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Using the example of an industrial site in Edmonton, Alberta, this paper argues that industrial ruins represent instantiations of abstract abandonment, a kind of real abstraction that directly articulates to the logic of capital. Drawing from excavations of the industrial ruins of Mill Creek Ravine, one of the first industrial areas in Edmonton, this paper reveals how sites of abstract abandonment congeal critical histories of both abandonment and its afterlives. The history of these ruins, and the communities that emerged after they were abandoned materialize the failures of capitalist fantasies, as well as the sprouts that grow in its cracks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last 500 years is characterized by immense socioeconomic and environmental transformations on a global scale. Animals were significantly affected by these processes but were also central to many of the transformations that shaped the modern world. While there has been a growing number of researchers investigating animal bones from archaeological sites from this period, the "Zooarchaeology of the Modern Era" working group provides the first dedicated forum for these scholars to meet. This paper introduces a special collection of studies which resulted from the first meeting of this research group and explores how these investigations help us understand our modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boston's "Big Dig" construction project resulted in the excavation of multiple archaeological sites dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, including the Great House/Three Cranes Tavern in Charlestown, Massachusetts (USA). An otherwise unremarkable pit below the tavern foundation contained bones originally identified as a cat skeleton, which has subsequently been reidentified as a dog. This paper discusses site context, osteological evidence for the dog's reclassification, and the shifts in cultural meaning this may indicate. Employing an osteobiographical approach, it draws together points of connection between the modern skeletal assessment, a series of 1980s excavations, and the motivations of eighteenth-century tavern inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological excavations conducted in Lisbon and nearby cities have yielded a significant amount of a type of pottery from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contexts not made in Europe. These bear characteristics allowing them to be associated with African or Brazilian productions and probably used by African populations. Although generally absent from the archaeological record, accounts from the mid-fifteenth century onwards note the presence of African people in Portugal, most as slaves. Materially speaking, however, it has always been assumed that they adapted to using local material culture, hence the lack of archaeological evidence marking them as distinct groups. However, the non-European pots discussed here reveal extensive wear marks and are found associated with domestic contexts. Most slaves worked in such contexts, as borne out by the historical evidence. The purpose of this paper is to start a discussion on the ways which these objects could have been used by non-Europeans in Portugal and how they reflect the presence of African populations with a specific identity and distinct social practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology from St. Mary's College of Maryland began looking for the former homestead of West Ashcom in the Spring of 2012. West Ashcom was established on the south bank of the Patuxent River in what is now St. Mary's County, MD by John Ashcom in 1651. At its height in the early eighteenth century it contained a manor house, kitchen, dairy, orchard, port, haberdashery, and various other barns and dependencies. Using traditional sources such as archives and methods like pedestrian surveys and surface collections, a late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century site was identified in a plowed field. Since then, archaeologists from SMCM have employed a range of sources, field methods, and mapping techniques to define the parameters of the site, past structures, and identify activity areas in a largely compromised area. This paper summarizes the results of more traditional uses of GIS mapping paired with experimental drone data to demonstrate the benefit of mixing old and new technologies when interpreting sites subject to continuous plowing and planting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work by archaeologists emphasized the contributions of archaeological fieldwork to the study of post-classical Greece. This marks a significant departure from traditional approaches to the archaeology of Byzantium that tended to focus on art historical methods and architectural history. Despite these changes in the study of post-classical Greece, the issues of abandonment, continuity and change continue to play an important role both in ongoing debates and will undoubtedly influence future research priorities. Only collaboration among scholars who study historical archaeology in Greece and elsewhere will ensure the continued relevance of this field even as these long-standing debates wane in relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the desired culture of a dictatorial system be transmitted from one generation to another? The focus of dictators on children could be an answer. Factually in such a system, children are located in a value system which teaches them what to do or what not to do in purpose of being good for the political system since the very beginning of their lives. In Iran, the traditional educational system teaches children to act as adults; people who are able to discern which action is bad and which is good. The exceptions are usually the ones who deconstruct the cultural/political structure and begin to resist based on their agencies. In the