UMass Heritage Archaeology Program - UMHAP

06/26/2017

SHA Call for Papers, from UMHAP colleagues Marc Lorenc and Elena Sesma. Deadline in a few days!

Memory & Community-Based Archaeology
Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, January 3-7, 2018.
Organizers: Marc Lorenc and Elena Sesma
Recent applications of community-based archaeology have engaged with various stakeholders from descendants to local members of the community, all with varying investment in the archaeological practice. The papers presented in this session focus on community-based archaeology as a theory and methodology that adds to the analysis of collective memory. Specifically viewing archaeology as craft (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2013), the papers explore how archaeology as both metaphor and practice allow for the excavation of memory through an engagement with materiality, temporality, and lieux de memoire (Nora 1989). Exploring the complex relationship of intersectionality to memory work (Mills and Walker 2008), presenters seek to engage the way community-based archaeology entangles with various processes of meaning making, commemoration, preservation, and education at archaeological sites. Using an interdisciplinary approach, presenters will tie in ethnographic archaeologies, oral history, archival research, and “dirt archaeology” to explore the relationship between memory and the archaeological praxis.

If you are interested in participating, please send abstracts (150 words) to [email protected] by Wednesday, June 28.

06/07/2017

This weekend in the Bahamas - continuing our community-based research in South Eleuthera!

06/06/2017

African Diaspora Archaeology Network

African Diaspora Archaeology Network

Check out ADAN's own Kelley Deetz's forthcoming book on enslaved cooks! She uses archaeological evidence seamlessly throughout her narrative to showcase the personal stories of Virginia's enslaved cooks.

06/06/2017

Clinton Church Restoration group buys AME Zion Church

Clinton Church Restoration group buys AME Zion Church

GREAT BARRINGTON — The first African-American church built in Berkshire County is now in the hands of a nonprofit dedicated to restoring it and turning it into a center for local black history and culture.

05/07/2017

7,000 bodies could be buried on Mississippi campus

7,000 bodies could be buried on Mississippi campus

Experts estimate up to 7,000 bodies are buried on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus.

08/24/2016

Castaways

Castaways

Illegally enslaved and then marooned on remote Tromlein Island for fifteen years, with only archaeology to tell their story

07/10/2016

Unearthing history at the Dr. Still site in Medford

Congrats to Marc Lorenc!

On Thursday, volunteers worked under project leader Marc Lorenc to excavate the site of the former home of James Still, "the Black Doctor of the Pines," who owned land in

06/20/2016

Wemyss Bight Community Library

There aren't enough words to say thank you! To my wonderful friend, Elena, who has taken time out of her busy schedule to help me put Wemyss Bight Community Library on the web! You are awesome!

03/02/2016

Archaeology in the Community

Archaeology in the Community

Bidding is now open for our Modern Landscape Photography Auction! Check out what is available now with the link below and let us know your favorite in the comments!
http://ow.ly/YFzcF

02/23/2016

W. E. B. Du Bois Birthday Celebration

Photos from today's celebration in the library lobby. We needed more cake!

01/13/2016

Congrats to J. Cameron Monroe!

Archaeologists believe they have located part of a colonial-era plantation under Haiti's Sans-Souci Palace, which dates to the early nineteenth century.

http://archaeology.org/issues/202-1601/trenches/3938-trenches-haiti-sans-souci-palace

(Courtesy J. Cameron Monroe)

08/03/2015

Wrapping up several weeks of work on the beautiful island of Eleuthera today! But more importantly, Happy August Monday, when the Bahamas celebrates Emancipation Day (August 1, 1834)!

06/29/2015

W E B Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst

eLEVate students looking at some of Du Bois' papers.

06/03/2015

Landscapes of Violence | Vol 3 | No. 3

Landscapes of Violence | Vol 3 | No. 3

Stuck in the middle with you: the political position of teachers during the Algerian War of IndependenceAlexis Artaud de La Ferriere

04/02/2015

TrowelBlazers

"Archaeology, Sexism, and Scandal: The Long-Suppressed Story of One Woman’s Discoveries and the Man Who Stole Credit for Them."

