| Page 766 | |
mounds in guatemala, and encouraged the careers of two Mayan archaeologists: Anna O. Shepard and tatiana proskouriakoff. During this time Kidder was also concerned with the importance of the environment and its influence on human culture. He included a concentration on environmental factors in his program of Mayan archaeology, a far-sighted move in 1953, since today’s archaeology considers this type of research as routine for most field/site analysis.
After World War II the Carnegie Institution began to allocate more of its resources to the “hard sciences” and less to the human and social ones, eventually closing down the Division of Historical Research, but not before Kidder proposed that the institution underwrite the use of radiocarbon dating for archaeology. Kidder retired in 1950, but until his death he continued to act as mentor for many archaeology students and colleagues and he taught a graduate course in archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley. As a reflection of the esteem in which he was and is still held, the Alfred Vincent Kidder medal was created by the society for american archaeology, and is awarded every three years to an outstanding Americanist.
References
For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 357–367.
Because of construction of the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, researchers from the University of Florida investigated six plantations on the southernmost part of the Georgia coast from 1977 to 1985—Cherry Point, Kings Bay, Harmony Hall, Marianna, Point Peter, and New Canaan. These plantations were small, middle, and large according to land- and slave-holdings categories developed by historians. Charles H. Fairbanks and Robin Smith conducted the testing from 1977 to 1980, while William H. Adams directed the testing and data recovery phases from 1981 to 1985. Thomas H. Eubanks directed the excavation of the McIntosh Sugarhouse in 1981 and 1985, and in 1981, this project was the first to make field use of microcomputers linked as smart terminals to the mainframe. In 1985, the project also made the first use of video camera/computer interfacing to produce artifact illustrations successfully.
The Kings Bay project was unique because it investigated all the plantations located between Crooked River and St. Marys River, a distance of over eight miles, and these were historically linked into a single community. Previous plantation archaeology had generally focused on big plantations, but at Kings Bay small and middle-sized ones were also investigated.
Because these plantations were geographically close, the environmental differences were largely nil, an especially important point for the zooarchaeological study. The faunal analysis done by William Richard Adams at Indiana University was by far the most detailed for historical sites on the coast—27,353 bone fragments from planter sites and 10,552 fragments from slave sites. Using calculations of meatweight, it was found that planters ate considerably more wild food than slaves did and utilized a wider variety of wild species.
Ceramic analysis, coupled with analogous historical documentation, suggests that slaves on task-system plantations like these had the ability and capital to engage in the market economy to support themselves. This greater economic freedom and market participation by slaves provided them with a means to control much more of their own lives than on the more-paternalistic gang-system plantations.
See also
The Danish zoologist japhetus steenstrup began researching the shell banks of northern denmark in the 1820s in order to understand sea- and land-level changes. Initially, he believed that the enormous mounds of shells were the result of geological change—that they had been washed up by the sea. However, in the course of his excavations he found artifacts, bones, and hearths that he dated to the Stone Age period.
| |