China or Prosser button identification and dating

Sprague, Roderick

doi:10.1007/bf03374353

Cited by 19 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…One of the best groups of shovelbums I have ever worked with, and here we are twenty years later and we’re all still best of pals. That’s pretty unique.” After the wrap party, Beidleman kept some crew members on to analyze the artifacts, which were conserved at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR), and included coins found in the eye sockets of burials, pieces of leather grommets, and dozens of ceramic prosser buttons, common as underwear fastenings starting in the mid‐nineteenth century (Lindbergh 1999; Sprague 2002). Some of the artifacts are tantalizing in the symbolism they may hold: In one of the comingled burial features (Box 2), an 1865 three‐cent nickel with a perforation was recovered, which has been hypothesized by some who have seen it as an Emancipation pendant (Figure 2).…”

Section: A Winter Discoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Bones in Stasis: The Challenging History and Uncertain Future of the Virginia State Penitentiary Collection

Chapman¹,

Cook²,

Edwards³

2020

Journal for the Anthropology of North America

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This article describes an archeological ethnographic study of the history and social context of the Virginia State Penitentiary, where burials excavated in the 1990s still remain in limbo: unpublished, unmemorialized, and unmourned. The penitentiary (1804-1991) was a feared site of solitary confinement, carceral labor, and capital punishment. Fieldwork conducted in advance of the penitentiary's demolition recorded solitary confinement cells within the eighteenth-century foundations, but also discovered a substantial burial ground within the prison walls. The collection includes the remains of over 200 people, many of whom were black prisoners who died between 1878 and 1884. Unfortunately, archeological analysis and publication were never completed. This article presents a new public engagement process to identify fresh possibilities for the sites and the individuals represented in this collection. Based on over thirty semistructured interviews conducted in 2015 and data from over 230 respondents to the 2018 Richmond Penitentiary Survey, we discuss how the penitentiary remains resonate or fails to resonate with Richmond residents, even as the city's broader history of archeological neglect is becoming better understood. We discuss how archival research and emerging models for archeological restorative justice may provide new avenues for addressing this urban archeological erasure in a major Southern metropolis.

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Section: A Winter Discoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Bones in Stasis: The Challenging History and Uncertain Future of the Virginia State Penitentiary Collection

Chapman¹,

Cook²,

Edwards³

2020

Journal for the Anthropology of North America

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“…Twenty-six ceramic buttons manufactured using the Prosser process were recovered from the interior of the structure. These white buttons were manufactured in England beginning in 1840 and were popular throughout the nineteenth century (Sprague 2002). Twelve "BEST RING EDGE" copper-alloy buttons, whose manufacture began in the mid-1850s, were also recovered from all three stratigraphic levels, indicating that the soil deposits did not correlate to discrete phases of the site's usage, but rather suggested continuous use of the space.…”

Section: Dating the Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Designed for durability, "BEST RING EDGE" buttons were inexpensive and widely available. Similarly, ceramic buttons manufactured by the Prosser process were the most ubiquitous and cheapest buttons available in nineteenth-century North America and Great Britain (Sprague 2002). The majority of the 26 ceramic buttons recovered from the Potato Hill structure were four-hole sew-through varieties, and the remainder were twohole sew-through.…”

Section: Artifacts Of Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The State of Decay into which the Island Has Fallen”: Education and Social Welfare on Montserrat after emancipation

Ryzewski

Cherry

McAtackney

2018

Int J Histor Archaeol

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The social life of the newly created 'laboring classes' in the post-emancipation Caribbean has been relatively unexamined across a number of disciplinary perspectives. This state of affairs can be explained through the dearth of documentary evidence that explicitly details the everyday lives of the newly emancipated (preventing historians from easily reconstructing their experiences) and the continuing focus of archaeologists on the plantation era of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper argues for the need to bring together a variety of sources to enable researchers to gain a better understanding of this important, transitional time in Montserratian history. Using evidence gathered from archives in the Caribbean, North America and the British Isles, materials excavated from a previously undocumented structure in the marginal north of the island, and local memories of education on Montserrat, this paper illuminates an almost forgotten aspect of the lives of nineteenth-century laboring classes on the island: the aspiration of education.

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“…The small number of porcelain, bone and brass buttons found within the hale pili are undecorated shirt‐style buttons. Porcelain “Prosser” buttons postdated approximately 1840 (Sprague ), suggesting that the structure may have been used until 1840 or later.…”

Section: An Overview Of the Miloli‘i Chronology And Inter‐assemblage mentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding variability in the hinterlands: settlement and subsistence inMiloli‘i,Kaua‘i,HawaiianIslands

Kahn

Kawelu

Wichman

et al. 2016

Archaeology in Oceania

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Recent archaeological excavations in Miloli‘i Valley, Kaua‘i are discussed to provide data from an isolated and marginal hinterland, far removed from the island's political centres. We develop a chronological sequence of site construction and use and discuss the nature of pre‐contact Hawaiian settlement and subsistence. We also outline elements of human–environment interactions from the settlement period to the protohistoric era, and provide tentative comparisons of the Miloli‘i hinterland sequence with those from core areas in the late prehistoric political hierarchy. Our case study highlights the degree to which inter‐ and intra‐island variability remain relatively under‐studied in the Hawaiian context.

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China or Prosser button identification and dating

Cited by 19 publications

References 1 publication

Bones in Stasis: The Challenging History and Uncertain Future of the Virginia State Penitentiary Collection

Bones in Stasis: The Challenging History and Uncertain Future of the Virginia State Penitentiary Collection

“The State of Decay into which the Island Has Fallen”: Education and Social Welfare on Montserrat after emancipation

Understanding variability in the hinterlands: settlement and subsistence inMiloli‘i,Kaua‘i,HawaiianIslands

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