Book Review: Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood to Corning by Regina Lee Blaszczyk

Book review of Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood to Corning by Regina Lee Blaszczyk 2000, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 368 pages, $39.95 (hardcover)

Book Review: The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life by Paul A. Shackel

The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life, by Paul A. Shackel, 2009, The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective Series, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 160 pages, 20 illustrations, $69.95 (cloth),$19.95 (paper)

Concluding Thoughts on the Finger Lakes National ForestArchaeology Project

This is a conclusion to the research compiled in this issue. Delle impresses the importance of GIS for this research as a burgeoning technology with much potential in this field of study

Introduction to the Finger Lakes National Forest Archaeology Project

An introduction to the volume, which presents research conducted at the convergence of two projects. One, a surve

Excavations at the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia HamiltonSmith Site, Lancaster, Pennsylvania: Archaeological Evidencefor the Underground Railroad

This article reports on archaeological investigations conducted at the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Site in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Stevens and Smith Site stands in the footprint of Ii proposed convention center and hotel complex, and will be partially destroyed by the construction. Stevens, a noted anti-slavery legislator, and Smith, his African American housekeeper and companion, are reputed to have been actively involved in the Underground Railroad during the 1850s. While little concrete evidence exists to corroborate the degree to which Stevens and Smith assisted fugitives escaping from enslavement, our excavations uncovered a modified cistern that may have been used as a hiding place. The evidence supporting that hypothesis is presented here

A Plantation Transplanted: Archaeological Investigations of a Piedmont-Style Slave Quarter at Rose Hill, Geneva, New York

Although a relatively short-lived phenomenon, plantation slavery was established in the Finger Lakes region of New York State by immigrant planters from Maryland and Virginia. Excavations at the Rose Hill site, Geneva, NY have located two quarter sites associated with these early 19th-century plantations, including the standing Jean Nicholas house on property once part of the White Springs Farm, the other a subsurface, though largely intact, stone foundation of a similar building at Rose Hill. Analysis of the refined earthenwares recovered from the plowzone at the Rose Hill quarter indicate that the structure was first occupied in the early 19th century, at the time that the original mansion house was built and Rose Hill cleared and prepared for large-scale agricultural production. The overall dimensions of the building, as well as evidence for the construction techniques, strongly suggest that the quarter was designed and built on piedmont quarter antecedents. Although much work still needs to be completed at the Rose Hill site, the evidence strongly suggests that a piedmont-style quarter was constructed when enslaved workers were forced to migrate to the Genesee Country in the opening decade of the 19th century. The evidence for slavery at Rose Hill suggests that mature, Virginia-style plantations were transplanted into upstate New York, opening a new avenue for the analysis of the material realities of slavery north of the Mason Dixon line

Volume Abstract

This volume presents research conducted at the convergence of two projects: the first a survey, inventory, and assessment of historic sites located within the boundaries of the Finger Lakes National Forest, a small national forest located in central New York; the second a pedagogical experiment conducted in the spring of 1998, the goal of which was to assess how a rather typical CRM project could be used to train graduate students in archaeology in manipulating Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to control and interpret archaeological data. This convergence resulted in the construction of a GIS-based data management system for historic-period cultural resources in the Finger Lakes National Forest. The final product of this project is an integrated GIS database that can now be used by the Forest Service to manage data concerning the historic sites so far identified in the Finger Lakes National Forest. This volume describes how this was accomplished and suggests how GIS can be used by historical archaeologists to control and interpret data on a regional scale. This volume is organized to demonstrate how a regional archaeological GIS database was constructed and how the database was used to interpret the historical and archaeological record of the abandoned farmstead community once located on Burnt Hill, the southern extent of the Hector Backbone, a ridge located within the Finger Lakes National Forest. Following an introduction outlining the project and defining what CIS is and how it was used in this project, Chapter 2 by Patrick Heaton presents an overview of the Euroamerican settlement history of the Hector Backbone. Heaton follows this presentation in Chapter 3 with an account of how archival materials were used to interpret the changing nature of the agricultural political economy of rural New York in the 19th and early-20th centuries. In Chapter 4, Mark Smith and James Boyle use archaeological evidence to analyze the layout of farmsteads in the Burnt Hill Study Area. Chapter 5, by Karen Wehner and Karen Holmberg, describes the various ways historic map data were used to analyze change in the rural settlement pattern of the Burnt Hill Study Area. In Chapter 6, Janet Six, Patrick Heaton, Susan Malin-Boyce, and James Delle analyze the artifacts recovered during the surface collections of sites located in project area. The final substantive chapter, by Thomas Cuddy, explores how one of ArcView\u27s modules, the Spatial Analyst, can be used to help interpret various kinds of archaeological data. The appendix, by Tom Cuddy, discusses the how-to element of the project, introducing those elements of ArcView integrated into our project and using our example to suggest guidelines on how to create a CIS project in ArcView. One goal of the appendix is to familiarize readers with GIS and ArcView terminology as well as the various elements of the application discussed throughout the volume

The Artifact Assemblage from the Finger Lakes NationalForest Archaeology Project

This article examines the arifact assemblage from the Burnt Hill Study Area and reveals the utility of GIS databases for historical information available in the GIS database