present paper, we argue the process of education (formal and informal) in Iran based on two sets of material cultural remains. The first is the Qajar (nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photos of children) and the second is the school compositions of 19 students found in the bag of a teacher who died in the devastating earthquake of Bam in 2003, in South Eastern Iran. The bag was found during a contemporary archaeological project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glass bottles were a valuable commodity in colonial Australia, and the commercial reuse of these vessels ensured that they were used to their full potential. The 2009 excavations at 19–37 A’Beckett Street, Melbourne, uncovered architectural features and occupation deposits associated with four bottle merchant businesses operating from Lot 35–37 between 1875 and 1914, providing a rare opportunity to study this little-known but significant light industrial trade. This paper draws on archaeological data from 35–37 A’Beckett Street to examine the role of bottle merchants and marine store dealers in nineteenth-century Melbourne. It also seeks to determine an archaeological signature for bottle merchants through comparison with other contemporary sites, and briefly touches on the implications of bottle reuse when identifying patterns of consumption in archaeological assemblages. [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]

This paper seeks to examine the role of the built environment as a tool of nineteenth-century British colonial expression within the Red Sea island town of Suakin, Sudan. Within Suakin and its environs, four major European focal points were examined through the use of archaeological survey and excavation. These were; (1) waterfront development (2) centers of colonial management, (3) terrestrial and maritime communication and (4) defense. The central argument of the paper is that economic and social control was maintained through the creation of new urban morphologies and European domination of existing urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1823, the Ontario House, a hotel and tavern, was built near Niagara Falls, Canada. In addition to providing a location for travelers and tourists to drink and lodge, Ontario House, like many other establishments, billeted soldiers when the need arose. The 2012 excavation of the midden and features of the Ontario House produced a large assemblage of artifacts including ceramics, buttons, numismatics, and military accoutrements. Of particular interest is an East Indian coin, found in the natural topsoil, which can be associated with the 67th Regiment of Foot's brief occupation of Ontario House in 1841. This paper addresses the significance of this coin and associated finds in regards to the global movement of the regiment and the socio-political context of Ontario House within regional history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the excavation of the Loyalist-period Butler Homestead site in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario a small cache of glass condiment bottles was discovered in a space identified as a larder or pantry. The form of the bottles suggests that they once contained dry mustard powder, the bottles of which are usually recovered from military sites when found in Canada. This paper examines the cultural history of mustard as a food and medicine, its role in eighteenth-century British cookery and agriculture, and demonstrates how this specific form of glass container tied a Loyalist household to local and international trade networks in British North America and England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Alternatives, framed as a simplistic dualism of capitalism vs communism, make it difficult to envision any alternative. Instead, the "sprouts" of communism lie concealed in capitalism, inherent in its contradictory logic and the twofold nature of labor. We present this theoretical framing so that our archaeological work can focus on people's 'other doing' and suggest that it will always be difficult to envision alternatives to our capitalist present until we reclaim the inspiration that exists internal to capitalism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ngongo Mbata, the main and most affluent center of the Kongo kingdom's Mbata province in the seventeenth century, is well known from the historical sources, but virtually unexplored in archaeological publications. Ngongo Mbata is unique in that it hosted a monumental stone building about which the historical record remains silent. This makes it particularly challenging from the point of view of historical archaeology. In this paper historical data, unpublished excavation results from the 1930s and our own fieldwork undertaken in 2012-13 are brought together, to tell a new story of early African-European contacts in the interior of West Central Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Spanish Occupation of the Philippines from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Laws of the Indies and ordinances determined where settlements should be established and how structures should be built. These laws radically changed indigeneous settlement patterns and created a hierarchy of space. In this paper, two stone ruins located in the old town of San Juan, Batangas, are investigated to trace the development of the town using the Laws of the Indies and ordinances as framework. The methods of study include integrating excavation results, interviews with local residents, and archival research. This research shows that the ruins were domestic units dating to the late 1800s. The architectural style of the houses and the artifacts recovered indicate that these structures belonged to local elites. These stone-based houses were the first to be archaeologically investigated in the Philippines. The results of the investigation show that the old town of San Juan was most likely a forced resettlement by the Spanish colonists. [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]

