“Human Accumulations”: Class and Tourism at Niagara Falls

H.G. Wells claimed that his real interest in Niagara Falls was the “human accumulations” that grew up around it. Niagara has figured prominently in the escalating research on the history of tourism, most of which focuses on when and how the middle-classes went on holiday. This copious literature seldom acknowledges the complexity of social relations involved in travel. These accounts typically ignore the hotel and restaurant employees who made the middle-class experience possible. The leisure, travel, and hedonism of the middle-classes was only made possible because of the labor provided by an army of workers. Archaeology at one of Niagara Fall’s hotels provides a context to examine how the Niagara experience was created by many different classes of people. Thus, the “human accumulations” at Niagara can be seen as the physical manifestation of these social relations of class.     

Visible Men and Elusive Women

Early gender archaeology formulated two statements: men are visible, women are invisible, and men work in hard materials, women work in soft materials. We discuss these dichotomies in connection with nineteenth-century folklore and an excavated eighteenth-century cottage at a summer-farm. We conclude that much of the gendered order-of-work tasks broke down in pragmatic day-to-day life, especially by women crossing the gender border. However, social chaos was held at bay by ritual acts and magic objects.     

Going Places: The Historical Archaeology of Travel and Tourism

This paper briefly introduces the topics of tourism, consumption, and heritage management considered in this special issue. Contributors to the special issue focus on tourism within nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and its connections to industrial capitalism and the creation of a culture of consumption. These issues are addressed in case studies of tourist sites, including archaeological sites.     

Across the Pacific: Transnational Context in the Japanese Plantation Workers’ Cemetery in Pāhala,Hawai’i

For nearly a century, immigration researchers have focused on immigrant adjustment largely in terms of relationships in/to the host country. More recently, some have used the concept of transnationalism to understand how ties with places beyond the host country impact immigrants’ experiences. The diversity of Hawai’i’s immigrant labor force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the associated ethnic/national hierarchy on the sugar plantations created a situation where the global status of workers’ homelands impacted their daily experiences and survival strategies. This paper examines the effects of transnational political context on the expression of ethnic/national identity on gravestones in the Japanese plantation workers’ cemetery in Pāhala, Hawai’i. Results of the gravestone analysis indicate that expressions of ethnic/national identity in the cemetery co-varied with the fluctuation of Japan’s status on the global stage, suggesting that immigrant workers’ status was continually affected by homeland politics, and that immigrants were therefore strategic in deploying their ethnic/national identity locally.     

Landscapes of Belief: Non-Conformist Mission in the North Pennines

In addition to the well-known foreign missionary activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century churchmen, this same period saw campaigns of active proselytization within Britain. Whether couched in terms referring to “religious revival” or “home mission” it had the same aim as foreign mission activity, namely to effect religious change. This paper explores the way in which the religious changes associated with these campaigns affected the landscape of the lead-mining districts of the North Pennines in northern England. A repeating cycle of preaching first outdoors, then indoors and then in purpose-built structures can be recognized.     

Factors Controlling Pre-Columbian and Early Historic Maize Productivity in the American Southwest,Part 1: The Southern Colorado Plateau and Rio Grande Regions

Maize is the New World’s preeminent grain crop and it provided the economic basis for human culture in many regions within the Americas. To flourish, maize needs water, sunlight (heat), and nutrients (e.g., nitrogen). In this paper, climate and soil chemistry data are used to evaluate the potential for dryland (rain-on-field) agriculture in the semiarid southeastern Colorado Plateau and Rio Grande regions. Processes that impact maize agriculture such as nitrogen mineralization, infiltration of precipitation, bare soil evaporation, and transpiration are discussed and evaluated. Most of the study area, excepting high-elevation regions, receives sufficient solar radiation to grow maize. The salinities of subsurface soils in the central San Juan Basin are very high and their nitrogen concentrations are very low. In addition, soils of the central San Juan Basin are characterized by pH values that exceed 8.0, which limit the availability of both nitrogen and phosphorous. In general, the San Juan Basin, including Chaco Canyon, is the least promising part of the study area in terms of dryland farming. Calculations of field life, using values of organic nitrogen for the upper 50 cm of soil in the study area, indicate that most of the study area could not support a 10-bushel/acre crop of maize. The concepts, methods, and calculations used to quantify maize productivity in this study are applicable to maize cultivation in other environmental settings across the Americas.     

A Tale of Two Migrations: Reconciling Recent Biological and Archaeological Evidence for the Pleistocene Peopling of the Americas

This article synthesizes the 2000s-era “peopling of the Americas” data drawn from molecular biology, osteology, and archaeology. Collectively, they suggest that colonization proceeded in two pulses, both originating in western Beringia, and before that, south-central and southeastern Siberia. The first pulse occurred circa 16 k–15 k cal. B.P. by watercraft along the coast of Beringia and western North and South America. The second took place 1,000 years later and involved proto-Clovis hunter-gatherers who used the ice-free corridor as a conduit south. At least eight North American sites dating as far back as the Last Glacial Maximum suggest that the peopling picture may eventually need to change to accommodate an earlier than previously thought migration through the ice-free corridor. For now, the data are not strong enough to support this scenario, but they are tantalizingly close.     

Archaeological Visualization: Towards an Archaeological Information Science (AISc)

This paper reviews and evaluates the potential use of modern visualization techniques in archaeology. It suggests the need to apply and develop such techniques as a central part of any modern archaeological investigation. The use of these methods is associated with wider questions about data representations, in particular, their integration with archaeological theory and their role in facilitating analysis and shaping interpretation. Concern for these questions and with the overall potential that information systems provide to capture, represent, analyze, and model archaeological information suggests the need for a new interdisciplinary focus, Archaeological Information Science. For such a focus to prosper, archaeologists need to develop additional skills that go beyond mere technical ones. They need to become more active in the design and creation of future information archaeological systems. To this end, archaeologists are urged to view this task as a way to extend archaeology in new directions and to recognize that the digital representation and treatment of archaeological information can generate new forms of doing archaeology.     

ON PITCHFORKS AND TOMAHAWKS*

ABSTRACT The core‐periphery model of the new economic geography has two “dramatic” implications: catastrophic agglomeration and locational hysteresis around the symmetry breaking level of trade freeness. In this note, we study a generalized version of this model with constant elasticity of substitution (CES) instead of Cobb‐Douglas upper tier preferences. The possibility of a continuous and easily reversible transition from symmetry to agglomeration now arises. One of the most prominent results of the new economic geography literature—the catastrophic consequences of small parameter changes—therefore, hinges crucially on specific functional forms for consumer preferences.