Monday, August 14, 2023

My Bibliography Part IIb: Delaware DOT Reports

Besides the NPS, my other client that has put some of my reports online is the Delaware Delaware Department of Transportation. DelDOT actually has a ton of archaeological reports available online, everything from major studies to little reports for intersection improvements; below are just my more interesting studies.These have been redacted to remove sensitive information, especially the locations of the sites.

Farm Life on the Appoquinimink, 1750-1830. Archaeological Discoveries at the McKean/Cochran Farm Site Odessa, New Castle County, Delaware. (1999) Excavation report on a major colonial farm site. What interested me most about this site was the use in the coastal plain of a kind of dairy building designed to use by a mountain spring.

The Ordinary and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Delaware: Excavations at the Augustine Creek North and South Sites,, New Castle County, Delaware. (2001) Lots of good findings at two eighteenth-century farm sites, led to an article in Northeast Historical Archaeology.

An Ordinary Family in Eighteenth Century Delaware: Excavations at the Dawson Family Site, Kent County, Delaware. (2002). After we had already excavated this site I found an aerial photograph that showed it as bare earth criss-crossed by earthmoving machines during road construction in the 1960s. If I had seen those photographs, we would not have bothered with this site. But by some fluke parts of the site did survive, including a cellar hole full of wonderful eighteenth-century artifacts.

Historic Context: The Archaeology of Farm and Rural Dwelling Sites in New Castle and Kent Counties, Delaware 1730-1770 and 1770-1830. (2002) Being tasked to write this document gave me a chance to review all the historical archaeology done in Delaware before 2000 and sum up what had been learned. This led to my paper, "Delaware Archaeology and the Revolutionary Eighteenth Century."

Historic Context: The Archaeology of African American Life in St. Georges Hundred, Delaware, 1770-1940. (2016) In 1770, most of the black people in North America lived on plantations. In 1900, a great many of them lived in small rural communities of two to twenty homes. This document dives deeply into the archaeology and history of one Delaware farming district to investigate how and when that happened and what life was like in those communities. I think this ended up as a great document because we had a terrific team: one guy right out of graduate school who was very up to date on the theoretical side of African Diaspora studies, another who was great at using title deeds and other sources to document the step by step formation of rural communities, and others, including students at Delaware State University who helped with research.

Archaeology of the Puncheon Run Site. (2005) Excavation report from a sprawling mass of ancient Native American camp sites that span at least 3,000 years.

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