Check out our new, dual post on Mary Ross Ellingson, including a book review and biography!

Brenna reviewed "Archaeology, Sexism, and Scandal" by Alan Kaiser, about the life of Mary Ross Ellingson-and as you might guess from the title, her hard work and insightful writing was stolen. You can read more about the book here:
http://trowelblazers.com/archaeology-sexism-and-scandal/

To find our more about the life of Mary Ross Ellingson, you can read a special post by the book's author, Alan Kaiser, here: http://trowelblazers.com/mary-ross-ellingson/

03/31/2015

A grandmother’s trove of Civil War photos goes to Library of Congress

A grandmother’s trove of Civil War photos goes to Library of Congress

Collector Robin Stanford had gathered rare stereo photos of war and slavery for 40 years.

09/29/2014

Explore Philly’s Buried Past, 2014! |

Explore Philly’s Buried Past, 2014! |

The 2014 Program features artifacts discovered in the Port Richmond, Fishtown, and Northern Liberties neighborhoods, archaeology in Old City, African American archaeology, archaeology interpretation via the Oculous Rift (3-D virtual) headset technology, and much, much, more!!! Directions/Parking PRO…

09/29/2014

Writing to Live: On Finding Strength While Watching Ferguson

My latest blog.

(Savage Minds is pleased to run this essay by guest author Whitney Battle-Baptiste as part of our Writer's Workshop series. Whitney is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massa...

07/20/2014

Some members of the UMHAP team are heading back to the island of Eleuthera to attend the Bannermantown Homecoming! Stay tuned for pics and updates on the experience.

07/17/2014

Chancellor Quickly, Deftly Redirecting UMass Flagship Campus - Higher Education

Chancellor Quickly, Deftly Redirecting UMass Flagship Campus - Higher Education

Dr. Kumble R. Subbaswamy acknowledges that there is “a lot of anxiety” about whether the university will remain committed to poorer areas even as it works toward being more selective.

07/16/2014

La Côte-Nord s'attaque aux pilleurs d'épaves | Steeve Paradis | Les régions

La Côte-Nord s'attaque aux pilleurs d'épaves | Steeve Paradis | Les régions

Qu'ils soient plongeurs expérimentés ou hommes-grenouilles du dimanche, ils sont encore trop nombreux à piller les vestiges subaquatiques de la Côte-Nord. La région a...

07/13/2014

Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, & Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois & the American Soul

Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, & Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois & the American Soul

One of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history, W.E.B. Du Bois penned the famous line that "the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." He is a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement. But his passionate, poetic words sp…

07/11/2014

Zinn Education Project

#tdih The Niagara Movement: On July 11, 1905, W.E.B Dubois and William Monroe Trotter convened a conference of black leaders to renounce Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism. They met at Niagara Falls, in Ontario, Canada, because hotels on the U.S. side of the falls barred blacks. The 29 men in attendance set forth a platform that demanded freedom of speech and criticism; a free press; manhood suffrage; abolition of all caste distinctions based on race or color; recognition of the principle of human brotherhood; belief in the dignity of labor; and a united effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership. (Read declaration: http://bit.ly/OWdqb) The organization they formed, the Niagara Movement, met annually until 1910. It was one of the organizations that paved the way for the formation of the NAACP. Recommended background reading, "Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915," see website here: http://www.definingthestruggle.com/ Image and text from the NAACP collection at The Library of Congress: http://1.usa.gov/NiRfuO, detailed caption here: http://1.usa.gov/1rdyPyw

07/04/2014

Frederick Douglass July 4th Speech Remains Relevant, Says Battle-Baptiste | Office of News &...

Frederick Douglass July 4th Speech Remains Relevant, Says Battle-Baptiste | Office of News &...