From at least 1750 until 1900, Euro-American settlers of New York and New Jersey appropriated the production of Indigenous North American shell beads, namely wampum. Excavations at the David Campbell House in northeastern New Jersey yielded deposits of worked shell coterminous with household assemblages dating from 1810 to 1850. Artifact analyses combined with merchant ledger manuscripts reveal the chaîne opératoire of settler beadmaking from 1770 to 1900, including temporalities of production, waste, and racial and gendered labor dynamics in transition to factory production. Conclusions warrant greater archaeological attention to the relationship between capitalist industrialization, settler-colonial dispossession, and Indigenous resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archaeological recovery of a padlock from an eighteenth- or nineteenth-acentury domestic site seems ordinary, offering mundane interpretations for a prosaic piece of material culture. However, a lock found in association with a slave cabin is more evocative, suggesting confinement, or alternatively, a negotiated social relationship, conditional privacy, and limited freedoms within enslavement. A survey of the archaeological literature is undertaken to determine the pervasiveness of these locks in enslaved contexts, and then these data are contextualized and interpreted using historical accounts, the WPA ex-slave narratives, and the tenets of American jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly knowledge of the historical settlements in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area in northern South Africa is fundamentally entangled with narratives told to N. J. Van Warmelo by two women, Sekgobogobo and Mphengwa. The account based on these stories narrated elements of Sekgobogobo's life history, and pointed to the at times lethal effects of internal political processes combining with regional instability and an approaching colonial frontier. This paper establishes a recursive relationship between this narrative and archaeological excavations to deepen the understanding of the sociopolitical dynamics in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [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]

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]

The Alderley Sandhills Project (ASP) was designed to archaeologically explore the transformative roles of industrialization and de-industrialization on the working communities of rural England. Collection of oral histories was an intrinsic element of fieldwork, with project participants including elderly former residents and neighbors of the excavated cottages. Their narratives provided a crucial source for understanding social meanings of the archaeological objects and places within this study site, particularly over the inter-war decades of the early twentieth century. Drawing from elements of this multi-year project, this paper will explore the dynamic maintenance of community life through the composition of social memories, and the materiality of social belonging, to illuminate the inner world of the Hagg Cottages of Alderley Edge, Cheshire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a substantial literature on the use of oral history in archaeology, but there has been little consideration of the kinds of oral history and memory produced by the practice of archaeology. Through the personal narratives of a range of people involved in excavation during the 1960s in Britain, this paper explores understandings of what has been described as an archaeological 'sub-culture'. It examines the ideas and interests that motivated peoples' engagement in the 'digging circuit' at this time, and looks at how these were implicated in the archaeology that was produced. We argue that such accounts do not simply expose the 'subjective' context in which archaeological knowledge of these sites emerged but constitute an explicit and vital challenge to established accounts of archaeology in Britain at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ringforts, the most numerous archaeological monument in the Irish landscape, have a dual character as places of early medieval habitation and as supernatural points of access to a fairy Otherworld. In my paper, I examine how these understandings interacted with, challenged and reinforced each other in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how oral perceptions had a significant if generally unacknowledged role in determining supposedly scientific archaeological perceptions of these monuments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the processes of settlement and abandonment of the medieval countryside as revealed by archaeological surveys undertaken in southern Greece. The Nemea region, the focus of an intensive archaeological survey, serves as a case study. Early archaeological surveys approached this time period primarily from a historical point of view. Political history provided the textual frame while the archaeological data were expected to “fill in” the gaps of the historical record. In contrast, in the last twenty-five years the second generation of surveys has taken an active interest in the archaeological documentation of the medieval countryside. The settlement trends observed in Nemea are viewed as manifestations of a variety of political, social, and economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the socio-spatial characteristics of two missions dating from different periods in Torres Strait, northeastern Australia. It builds upon previous archaeological research which correlates settlement-subsistence systems with the seascape cosmologies of marine specialists. Against the backdrop of profound changes in colonial governance and religious commitment (from mission to church) from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries, we