Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP)

Assisting faculty and staff to engage in research and scholarly & creative endeavors

Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) / Archives for anthropology

Professor King’s Archaeological Work with the Rappahannock Tribe Featured on Podcast

Professor of Anthropology Julia King took part in the pilot episode of “Tribal Truths,” a new podcast series from RadioIQ that aims to debunk myths and legends with facts, teaching about tribal cultures and current issues.

King says in the first episode titled  “Ancient cliffs are revealing lost tribal histories” that “there is so much that the land tries to tell us if we just listen to what it has to say.”

Featuring Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson and narrated by tribal member Steven Nelson, the episode focuses on Fones Cliffs, a place along the Rappahannock river in eastern Virginia where the Rappahannock Tribe once lived. King and her team of archaeologists, in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the US Fish and Wildlife Services, and the Federally-recognized Rappahannock Tribe, have been working to trace the history and development of the Rappahannock Tribe in early American history.

“[The archaeologists are] digging for traces of our towns and connecting them to our oral histories. And centuries after the Rappahannock Tribe’s removal from this area, they’re reconstructing our ties to Fones Cliffs, looking for three of our towns once located there. It’s a race against time, development and climate change,” Nelson said on the podcast.

The anthropology department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland first began studying the Rappahannock Tribe’s history in 2016 at the request of the National Park Service’s Chesapeake Bay Office, the Chesapeake Conservancy, and the Rappahannock Tribe. The work was undertaken to provide interpretive support for the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. Following the NPS-funded project, the Tribe and King and her students have continued their collaboration. The survey of the greater river valley has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service’s Underrepresented Communities Program.

Photo credit: Pamela A. D’Angelo

Professor Julia King Receives Prestigious Fellowship in Landscape Studies from Dumbarton Oaks

Julia King, professor of anthropology and chair of that department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has been awarded a prestigious residential fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C.

Administered by the trustees for Harvard University, Dumbarton Oaks supports research and learning in Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies through fellowships, internships, meetings, and exhibitions.

King will spend her fellowship researching the experiences of Indigenous communities in the Rappahannock River valley in eastern Virginia between 1500 and 1900, linking these experiences to the river valley’s Native landscape. Using the extensive archaeological database assembled during the College’s recently concluded NEH-funded project in the Rappahannock valley, King will draw on Dumbarton Oaks’ extensive library holdings to place the finds in their greater context. The fellowship will allow King time to prepare a book exploring how the Native Rappahannock communities negotiated settler colonialism over the course of four centuries.

“The Dumbarton Oaks Library holds one of the most extensive collections anywhere of published and unpublished materials on landscape, including Indigenous landscapes,” King noted. “The opportunity to have access to DO’s holdings for the fellowship period will enhance my understanding of the Native landscapes my students, staff, and I have been studying over the last decades.”

King is an anthropological archaeologist who has 30 years’ experience researching, studying, and teaching about the Chesapeake region’s rich past and its relationship to the present. She is a past president of the Society for Historical Archaeology and the recipient of the Society’s 2018 J. C. Harrington Award in recognition of her scholarship and contributions to the field of historical archaeology. Her work has also been recognized by the Archaeological Society of Virginia and the Register of Professional Archaeologists.

SMCM Archaeologists Featured in Archaeology Magazine

Professor of Anthropology Julia King and adjunct instructor of anthropology Scott Strickland ’08 are featured along with Chief Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe in the January/February edition of Archaeology Magazine. The article, “Return to the River,” focuses on their work tracing the history and development of the Rappahannock Indians in early American history. The anthropology department at St. Mary’s College first began studying the Rappahannock River valley’s history in 2016 at the request of the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay Office and the Chesapeake Conservancy. The work was undertaken to provide interpretive support for the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail and led to the Rappahannock Indians’ return to the river when former Senator John Warner and his daughter, Virginia Warner, donated land to the Rappahannock in their ancestral homeland. The survey of the greater river valley has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Professor Julia King Awarded Archeology Grant from National Park Service

Professor of Anthropology, Julia (Julie) King, was recently awarded a $110,000 grant from the National Park Service to fund a complete archeological overview and assessment of Piscataway Park in Prince George’s County, Maryland. This project will be conducted through a Cooperative Agreement under the Chesapeake Watershed Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit. The Cooperative Agreement was signed August 14, 2020 and the project is expected to be completed by December 31, 2021.

