Shipwreck Identity, Methodology, and Nautical Archaeology

The goal of this essay is to decipher the methods used by nautical archaeologists to create and to apply affiliations or identities to the assemblages they investigate under water. By collating 36 years of data from The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, this author proposes that the methods applied are predominantly intuitive, and are not only susceptible to a variety of interpretive critiques, their intuitive nature also impacts the various historical narratives that the material culture becomes embedded within. The author concludes by arguing that the explication of methods is necessary for the discipline to continue to grow, and proposes that disengaging the identification of ancient and early medieval wrecks from a historical narrative is a route worth exploring.     

The Nautical Archaeology of Puerto Rico

The waters of Puerto Rico harbour the remains of thousands of years of human occupation. The island played a key role in the first decades of European exploration of the New World, and its coasts and estuaries have preserved an extensive record of the island's maritime history, before and after the arrival of the Europeans. The objective of this project is to study Puerto Rico's seafaring history through the investigation of its submerged cultural heritage, with a particular focus on the history of European shipbuilding. In 2008 the authors started with survey on the north coast.
© 2009 The Authors     

'Giant Strides' in Documentaries, 'Ascents' in Archaeology: Nautical Archaeology's Relationship with and Place within Popular Culture

This article covers 30 years of the representation of nautical archaeology on television. It criticises and positions current research, then develops an objective methodology for examining television documentaries. The relationships and similarities between television documentaries and academia and the wider professional and amateur discipline is debated. Original research, which argues for a structure that is ever-present in nautical archaeology as in popular culture and academia, is deconstructed, and the implications reviewed. A sequence of images is defined and it is demonstrated that this forms a 'unique selling-point' used by both television and the academic discipline.
© 2008 The Author     

Archaeology, History, and Historical Archaeology in South America

This paper discusses the relationship between history and archaeology in general, their common concerns and links with historical archaeology. It deals with the development of historical archaeology in three related South American countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and pays attention to recent trends in the theory and practice of the discipline in the area.     

Cross-Cultural Approaches in Archaeology: Comparative Ethnology, Comparative Archaeology, and Archaeoethnology

Cross-cultural approaches have been used widely in archaeological research. Comparative ethnology has provided a number of archaeological indicators of behavior, but large segments of the archaeological record have not yet been subjected to extensive comparative analysis. Comparative archaeology has aided in exploring variation among societal types (such as chiefdoms) and categories within the archaeological record (such as settlements). Diachronic comparisons have been used frequently by archaeologists, but these have often been based on unique samples and only rarely have employed statistics to aid in the discovery or testing of hypotheses. Archaeoethnology, comparative analyses of archaeological cases employing valid samples and statistical evaluation of theories and hypotheses, is introduced.     

Archaeology on Television, 1937

The birth of archaeologically themed television programmes is intimately linked to the birth of television itself. Yet little is known of the earliest broadcasts owing to both the fragmentary archival record and the longstanding hype surrounding later archaeology TV productions. This article examines two of the first such shows, likely the earliest in the English-speaking world for which records survive, focused on the British Iron Age site of Maiden Castle and on the reconstruction of prehistoric pottery. While noting the role of Mortimer Wheeler in their development, I also highlight several key women who produced the programmes, starred in them, and otherwise held critical posts in the establishment of professional archaeological practice in Britain, including Margot Eates, Ione Gedye, and Delia Parker — all based at London's Institute of Archaeology (IoA). These BBC TV broadcasts were specifically deployed to showcase the sites and methods of the burgeoning discipline of archaeology. More importantly, however, they were subtle players in the building of intellectual and institutional capital for both the IoA and the BBC. Augmented by other graphic media produced by the IoA itself, the earliest televised archaeology shows generated income, exposure, capacity, and clout for these two very different but pioneering organizations.     

Maroon Archaeology Is Public Archaeology

Researchers of the contemporary past have sought to be instrumental in public dialogue about how artifacts speak to heritage matters relevant to living communities and decision-making polities (Emberling and Hanson, Catastophe!: the looting and destruction of Iraq’s past, 2008; Gibbon, Who owns the past?: cultural policy, cultural property, and the law, 2005; Mullins, Places in mind: public archaeology as applied anthropology, 2004; Renfrew, Loot, legitimacy and ownership: the ethical crisis in archaeology, 2000; Skeates, Debating the archaeological heritage, 2000). This approach has made archaeology a public endeavor that serves the needs of inquisitive researchers, as well as those groups of individuals whose lives may be directly affected by the excavation, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological remains. This paper will broadly assess how the archaeology of Maroons—tribal communities of runaway slave descendants—has affected the application of scholarly research in the former Dutch territory of Suriname, SA. The shift in relevance is due to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights 2007 judgment that allows Suriname Maroons to assert decision-making authority on matters of land management and development in ancestral and contemporary habitat. Vital to this endeavor is, Maroon involvement in archaeological research and more importantly, an overhaul in Surinamese antiquity laws.     

唐陵大遗址考古的思路与方法——2007～2008年度中国田野考古一等奖获奖项目介绍

<正>陕西唐陵大遗址保护项目的考古工作荣获2007～2008年度全国田野考古一等奖。这是国家文物局和考古学界对我们工作成绩的肯定与鼓励,也是我院田野考古工作者开拓创新、辛勤工作的结果。以下将唐陵考古工作中的思路、方法、措施以及得失作以介绍,以期得到考古界同仁的指教。     

Archaeology Underfoot: On-Campus Approaches to Education,Outreach, and Historical Archaeology at Brown University

This article explores the methods and outcomes of “The Archaeology of College Hill” (AoCH), a hands-on fieldwork course at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. The first half of this paper recounts the results of a three-year research program (2012–2014) on the Quiet Green of the university’s campus. This work identified a material assemblage associated with the school’s first official President’s House and uncovered evidence for over two centuries of student life. The second half of this article addresses our pedagogical methods, including elements of replicable course design and feedback from a qualitative survey on students’ impressions of the class. By situating this project within wider dialogues on the role of fieldwork in undergraduate teaching, we demonstrate the ways in which practical, on-campus projects like AoCH can reach a more diverse body of students, increase enrollments in other archaeology courses, and develop a more engaged, de-centered pedagogy.