map the changing structure of two Torres Strait missions, and reflect upon these changes relative to lived sea-space. We use this approach in the belief that “local” histories provide meaningful context to broader colonial narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two contrasting Australian case studies in the archaeology of Indigenous-European interaction: one mission-like in its intent, the Aboriginal Settlement for Tasmanian Aborigines at Wybalenna on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait (1833–47), the other the Lutheran mission at Lake Killalpaninna (1867–1928) investigated by the Central Australia Archaeology Project (CAAP). Each of the two case studies adopted different strategies of investigation. Wybalenna was a small excavation while Killalpaninna was an extensive surface survey. Both studies reveal diversity in the range of responses to a missionizing program, providing evidence of agency in the formation of the archaeological record. They demonstrate the value of the material evidence and the significance of archaeology in contributing to a more sensitive understanding of the interaction process by providing an alternative to textual sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mombasa’s strategic position on the Swahili Coast and fine harbours were key factors in its emergence as a prosperous city state during the early second millennium AD. These same attributes drew the attention of rival powers in the struggle to control the lucrative Indian Ocean trade network, particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Drawing from a rich legacy of cartographic and documentary sources created in the course of Mombasa’s turbulent history, this paper presents the results of a coastal archaeological survey undertaken in 2001 as part of a wider collaborative maritime project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Los Viscos, a multicomponent rockshelter in the high-altitude valley of El Bolsón, South-Central Andes, was occupied intermittently over the last 1200 years. One brief occupation dates to the early Hispanic-Indigenous contact period (ca. 1450–1630 cal CE), when European fauna were present but Hispanic political control was unestablished. Zooarchaeological analyses from this occupation are presented (NSP = 233; NISP = 83). Camelids were primarily exploited for meat and few other taxa were consumed, implying continuity with previous late pre-Hispanic occupations. Discontinuities include an apparent lack of camelid secondary product and dried meat exploitation. This is one of few studies documenting early Indigenous-European interactions in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (FBCP) burial ground was excavated in 2017 after being discovered during construction in historic Philadelphia (Leader et al., in press). Burial records indicate its use from ca. 1702–1859. Skeletal remains of approximately 491 individuals, along with associated funerary goods, including coffins and coffin furniture were recovered from the archaeological excavations. Across historical burial grounds, textiles are often infrequent due to a lack of preservation, or are understudied due to the inability to identify the fabrics. These disadvantages highlight the need for the increased sharing of methods for textile identification, and discussion of historical funerary textiles. Like many burial ground sites, a large number of shroud pins was recovered at FBCP yet only a small sample of textile material (n = 12) was preserved. Here we use polarized light microscopy (PLM) to identify textile fibers and weaves, and discuss these using other comparable funerary textile examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Central to the notion of modernity has been a historical loss of meaning and a resulting state of melancholy. An abandoned classical landscape allows for repeated inspiration and the possibility of rebirth after the rupture. Archaeological field survey has shown that the Greek countryside has been stable in only one way, a perpetual cycle of abandonment and re-habitation from prehistory to the present. This rhythm of eternal return differs from the catastrophe of a single golden age. Rather than producing anxiety, the trope of endless abandonment annuls the drama of collapse and comforts the modern psyche. The Greek countryside, thus, provides unique fodder for modernity’s historical posturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, historical archaeologists in the American West have begun conducting biochemical analyses of contents in bottles recovered from archaeological sites dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Archaeological excavations conducted at the Alameda-Stone Cemetery Site provided a large amount of data about the residents of a Tucson, Arizona neighborhood that existed between 1889 and the 1950s. This was a transformative period in the pharmaceutical industry when university-trained pharmacists advanced their field and advocated against the use of mass-produced patent and proprietary medicines. The discovery of two sealed medicine bottles with intact contents provided an opportunity to examine medicinal products from bygone days. This analysis centered on the main question: What can archaeologists discover about the contents of historical bottles that were discarded and have been subjected to environmental conditions for decades? The bottle contents from Tucson were analyzed by gas chromatograph/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) to reveal the ingredients of the medicines and were compared with biochemical medicine analysis conducted at other sites in the American West. These results, in conjunction with historical and archaeological data, demonstrate archaeologically recovered medicines can provide insight into pharmacy and medicine ingredients used in the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The redevelopment of a football