Mapping and Historical Archaeology: Beyond (within, through) the Grid

About

Alanna Warner-Smith is a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History Smithsonian Institution. As a historical bioarchaeologist she draws upon skeletal archival and material traces to understand lived experiences in the past. Broadly her research examines how macroscalar processes and phenomenasuch as inequality immigration capitalism urbanization and industrializationare experienced and embodied on the ground. She has contributed to research on the Spring Street Presbyterian Church in New York City New York and the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah. She has also followed the path of a cholera epidemic that moved through the Caribbean in the 1850s. Her current research explores the intersections of health labor and citizenship through the embodied experiences of Irish immigrants living and dying in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work includes attention to the postmortem lives of immigrants as she studies the collection curation and research of the remains of immigrants in the history of biological anthropology.Sarah E. Platt is an anthropologically informed historical archaeologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of Charleston. Her area of study is the urban South focusing on the archaeology of downtown Charleston South Carolina using predominantly collections-based methodologies. Broadly she is interested in how memory and Lost Cause perceptions of the Southern past impact the archaeological archive and the collections repository. In the face of the ongoing collections crisis in archaeology where the production of collections outstrips the resources available to store and care for them she is also invested in creative uses of pre-existing legacy collections and applying new research questions to old sites.