I assembled this bibliography for my LinkedIn page and thought I might as well put it here, too.
The Bruin Slave Jail, Alexandria, Virginia. John Bedell, Lisa Kraus, and Charles LeeDecker. October 2011, Revised January 2023.
On ResearchGate as a preprint. Study of the fascinating history and remarkable archaeology of the jail owned by slave trader Joseph Bruin, a notorous scoundrel who inspired one of the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Implications of Precise Radiocarbon Dates (5800-5500 Cal Bp) for the Halifax Complex in Eastern Virginia. John Bedell and Stuart J. Fiedel. Archeology of Eastern North America, 50:79-98, 2023.
Not online so far as I know. In 2014 I led the excavation of a remarkable Native America site in Virginia dating mainly to between 4000 and 1500 BC and ended up as the custodian as the best available set of dates for the Halifax culture. So I enlisted a colleague and friend to help me produce this article. Incidentally there is nothing strange about an archaeologist taking a decade to turn an excavation into a publication; we are bad that way.
The Sensation of This Week: Archeology and the Battle of Fort Stevens. John Bedell and Stephen Potter. In Archaeology and the Civil War, edited by Clarence Geier. University of Florida Press. 2014.
Not online so far as I know, but I also wrote the brochure you can read online here. The National Park Service used to say that the whole battlefield from the Battle of Fort Stevens, during Jubal Early's Raid on Washington in 1864, had been lost to development, but we found that part of it survived in Rock Creek Park. One small piece of the wonderful Civil War studies I have done for the NPS, most of which can't be published because of concerns about looting.
The Prince William County Poor House, 1795 to 1928. Middle Atlantic Archaeology 28:17-30. 2012.
Not online so far as I know, but the NPS has a summary of the findings. This was a great learning experience for me, because when I started I knew nothing about the provision of poor relief in colonial or nineteenth-century America. They had debates about welfare in 1830 that you could reprint today completely unchanged.
Delaware Archaeology and the Revolutionary Eighteenth Century. John Bedell. Historical Archaeology 35(4):83-104. 2001. Available on JSTOR.
Lewis Binford, one of the Great Men of North American Archaeology, praised this in his plenary address at the 2003 SHA conference as the sort of work historical archaeologists ought to be doing more of. Which was probably the high point of my career as a scholar. The article uses a great data set to explore how much everyday life in the colonies really changed across the 1680 to 1830 period, which some people had claimed saw a "revolution" in how people lived and thought. And you all know how I feel about revolutions.
Ordinary and Poor People in 18th-Century Delaware. John Bedell and Gerald P. Scharfenberger. Northeast Historical Archaeology Vol. 29 (2000), Article 3.
Available at the NHA web site. Using the results of excavations done for the Delaware DOT to investigate ordinary life in the colonies.
Archaeology and Probate Inventories in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Life. John Bedell. Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXXI:223-245. 2000.
Available on JSTOR. I argue that using archaeology and probate (estate) inventories together gives a much better idea of past material culture than either does alone, with examples drawn from my Delaware work. You might think that this is obvious but when I researched this I found exactly one article doing the same thing, and that was in French, about a small town in Brittany.
Memory and Proof of Age in England, 1272-1327. John Bedell. Past and Present 162:3-27. 1999.
Not online so far as I know. This is still my favorite publication, in which I used a quirk of English law to investigate how medieval men kept track of time and what they remembered from 21 years before.
Status, Technology, and Rural Tradition in Western Pennsylvania: Excavations at the Shaeffer Farm Site. John Bedell, Michael Petraglia, and Thomas Plummer. Northeast Historical Archaeology Vol. 23 (1994), Article 3.
Available at the the NHA web site. For me this project was an experiment in whether archaeology can tell us anything about nineteenth-century farm life that we couldn't learn more easily in some other way. Conclusion: maybe a little.
3 comments:
Fantastic. Me playing devils advocate: I completely agree the site locations should be protected. But who is supposed to benefit from these endeavors? After all, it is funded by the people through their tax money. We chastise looters for not recording their finds. Is it fair that only a handful of people (professional archaeologists) get to see the results? NPS used to have better online links to some of the finds mentioned, without specific maps or locations, that seem to have disappeared.
Not being able to publish Civil War research is indeed frustrating, but whenever I raise it the NPS folks start telling stories about brazen looting by hard-core buffs, accidental looting by ignorant Dads taking their kids out to look for Minie balls, etc. In the case of the Rock Creek Park we were able to publish that article, which has no map, but have not been able to do what I really want, which is to lay out a trail that follows the battle lines, with a marker for the charge of the Veterans' Reserve, the War Department clerks called into action when Early's men approached the city. Such a great Washington story.
Yes. This is the one I was looking for:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/remains-of-the-battle.htm
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