Brian Damiata and I put together a quick slice animation of the GPR results from our joint project in Roxbury with the City of Boston. The GPR readings help mapped the subsurface in the yard around the house, therefore the house, carriage house, and dirt pole are in white.   The house is the central white block and the dirt pile extends out  of the carriage house in the southwest.   If you look closely, there are many pipes running east-west.  The block to the north, in the neighbors yard, could show a circular feature that may be a well. The deepth of the slice is listed on the upper left (in cm).  Areas that reflect GPR energy (microwaves) are in red.  Where there was not reflection, the map is blue.  Based on these results  the excavations can be interpreted with better accuracy.

Coring in the ash midden outside the turf house museum

Sigríður Sigurðardóttir, Director of the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum will give a Brown Bag talk on  Tuesday, April 12 at 12:30 t UMass Boston in McCormack 1/503. The talk is  titled “From Text to Trowel:  how a local rural heritage museum thrives in the 21^st century.”

The talk will describe the diverse portfolio of activities that the Skagafjörður Heritage Museum conducts that make it a vibrant center of cultural life for a valley in northern Iceland that has 6000 people and is located 60 miles south of the artic circle.  The Museum mixes local and international projects with traditional and cutting edge approaches to work in areas that require knowledge of hard science and local legend. The museum embraces 40,000 or so tourists every year but has a café frequented by locals. The Museum also offers international courses that take advantage of the regional knowledge of the traditional craft of turf house building.  Finally, she will describe how the small archaeological department has become one of the largest recipients of Icelandic government grants.

The Skagafjörður Heritage Museum is UMass Boston’s Partner in the National Science Foundation funded Skagafjörður Church and Settlement Survey (SCASS).  That project will run for 3 years and has received well over $500,000 in grants.

Research assistant professor Doug Bolender will be featured on the new NOVA special Vikings Unearthed, which airs tonight at 9 on PBS. Read more about the show and Doug’s involvement on the Skagafjörður Church and Settlement Survey blog here, and tune in tonight to see the show!

Photo credit to the New York Times

Brian Damiata and Katie Wagner using the GPR at 27 Dale St in Roxbury

Jared Muehlbauer, Brian Damiata, and Joseph Trebilcock running a GPR transect

Our joint project with the City of Boston Archaeology Program has been getting a lot of press. You can see some of the articles using a google news search.  One of the more in depth articles is by Sylvia Cunningham for NBCBLK.  Joe Bagley, the City Archaeologist, has been posting many pictures on Twitter, Instagram  and Facebook.

We have now finished the geophysical portion of the project.  Excavations, will begin next week.  We will post some of the results soon.

How Chocolate Came to Be

Dr. Kathryn Sampeck

Thursday, March 10, 2016 at 12:30

McCormack, first floor, room 503

Chocolate is a fairly unremarkable part of daily life today. We have fairly clear ideas about what color it is, how it should taste, and what kinds of foods it should be part of. All of these qualities seem natural, unremarkable. Little would you suspect that chocolate has a colonial past that involved some of the greatest horrors of colonialism in Spanish America. The fascinating journey from these early colonial encounters with chocolate to the more modern experience of it had much to do with who produced chocolate, where, and when and for whom–in other words, labor relations in Latin America, local politics, and Atlantic World trade. It is a story of struggles against abuse and marginalization, covert and overt resistance, victories both small and large despite changes in the political economy designed to thwart those very efforts.

Dr. Kathryn Sampeck who is a visiting scholar at Harvard this semester will be coming to talk about her archaeological and ethnographic research on chocolate and the people who produced and consumed it.

The second meeting for the thesis proposal mini-course will be today at 3.  Today we will focus on developing research questions using a rubric to better understand middle range theory in historical archaeology.

The schedule for the thesis proposal mini-course has been changed (due to the snow-day loss on February 8).  Here is the new schedule:

February 22 (3 PM, Room 503): Developing research questions, part 1
February 29 (3 PM, Room 503): Developing research questions, part 2
March 7 (3 PM, Room 503): Understanding the process and reasonable timelines

March 14: Spring Break
March 21 (2 PM, Room 503): Examples of successful proposals

We have a lot of graduate students working in the labs, but there are always a few undergraduates doing special projects as well, and we’ll be featuring their work in a few upcoming posts.

Steven Williams, a UMB undergraduate, is doing an internship in the Fiske Center this spring to implement a new system — bar codes for our boxes! These bar codes will be linked to the artifact cataloging database and let us know how many boxes we have in total, how many from each site, what is in them, and where they are.

Photographing boxes and scanning bar codes

In this photo, Steve is using an iPad to photograph each box and to scan the bar code. The photo becomes part of the database record, in addition to a number of fields that are entered by hand.

The information about summer archaeological field schools is now available on the UMass Boston CAPS webpage!

Students excavating in New Mexico in 2015.

There will be three field schools this summer: in Plymouth, Massachusetts; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Belize. Those in Plymouth and Santa Fe are offered by Fiske Center archaeologists; the Belize program is directed by Dr. Lauren Sullivan in the Anthropology Department.