Piscataway Park is a unit of the National Park Service administered by National Capital Parks—East. The park is located in Southern Maryland along the banks of the Potomac River. This park is significant because of the rich archeological resources located within the park and their impact on our modern understanding of Native American societies in the Eastern Middle Atlantic. Situated approximately 25 miles downriver from Washington D.C., lands within the park were home to the Potomac Valley’s indigenous inhabitants for thousands of years—dating as far back as 6,000 years ago and through the 1500s. Among the occupants were the Piscataway Indians of Southern Maryland whose ancestors still live nearby today.

Piscataway Park is the greatest resource of pre-contact and contact period American Indian archeological resources in the National Capital Region of the National Park Service. The park has been the subject of several archeological investigations, but there has never been a synthetic report of this work or a formal organization of this material for management needs. The scope and breadth of existing archeological collections also lend themselves to addressing future research questions related not only to the history of Piscataway Park, but also the Native American communities that once lived there.

The archeological overview and assessment will describe and assess the known and potential archeological resources at Piscataway Park. The overview reviews, summarizes and synthesizes existing archeological data in detail, assesses past work, identifies gaps in our understanding of the archeological data, and determines the need for and recommendations for future studies. The document will be a core baseline archeological resources management reference for the National Capital Parks—East unit. This project will also critically examine and evaluate museum collections from archeological sites in the park to assist in understanding the history of the park. Furthermore, this work will develop recommendations for future research for management of park resources and public education. Julie King is the Principal Investigator for the project, with Scott Strickland (’08) serving as Research and GIS Coordinator. The grant also includes funding for an assistant archaeologist, likely to be an SMCM alum, and two student assistants.

Pending available funding, King and NPS may continue the project into 2022 and beyond with a new cooperative agreement. Additional work will likely entail reviewing and assessing archaeological collections, completion of updating state site forms, and updating archeological site condition assessments for the National Park System’s online Cultural Resources Inventory System. Further work may also involve the production of a publicly accessible document (excluding sensitive archeological information) that will provide a detailed history of the Native American experience as linked to Piscataway Park, along with a Finding Aid/Collections Assessment document to complement the Archeological Overview and Assessment Document.

Professor of Anthropology Julia King and Collaborators Continue Archaeological Research Along Rappahannock River

Professor of Anthropology Julia King, Instructor of Anthropology Scott Strickland and SMCM students Caitlin Hall, Sarah Kifer and Danielle Harris-Burnett are featured in a July 25, 2020 Fredericksburg.com article focusing on their Rappahannock Tribe project called “Indigenous Borderlands of the Chesapeake.” The team is doing historical archaeology in Virginia to find spots where Native American villages existed along the Rappahannock River.

King and her crew have been working recently at a land tract above the Rappahannock River called Fones Cliffs. The site had been considered for development but was acquired instead in 2019 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Fones Cliffs has a rich cultural history, as well as important ecological habitat and a beautiful white cliff landscape.

The team of archaeologists has found clues of Native Americans at Fones Cliffs and King said the main objective will continue to be finding evidence of the three large villages that exist in both the Rappahannock Tribe’s oral histories and in Captain John Smith’s journals, describing his journey up the river in 1608. King notes that an earlier round of exploration on the Fones Cliffs site was funded by The Conservation Fund, while this year’s two weeks of digging and exploration were paid for by the refuge.

Associate Professor Gijanto and Professor Larsen Awarded Three-year NSF Grant to Fund Student Research Experiences

Drs. Gijanto (center) and Larsen (right)

Liza Gijanto, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Randy Larsen, Professor of Chemistry, were recently awarded an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant focused on archaeological investigations of colonial Maryland (Award No. 1950646). The $368,278 grant will fund a multi-year research program for numerous students from across the U.S. 

Each summer during this NSF-REU program, 12 undergraduate students and their mentors will investigate the role of country estates in shaping Maryland society from the mid-17th until the early 19th century. This archaeology REU program is novel in terms of research focus, combining traditional field and laboratory techniques with cutting-edge collection management methods (archaeometry, mapping, dating, photogrammetry). Participants will also receive instruction in ethical curation that includes interpretation in both scholarly publications and museum exhibition. The eight-week program will be hosted by St. Mary’s College of Maryland, with field work occurring at the Cremona Estate in Mechanicsville, MD and collections management and conservation training done in collaboration with the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab) in St. Leonard, MD. The three-year project was scheduled to run in the summers of 2020, 2021 and 2022. However, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Gijanto and Larsen are working with NSF to delay implementation of the project by one year.