stadium in Brisbane, Australia provided the opportunity to archaeologically salvage the remains of 397 colonial inhabitants from a cemetery that was in use between 1843 and 1875. No burial registers survived and DNA testing of the remains failed. One person, Eliza Coffey, who burned to death in 1863, has been identified through the forensic analysis of a small piece of textile found in the coffin and extensive archival research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent archaeological studies have highlighted the sociability of drinking spaces as a means to better understand quotidian activities of non-elites. Through research conducted at Smuttynose Island, in the Isles of Shoals, Maine, I illustrate an often-overlooked narrative of the Atlantic World, and especially colonial North America - the daily life of individuals working within frontier resource extraction communities. Further, I argue that such communities and their assemblages fall within a continuum which places cosmopolitan city-centers on one end and rural settlements on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nya Lödöse site, a sixteenth century town buried beneath present-day Gothenburg, is currently undergoing large-scale archaeological excavation. This article presents some aspects on the project as such; organization, cooperation between different actors, documentation methods, and the conservation of the excavated finds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores demographic patterns and social topography in Nya Lödöse by studying the material from the cemetery excavated in 2013. The cemetery is seen here not only as a place to bury the dead, but also as a place where social identity is presented and negotiated, in more or less subtle ways. A cemetery can also show social stratification as well as cultural diversity, both of which were present in Nya Lödöse. The ongoing excavation of the cemetery will hopefully show general characteristics of different traditions and behavior connected to the burials. Once completed, the survey will give good insight into demography, burial customs and social identity in an early-modern Swedish town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excavations at Nya Lödöse (1473-1624) revealed evidence of medicinal practice from the period in three forms: healed injuries and indications of disease found as pathologies on human bones, internal use of herbal medicine found in the stomach region of burials, and evidence of cultivation and preparation of medicinal plants in gardens inside and outside the town. Indications are that medical treatments were part of everyday life of the town and that a domestic tradition of medicine, closely linked to the scholarly practices of the time, was practiced. The skeletal remains from the town cemetery bear witness to the caring of injured and ill persons, probably within the family or household. There are also indications of more advanced treatments, possibly executed by professionals such as surgeons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing the results of several decades of excavation in the center of Melbourne, Australia, provides the opportunity to reflect on what archaeological evidence has to contribute to understandings of the colonial city. The city has been shaped by its role as a colonial entrepot, a gold rush port, and a nineteenth-century metropolitan center. Its rich archaeological record derives from the intersection of heritage controls and a development boom. Data from archaeological excavations drives new perspectives on Melbourne itself, revealing a city intimately connected with the gold rush boom that fuelled its growth. Archaeological data also shed light on the specific and distinctive historical circumstances that influenced the development of cities established in the nineteenth century, including transnational migration and trade along with emerging concerns over public health and sanitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The western forecourt of the Royal Exhibition Buildings, Carlton, was one of the main components of its “palace garden setting.” After several phases of landscape change, in the 1950s the area was covered with asphalt and used as a car park. In 2004, the “Royal Exhibition Buildings and Carlton Gardens” was inscribed on the World Heritage List and subsequent management and conservation plans provided the stimulus for the conservation and re-interpretation of the western forecourt. The custodians of the site, Museum Victoria, commissioned an archaeological excavation with the aim of uncovering information that would inform the reconstruction of the former 1880s “German Garden.” Godden Mackay Logan (now GML Heritage), in collaboration with La Trobe University, undertook these investigations which became part of a public engagement program, employed new approaches to artifact management and provided significant information regarding changes to the landscape over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the eighteenth-century English consumer, purchasing smuggled goods was a way to circumvent colonial rules and taxes. Information drawn from artifacts recovered at the Narbonne House, located in Salem, Massachusetts, and four other eighteenth-century colonial sites investigate this historical interaction. Considering various taxes and trade laws non-English wares should not be archaeologically visible. The fact that these goods are visible requires a more thorough discussion of their potential origins. If artifacts recovered in an English colonial context can be identified as smuggled goods, then the identification of such wares could help expand archaeological interpretations of eighteenth-century sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern grocery stores, chocolate is a small item dwarfed in the allotted shelf space by its bitter cousins, coffee and tea. Yet, in the first three centuries of the post-Columbian era, the cacao-based drink, once reserved for the elites of Mesoamerica, was transformed into a beverage that was enjoyed across the Spanish colonial world and beyond to the rest of Europe and the respective colonial empires. We explore the archaeological and documentary evidence from both shipwreck and terrestrial sites in the borderland region of New Spain including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and the Philippines to illustrate the presence and use of chocolate from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. We show that the study of chocolate on the fringes of New Spain provides a lens for understanding the dynamics of larger issues surrounding the birth of the modern global economy. [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]