Nine years before the Civil War, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass addressed an Independence Day observance in Rochester, N.Y. and delivered a blistering indictment of national idealism that overlooked, ignored and accepted slavery as part and parcel of the American identity and econo…

04/02/2014

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use

When I was a kid, my father brought home from I know not where an enormous collection of National Geographic magazines spanning the years 1917 to 1985. I found, tucked in almost every issue, one of the magazine’s gorgeous maps—of the Moon, St.

04/02/2014

Anthropology News

Anthropology News

The clandestine movement of people across the Mexico-United States border is of interest to many people, including archaeologists. There aren’t a lot of archaeologists doing fieldwork on it, but the results of those that do are fascinating, and important.

04/02/2014

Nazis, the Holocaust, and Archaeology as Reality TV

Nazis, the Holocaust, and Archaeology as Reality TV

It's ironic that while the new National Geographic reality TV show "Nazi War Diggers" has evoked howls of outrage from archaeologists all over the world for its happy-go-lucky desecration of human ...

02/21/2014

Archaeology at Monticello

Monticello archaeologists have almost completed the trench from the garden up to Mulberry Row--only pollen, phytolith, and soil chemistry column samples remain to be taken. The image (left) shows the original ~70-degree cut of the garden slope between Mulberry Row and the vegetable garden. Note how different this is to the modern slope. (The arrow on both images points to the same position to allow for orientation.)

The image on the right is taken from on top of the South Dependency looking south towards Mulberry Row and the vegetable garden. With the completion of the southern portion of the trench, archaeologists will re-focus their excavations in this area—the East Kitchen Yard, which is adjacent to Kitchen Road excavations of 2012 (http://www.monticello.org/site/blog-and-community/posts/archaeological-fieldwork-update-kitchen-road).

02/09/2014

African Diaspora Archaeology Network

African Diaspora Archaeology Network

Greetings All! There has been a few setbacks and delays in getting the Newsletter up and running. Please bear with us, we are building and strengthening our editorial team to get information out there. Still, you can check out what we have up at the moment - http://scholarworks.umass.edu/adan/ - we are still asking our supporters for material/content/updates/field photos/etc.
Please do not give up on is, we are still out there!

11/12/2013

Photos Reveal Harsh Detail Of Brazil's History With Slavery

Photos Reveal Harsh Detail Of Brazil's History With Slavery

The South American country was the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery.

11/07/2013

Archaeology and Politics Symposium, Archaeology Program - Wesleyan University

Archaeology and Politics Symposium, Archaeology Program - Wesleyan University

Think archaeology is all about the past? Think again!Archaeology often plays a powerful role in shaping modern identities: it has been used to justify ethnic conflict and bolster territorial claims; to franchise and disenfranchise.The Archaeology and Politics Symposium presents four exceptional spea...

11/06/2013

Via DAACS

Behold these gaming pieces, recovered from eighteenth and nineteenth-century slave quarter sites in the DAACS database! The circular pieces were made by carving the edges of ceramic sherds. The ware types range from Delft to Whiteware, and all the sherds are decorated in some way. The site locations of the artifacts range from Tennessee to Jamaica, though interestingly, only one sherd is from a non-Jamaican site.

A simple artifact query via the DAACS website can be performed in order to get this information. Further analysis using downloadable data retrieved via more complex queries, also available on the website, can help investigate broader research questions. What sorts of contexts or features do these artifacts come from? Does time play a role in why they are present or absent at certain sites? Go ahead, do some research!

09/16/2013

Du Bois in Our Time

Du Bois in Our Time

The legacy of the late civil rights leader, writer, and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois is featured in a landmark exhibition that opens September 10, 2013, at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Du Bois in Our Time focuses on the intersection of art and t...

08/30/2013

home | One Eleuthera Foundation

Check out the website of one of our partners on Eleuthera, the One Eleuthera Foundation.

One Eleuthera brings together people, resources, and expertise to develop opportunities for all Eleutherans to prosper. We see a path to the future as one founded in empowering communities by building upon their unique qualities, branding the Eleuthera experience, connecting each settlement through…

08/26/2013

Big Ban Walkthrough

A walkthrough of Big Ban, the remains of the largest structure on the property.