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Archaeologists investigating sites of craft and industrial enterprise often puzzle over a domain of bewildering ruins. Locations of remarkable energy, tumult, and creativity now stand silent. This book provides an overview of the archaeology of American craft and industrial enterprises, outlines developments in theories, research questions, and interpretative frameworks, and presents case studies from a wide range of subjects. Research focused on industrial enterprises traverses a spectrum of perspectives. Some limit their efforts to recording, mapping, and studying the mechanics of a site. Others examine comparative questions of changes of technologies over time and space. Many analysts look away from the buildings and equipment of the workplace and focus instead on the workers, their families, residences, lifeways, and health experiences. With many sites presenting standing ruins, historians and archaeologists often encounter local stakeholder groups who wish to promote heritage themes and tourism potentials. All of these perspectives can be pursued with significant advances in research and curation methods. Investigations often range from microscopic analysis of product constituents to large-scale, three-dimensional recording of locations and features with high-resolution laser technologies. Past debates questioned whether primary emphasis should be on heritage recording or on archaeological research questions. More recent trends focus on collaborations across interest groups.

The discipline of historical archaeology owes much of its development and prominence to work begun nearly a century ago and continuing to the present at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This edited volume chronicles only a few of the lessons learned on behalf of the discipline, growing out of the 2014 Society for Historical Archaeology symposium “Discovering What Counts in Archaeology and Reconstruction: Lessons from Colonial Williamsburg.” It includes case studies based on exemplary approaches and methodologies that undoubtedly will continue to make Williamsburg meaningful to historical archaeology in the twenty-first century and beyond this episodic period.

This book contributes to global conversations about the nature and practice of public history and heritage studies, as well as heritage scholarship in Latin America and the Caribbean. Drawing from the context of Belize and two rural African-descendant Kriol communities, this book demonstrates the many means by which people construct values, meanings, and practices related to heritage. These meanings have wide-ranging influences on peoples’ cultural identity, daily practices, and engagements with tangible and intangible culture. The author demonstrates that since the late nineteenth century, Belizean colonial and national institutions have constructed and used heritage places and ideologies to manage difference, govern citizens, and reinforce economic and social development agendas, particularly through archaeology and formal education. Institutional heritage practices have resulted in marginalized pasts and enduring racial and ethnic inequalities, especially in regards to Kriol cultural heritage. However, this book also details how Belizean teachers and children resisted and responded to persistent colonial and state legacies through vernacular heritage practices. The book’s methodology is innovative as it combines British imperial archival sources with years of ethnographic observations and interviews with government officials, teachers, and young people. A major contribution of the book is historicizing heritage by identifying connections between colonial and state cultural politics and global heritage trends over time. Another significant contribution is demonstrating how education and archaeology are interconnected social institutions through which official and vernacular heritage forms and practices are constructed, controlled, negotiated, and contested.

This volume presents new data and interpretations from research at Florida’s Spanish missions, outposts established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to strengthen the colonizing empire and convert Indigenous groups to Christianity. In these chapters, archaeologists, historians, and ethnomusicologists draw on the past thirty years of work at sites from St. Augustine to the panhandle. Contributors explore the lived experiences of the Indigenous people, Franciscan friars, and Spanish laypeople who lived in La Florida’s mission communities. In the process, they address missionization, ethnogenesis, settlement, foodways, conflict, and warfare. One study reconstructs the sonic history of Mission San Luis with soundscape compositions. The volume also sheds light on the destruction of the Apalachee-Spanish missions by the English. The recent investigations highlighted here significantly change earlier understandings by emphasizing the kind and degree of social, economic, and ideological relationships that existed between Apalachee and Timucuan communities and the Spanish. Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida updates and rewrites the history of the Spanish mission effort in the region.