In 2011, during a salvage excavation at the Fort York National Historic Site, Archaeological Services Inc. (ASI) recovered a pinfire shotgun shell cartridge. This unique small find tells a story of the ebb and flow of the firearms technology used by armed forces around the world. It also shows how the pinfire shotgun was likely brought to Fort York in response to the Trent Affair. This international incident during the American Civil War risked a return to hostilities between Britain and the United States and sparked a defensive rearmament across the colony of Canada. This artifact also highlights the military evolution of the shotgun from a hunting tool brought to the battlefield by ragtag militia, to cutting edge weaponry used by military special forces around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bishop's Block site in downtown Toronto contained the foundations of four townhouses constructed between the 1830s and 1860s, which were occupied as private residences into the early twentieth century. From this site came a ceramic container of 'Atkinson's Celebrated Parisian Toothpaste,' a commercially prepared product developed in the late 1850s to appeal to people worried about having a bright smile, sweet breath, and impeccable hygiene. Cleanliness and social acceptability became ever more intertwined during the Victorian era, while epidemics remained a grim reality. In this context we see toothpaste transform from a product used by a narrow segment of the population at the beginning of the nineteenth century into a more widely adopted badge of cleanliness at the close of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the biographies of small artifacts from archaeological contexts is an endeavour that can expose unrealized or forgotten historical and cultural meaning at local, regional, national, and international levels. The recovery of a small glass bottle embossed with the name 'Sir J. Clarke's Female Pills' from a site in Toronto has drawn together the production history and advertising during the nineteenth century of a patent medicine product classed as an abortifacient. Furthermore, it connects the history of women's health and fertility rights to the social and economic motivations influencing control over family planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situated some 600 mi (965 km) east of North Carolina, the island of Bermuda is Britain's oldest surviving colony. While much of the British Empire has been dismantled, Bermuda remains within the Imperial fold, and is today designated a 'British overseas territory.' Within this framework, Bermuda's heritage tourism landscape perpetuates an institutionally imposed colonialist narrative that neglects to explore the contributions of the island's under-represented communities. This article explores these issues with respect to the island's tourism plan. It concludes by highlighting new archaeological research centered on the material lives of enslaved Bermudians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Market Street Chinatown in San Jose, California, was a thriving urban community until its destruction by arson fire on May 4, 1887. A surprisingly robust assemblage of wood artifacts was recovered during salvage excavations in the mid 1980s. Taxonomic identification and analysis of structural timbers and portable wood objects contribute new perspectives on trade, travel, the built environment, recreation, and work in this nineteenth-century Chinese immigrant community. As wood artifacts are not commonly preserved in open-air archaeological deposits, this study contributes a rare archaeological view on the use of wood materials in nineteenth-century urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of current Spanish ceramics studies rely heavily on a typology based on sherds from American excavations and museum collections. While decades of use and refinement have made this system invaluable for dating sites and recognizing trade patterns in the Americas, its focus on archaeological ceramic types does little to explain how individuals used and perceived their ceramics. I argue that using a vessel-based classification system will allow archaeologists to explore deeper questions regarding behavior and emic (user-ascribed) views of the objects recovered in excavations as well as provide a way of comparing Spanish and Spanish-American ceramic assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological survey in the Forêt domaniale des Andaines has recorded nearly 900 discrete earthwork bunkers, building foundations, trenches, and other features associated with WW2 German fuel, munitions and logistics depots. Documentary evidence establishes these depots were administered from Bagnoles-de-l'Orne and were a key component of the Seventh Army logistics network before and during the Normandy Campaign of June-August 1944. Post-war survival of features has been remarkably good in this forested setting and it is argued that this likely constitutes one of the best-preserved and most extensive examples of a non-hardened WW2 archaeological landscape yet documented in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]