The study of American institutional confinement, its presumed successes, failures, and controversies, is incomplete without examining the remnants of relevant sites no longer standing. Asking what archaeological perspectives add to the understanding of such a provocative topic, Eleanor Conlin Casella describes multiple sites and identifies three distinct categories of confinement: places for punishment, for asylum, and for exile. Her discussion encompasses the multifunctional shelters of the colonial era, Civil War prison camps, Japanese-American relocation centers, and the maximum-security detention facilities of the twenty-firstcentury. Her analysis of the material world of confinement takes into account architecture and landscape, food, medicinal resources, clothing, recreation, human remains, and personal goods. Casella exposes the diversity of power relations that structure many of America's confinement institutions. Weaving together themes of punishment, involuntary labor, personal dignity, and social identity, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement tells a profound story of endurance in one slice of society. It will illuminate and change contemporary notions of gender, race, class, infirmity, deviance, and antisocial behavior.

The archaeological assemblage from the Hyde Park Barracks is one of the largest, most comprehensive and best preserved collections of artefacts from any 19th-century institution in the world. Concealed for up to 160 years in the cavities between floorboards and ceilings, the assemblage is a unique archaeological record of institutional confinement, especially of women. The underfloor assemblage dates to the period 1848 to 1886, during which a female Immigration Depot and a Government Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women occupied the second and third floors of the Barracks. Over the years the women discarded and swept beneath the floor thousands of clothing and textile fragments, tobacco pipes, religious items, sewing equipment, paper scraps and numerous other objects, many of which rarely occur in typical archaeological deposits. These items are presented in detail in this book, and provide unique insight into the private lives of young female migrants and elderly destitute women, most of whom will never be known from historical records.

A landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms Institutions pervade social life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time. But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school, hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences can reflect the positive impact of an institution or its greatest failings. This interplay of orthodoxy, authority, opposition, and individual experience are all expressed in the materiality of institutions and are eminently subject to archaeological investigation. A few archaeological and historical publications, in widely scattered venues, have examined individual institutional sites. Each work focused on the development of a specific establishment within its narrowly defined historical context; e.g., a fort and its role in a particular war, a schoolhouse viewed in terms of the educational history of its region, an asylum or prison seen as an expression of the prevailing attitudes toward the mentally ill and sociopaths. In contrast, this volume brings together twelve contributors whose research on a broad range of social institutions taken in tandem now illuminates the experience of these institutions. Rather than a culmination of research on institutions, it is a landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms.

The internment of civilian and military prisoners became an increasingly common feature of conflicts in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Prison camps, though often hastily constructed and just as quickly destroyed, have left their marks in the archaeological record. Due to both their temporary nature and their often sensitive political contexts, places of internment present a unique challenge to archaeologists and heritage managers. As archaeologists have begun to explore the material remains of internment using a range of methods, these interdisciplinary studies have demonstrated the potential to connect individual memories and historical debates to the fragmentary material remains. Archaeologies of Internment brings together in one volume a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to this developing field. The contributions are geographically and temporally diverse, ranging from Second World War internment in Europe and the USA to prison islands of the Greek Civil War, South African labor camps, and the secret detention centers of the Argentinean Junta and the East German Stasi. These studies have powerful social, cultural, political, and emotive implications, particularly in societies in which historical narratives of oppression and genocide have themselves been suppressed. By repopulating the historical narratives with individuals and grounding them in the material remains, it is hoped that they might become, at least in some cases, archaeologies of liberation.

The Archaeology of Slavery grapples with both the benefits and complications of a comparative approach to the archaeology of slavery. Contributors from different archaeological subfields, including American, African, prehistoric, and historical, consider how to define slavery, identify it in the archaeological record, and study slavery as a diachronic process that covers enslavement to emancipation and beyond. Themes include how to define slavery, how to identify slavery archaeologically, enslavement and emancipation, and the politics and ethics of slavery-related research.

