York in July 2009 to establish the wider intellectual framework for the investigation of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century archaeology of the Hungate neighborhood of York. In this opening article, the trajectory of medieval and post-medieval archaeology in Britain is contrasted with historical archaeology in the United States and Australia, and the influence of the pre-modern history of the Hungate neighborhood on its development since 1800 is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflective piece draws together the themes and issues presented within the volume, exploring historic and contemporary definitions and attitudes towards poverty and their implications of the archaeological study of 'slum' neighborhoods. It compares and contrasts the individual case studies from York and Manchester with investigations in America and Australia, drawing attention to the differences between them. Suggestions are made for future investigations, particularly in the potential for further comparative work at an international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]