Dooley's Ferry: The Archaeology of a Civilian Community in Wartime
Warfare and conflict are familiar topics to anthropologists, but it is only recently that anthropological archaeologists moved to create a discrete specialization, known as Conflict Archaeology. Practitioners now actively pursue research in a number of different areas, such as battlefields, fortific...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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W&M ScholarWorks
2013
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| Online Access: | https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623627 https://doi.org/10.21220/s2-6qr8-x040 https://scholarworks.wm.edu/context/etd/article/3418/viewcontent/3578123.pdf |
| Summary: | Warfare and conflict are familiar topics to anthropologists, but it is only recently that anthropological archaeologists moved to create a discrete specialization, known as Conflict Archaeology. Practitioners now actively pursue research in a number of different areas, such as battlefields, fortifications, and troop encampments. These advances throw into sharp relief areas that need greater focus. This dissertation addresses one of these shortcomings by focusing on the home front by studying Dooley's Ferry, a hamlet that once lay on the banks of the Red River, in southwest Arkansas. Before the American Civil War, it was a node in the commodity chains that bound the British Atlantic World together through the production and exchange of cotton for finished goods from the United Kingdom and northeast United States.;The war drastically altered the community in different ways. The site lost community members to military service, displacement, and emancipation. Those who remained were forced to find new ways to cope with the deprivation brought about by the collapse of antebellum trade networks that supplied them with food and finished goods. The residents also faced increasingly complex and ambiguous relationships to government and the Confederate Army.;For four years, the College of William & Mary and the Arkansas Archeological Survey investigated the archaeology of Dooley's Ferry using multiple excavation and remote sensing techniques. The results characterized the distribution of historic residences at the site, established their temporal affiliations, and allowed archaeologists to draw start to understand how we may study the home front archaeology and add substantially to an under-studied aspect of Arkansas's past. |
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