The archaeology of war has revealed evidence of bravery, sacrifice, heroism, cowardice, and atrocities. Mostly absent from these narratives of victory and defeat, however, are the experiences of prisoners of war, despite what these can teach us about cruelty, ingenuity, and human adaptability. The international array of case studies in Prisoners of War restores this hidden past through case studies of PoW camps of the Napoleonic era, the American Civil War, and both World Wars. These bring to light wide variations in historical and cultural details, excavation and investigative methods used, items found and their interpretation, and their contributions to archaeology, history and heritage. Illustrated with diagrams, period photographs, and historical quotations, these chapters vividly reveal challenges and opportunities for researchers and heritage managers, and revisit powerful ethical questions that persist to this day. Notorious and lesser-known aspects of PoW experiences that are addressed include: Designing and operating an 18th-century British PoW camp. Life and death at Confederate and Union American Civil War PoW camps. The role of possessions in coping strategies during World War I. The archaeology of the ‘Great Escape’ Experiencing and negotiating space at civilian internment camps in Germany and Allied PoW camps in Normandy in World War II. The role of archaeology in the memorial process, in America, Norway, Germany and France Graffiti, decorative ponds, illicit saké drinking, and family life at Japanese American camps As one of the first book-length examinations of this fascinating multidisciplinary topic, Prisoners of War merits serious attention from historians, social justice researchers and activists, archaeologists, and anthropologists.

This volume examines human sexuality as an intrinsic element in the interpretation of complex colonial societies. While archaeological studies of the historic past have explored the dynamics of European colonialism, such work has largely ignored broader issues of sexuality, embodiment, commemoration, reproduction and sensuality. Recently, however, scholars have begun to recognize these issues as essential components of colonization and imperialism. This book explores a variety of case studies, revealing the multifaceted intersections of colonialism and sexuality. Incorporating work that ranges from Phoenician diasporic communities of the eighth century to Britain's nineteenth-century Australian penal colonies to the contemporary Maroon community of Brazil, this volume changes the way we understand the relationship between sexuality and colonial history.

This new edition of Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism shows where the study of capitalism leads archaeologists, scholars and activists. Essays cover a range of geographic, colonial and racist contexts around the Atlantic basin: Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, the North Atlantic, Europe and Africa. Here historical archaeologists use current capitalist theory to show the results of creating social classes, employing racism and beginning and expanding the global processes of resource exploitation. Scholars in this volume also do not avoid the present condition of people, discussing the lasting effects of capitalism’s methods, resistance to them, their archaeology and their point to us now. Chapters interpret capitalism in the past, the processes that make capitalist expansion possible, and the worldwide sale and reduction of people. Authors discuss how to record and interpret these. This book continues a global historical archaeology, one that is engaged with other disciplines, peoples and suppressed political and economic histories. Authors in this volume describe how new identities are created, reshaped and made to appear natural. Chapters in this second edition also continue to address why historical archaeologists study capitalism and the relevance of this work, expanding on one of the important contributions of historical archaeologies of capitalism: critical archaeology.

Since the founding of the United States, the rights to citizenship have been carefully crafted and policed by the Europeans who originally settled and founded the country. Immigrants have been extended and denied citizenship in various legal and cultural ways. While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal perspective, historical archaeologists have yet to fully explore the material aspects of these social boundaries. The Archaeology of Citizenship uses the material record to explore what it means to be an American. Using a late-nineteenth-century California resort as a case study, Stacey Camp discusses how the parameters of citizenship and national belonging have been defined and redefined since Europeans arrived on the continent. In a unique and powerful contribution to the field of historical archaeology, Camp uses the remnants of material culture to reveal how those in power sought to mold the composition of the United States and how those on the margins of American society carved out their own definitions of citizenship.

The American lumber industry helped fuel westward expansion and industrial development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, building logging camps and sawmills—and abandoning them once the trees ran out. In this book, John Franzen surveys archaeological studies of logging sites across the nation, explaining how material evidence found at these locations illustrates key aspects of the American experience during this era. Franzen delves into the technologies used in cutting and processing logs, the environmental impacts of harvesting timber, the daily life of workers and their families, and the social organization of logging communities. He highlights important trends, such as increasing mechanization and standardization, and changes in working and living conditions, especially the food and housing provided by employers. Throughout these studies, which range from Michigan to California, the book provides access to information from unpublished studies not readily available to most researchers. The Archaeology of the Logging Industry also shows that when archaeologists turn their attention to the recent past, the discipline can be relevant to today’s ecological crises. By creating awareness of the environmental deterioration caused by industrial-scale logging during what some are calling the Anthropocene, archaeology supports the hope that with adequate time for recovery and better global-scale stewardship, the human use of forests might become sustainable. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney