Vol. 14 No. 2 Summer 2010
  

An Examination Of Slavery

By Michael Bawaya

For the last 10 years Jillian Galle has served as the project manager of the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), which is based at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s former estate in Virginia. It’s now a World Heritage site owned and operated by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. DAACS’ mission is to make digital archaeological data from slave societies in the Caribbean, as well as the Chesapeake and the Carolinas in the U.S., available to researchers via the web.
           

DAACS archaeologists want to know how major demographic and economic changes affected slaves in the U.S. and the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries. Galle and her colleagues spent five months in Jamaica in 2006 to reanalyzing collections recovered by other archaeologists from two 18th-century sugar estates—Seville and Montpelier—on the island’s north coast. But those collections, which were recovered from only a few houses that were part of large slave villages, represented a fraction of these sites’ data.
           

“The traditional approach to slavery in the Caribbean is to investigate one, two, or three household sites at a single village,” she said. However much this method reveals about those particular sites, it leads to the guesswork of extrapolations and assumptions regarding the rest of the village. At Monticello, Frasier Neiman, the director of archaeology, emphasized investigating entire landscapes rather than focusing on individual sites, and Galle employed this method, digging 20-inch-in-diameter test pits every six yards across the entire villages at eight estates on Jamaica, Nevis, and St Kitts.

Exploring The Archaeology Of North Dakota

By Lauren Donovan

The remnants of native villages, trading posts, forts, and battle sites remain part of North Dakota’s landscape. Paleo-Indians occupied this land as long as 13,000 years ago, thousands of years later tribes such as the Mandan and Hidatsa made it their home, and Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery wintered here during their journey to the Pacific Ocean.

A driving trip to a number of North Dakota’s premiere archaeological sites offers the added benefit of seeing some of the state’s beautiful farm and ranch country, much of which is bordered by the mighty Missouri River, the longest river in America. Plan four to six days to do justice to this tour, which begins in Bismarck, the state’s capital.

Coping With The Great Recession

By Paula Neely

The Great Recession has wreaked havoc. We know only too well about the job losses, home foreclosures, and industry bailouts. What’s less well known is that the recession is also affecting archaeological resources. In response, local, state, and federal officials, and concerned individuals are scrambling to deal with this threat.

In Arizona, five of 30 state parks are slated for closing this year because the parks department budget was cut by 80 percent and its revenues were diverted to fund other state programs. Lyman Lake State Park and Homolovi Ruins State Historic Park were the first to close in February, and officials are concerned that looting, once a major problem, might resume.

The Ohio Historical Society is funded in part by the state legislature to promote knowledge of Ohio’s history and archaeology. This year their biennial state subsidy for managing historical parks was cut by a third, from $12 million to $8 million. The cuts meant the society had to take creative measures to fulfill its responsibilities.
           

According to Dan Odess, the assistant associate director of cultural resources for the National Park Service, looting has increased at some national parks, as well as on federal lands the park service doesn’t manage, as a result of the recession. The culprits are not only organized looters, but also unemployed people who have more free time to hunt for artifacts. “Site protection is always an issue,” he said, “but there are fewer people on the ground now, and fewer people to deal with those issues.”

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