This comprehensive and innovative REU program will provide undergraduates with a first-class research experience in archaeology and state-of-the-art training in the latest scientific and methodological approaches to archaeological fieldwork, artifact curation, materials analysis, curatorial interpretation and public engagement with scholarly content. Drs. Gijanto and Larsen also seek to highlight the ongoing archaeological collections crisis, which is largely due to the separation of archaeological fieldwork from collections management and the lack of planning and resource allocation for the proper care of materials once they have been excavated. To investigate the research question and provide solid training in archaeology, students will learn: 1) the use of archaeological, archival, and spatial data to discern the role of country estates in shaping MD society; 2) the relationship between generating a collection and maintaining it; 3) archaeometry and materials characterization; and 4) public engagement through research presentations, publications and museum exhibition. This combination of research and state-of the art training available to early career, underserved students is currently unique among U.S. field schools.

Documenting Chesapeake History

The region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay is rich in history. Originally settled by Native American tribes, the area is also home to the United States’ earliest English colonial settlements and the beginnings of American slavery. Since 2001, Julia King and a consortium of researchers have been advancing the archaeological study of the region through digital methods, collections-based research, and more traditional field excavations. Their work has made archaeological data more accessible to researchers and students and yielded new insights into colonial and pre-colonial history. It has also had an impact on Native American tribes who still live in the region.

As the first director of the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, King was charged with organizing and relocating archaeological collections from across the state to one central location. NEH grants helped preserve and electronically catalog records documenting more than 1-million objects from archaeological sites located throughout the Chesapeake Bay region, making them more broadly accessible to researchers. NEH funding also supported two comparative studies of English, Indigenous, and African culture in the Chesapeake. A consortium of researchers from around the region worked on these projects, contributing and digitizing their archaeological catalogs.

Through this work, archaeologists came to see nuances in interactions between Native Americans and English settlers, as evidenced through objects found in excavated sites. For instance, between 1660 and 1680, the colorful beads Native Americans traded changed from blue and white to black and red, indicating a growing antipathy for the settlers: among Native people, the color black was often closely associated with death. Beyond these insights, the funding resulted in two websites: ChesapeakeArchaeology.org and ColonialEncounters.org. These continue to be used by students and researchers as they explore the region’s history.

Now a professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, King has continued her work in the region’s archeology and history through an NEH grant to excavate and analyze Indigenous sites along the lower Rappahannock River in Virginia. Throughout the project, King has worked closely with Rappahannock people who live in the area and whose ancestors settled the river valley. The excavations and GIS work associated with the project have proven crucial to helping the Rappahannock Tribe verify the accuracy of some of their oral traditions. More than subtle changes in historical interpretation and their echoes in museum exhibitions in classrooms, outcomes like these have been among the most significant in King’s career. All of this work, with its focus on Indigenous sites, has helped boost the efforts of Native tribes seeking recognition. As King states, “10 or 15 years ago, many people wouldn’t believe there were Native Americans here. They thought they were long gone, when in fact they are still here.”

This article first appeared on the National Humanties Alliance NEH for ALL webpage. This project has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland Receives Chesapeake Cultural Studies Grant

St. Mary’s College of Maryland has been awarded a $24,000 Chesapeake Material Cultural Studies Grant from The Conservation Fund.

The grant will advance the College’s work using archaeological artifacts to examine how Native American groups in the Chesapeake’s major river drainages responded to the region’s occupation by European settlers. SMCM Professor of Anthropology Julia A. King and Project Archaeologist/GIS Specialist Scott M. Strickland will compare artifact collections from 17th- and 18th-century Native sites in Maryland and Virginia to document post-Contact Indian lifeways and experiences. King and Strickland will be assisted by tribal consultants from the Pamunkey, Piscataway, and Rappahannock tribes.

The Conservation Fund—a national nonprofit dedicated to providing environmental solutions that make economic sense for communities—presented grants to SMCM and 10 other research, education and historical institutions and specialists to support the conservation, preservation and study of cultural artifacts from the Chesapeake region dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries.

“Funding from The Conservation Fund provides an excellent opportunity to understand how the Chesapeake region’s many Indian groups shaped the colonial encounter,” Scott Strickland noted. “Tribal participation in this project will provide an important but often missing Native perspective for interpreting early American history.”

Ranging from $15,000 to $25,000, the Chesapeake Material Cultural Studies Grants help further research and expand current knowledge of artifact collections from previously excavated archaeological sites at Jamestown, Martin’s Hundred, Carter’s Grove, Kingsmill and other locations in the Chesapeake region to better understand and interpret the colony’s first settlers and their response to the new environment and climate.

“American history is intrinsically connected to the land. In Virginia and especially in the Chesapeake region, our land can tell a variety of stories going back multiple centuries,” said Heather Richards, Virginia state director for The Conservation Fund. “While we at The Conservation Fund focus on protecting the places where history happens and conserving important natural resources, we depend on our peers in the archeological field to research and interpret how human lives intersected with these places. We are honored to support St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s ongoing work.”

A full list of the eleven Chesapeake Material Cultural Studies Grant recipients can be found here: http://bit.ly/ChesapeakeGrants.

SMCM Student Connects Physics and Drones with Anthropology During Internship at UMD UAS Test Site

Using drone technology, Luke Quinn ‘20 spent his summer researching a way to more efficiently survey archaeology sites for magnetic anomalies.

Through an internship with the University of Maryland Unmanned Aerial Systems Test Site (UMD UAS), Quinn, a St. Mary’s College of Maryland physics major with a concentration in applied physics, researched the feasibility of attaching a magnetometer to an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), commonly referred to as a drone, to survey archaeology sites.

The UMD UAS Test Site takes on five interns each summer. Applicants submit a project proposal with their application. According to information from its website, “summer internships give students an opportunity to work hands-on with researchers and staff on the modeling, design, analysis, simulation, assembly, and experimentation of UAS.”

“[Quinn’s] work is intriguing because it would allow archaeologists to conduct remote sensing surveys without having to literally be on the ground,” said Julia King, St. Mary’s College professor of anthropology. Magnetometers are typically hand-held and walked in straight lines over areas being surveyed.

“In the case of southern Maryland, so many important sites are located in actively farmed fields,” she said, adding that most farmers support the work of anthropologists but “not when it comes to traipsing through their crops.”

Throughout the 11-week program, Quinn has had the opportunity to research, design and build — using a 3D printer — a harness that would attach a magnetometer onto a drone and with assistance from UMD UAS Test Site test engineer Josh Gaus, he was able to test his project at an important archaeological site in Chaptico, recommended by King.

According to King, the site was once occupied by a governor of Maryland in the 1660s until his death in 1679. A previous survey revealed brick foundations, a cellar, and a brick drain. Quinn and faculty adviser Joshua Grossman, professor and chair of the physics department at St. Mary’s College, said knowing anomalies have been previously recorded would allow Quinn to have data for comparison. “I had no idea I’d be out here doing research like this. I can’t really put it into words,” Quinn said during one of his opportunities in the field. Quinn said he was able to take lessons learned about magnetism in Grossman’s class and apply them to his research in the field.

Grossman explained that during this internship, Quinn was getting first-hand experience with project management. “That’s a highly transferable skill,” Grossman said. Grossman explained that aside from the physics and drone skills, Quinn was learning the importance of time management, communication, and figuring out what can be done within the parameters of a fixed budget.

Grossman also commented on the internship’s fit with a liberal arts education, “bringing together the engineering and technology and application in the humanities, in this case, archaeology.” After his field work, Quinn spent the remaining weeks of his internship analyzing data and matching timestamps from the drone and the magnetometer to determine locations of the readings. He said while the data didn’t match with King’s initial survey, he still found it helpful to his research and was pleased with his experience. He said he gained a lot of experience working with drones and learning how they operate. He also was able to work with 3D printers and various software packages. Quinn plans to continue this project throughout the Fall 2019 academic semester.

Professor King’s NEH-funded work with the Rappahannock Tribe Featured in National Council of University Research Administrators Magazine

Professor of Anthropology Julia King (left) and Rappahannock Tribe Chief Anne Richardson (right)

Professor of Anthropology Julia King’s National Endowment for the Humanities-funded work with the Rappahannock Tribe is featured in the March/April 2019 issue of National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA) Magazine.

King, in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, Chesapeake Conservancy, and the federally-recognized Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia, is tracing the history and development of the Rappahannock Indians in early American history (200-1850 AD).

NCURA Magazine is a member-only magazine available both in print and online for all NCURA members, published six times a year. It is arguably the leading national organization for research administrators with membership in the thousands.