The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers - Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River (THE PLENUM SERIES IN UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY) (The Springer Series in Underwater Archaeology) PDF
Preview The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers - Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River (THE PLENUM SERIES IN UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY) (The Springer Series in Underwater Archaeology)
The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River The Plenum Series in Underwater Archaeology Series Editor: J. Barto Arnold III Institute of Nautical Archaeology Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Maritime Archaeology: A Reader of Substantive and Theoretical Contributions EditedbyLawrenceE. BabitsandHansVanTillburg The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers: Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River Annalies Corbin The Persistence of Sail in the Age of Steam: Underwater Archaeological Evidence from the Dry Tortugas DonnaJ. Souza A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River Annalies Corbin University of Idaho Moscow, Idaho Kluwer Academic Publishers New York • Boston • Dordrecht • London • Moscow eBookISBN: 0-306-47171-X Print ISBN: 0-306-46168-4 ©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Kluwer Online at: http://www.kluweronline.com and Kluwer's eBookstore at: http://www.ebooks.kluweronline.com This book is for Ed, Niki, Bill, and Daisy and is dedicated to the memory of Dr. E. B. Trail, dentist, historian, and the first Missouri River steamboat buff to make an active call for the protection of western river steamboats This page intentionally left blank. Foreword For many years, one of my favorite classroom devices in historical archaeology was to ask the students to imagine that they had to make the choice between saving—from some unnamed calamity—all master’s theses or all doctoral disser- tations in anthropology, but not both. Like good students, they usually looked to their Ph.D.-holding professor and chose the dissertations. Much to their surprise, I would respond that the theses would win without even taking time to ponder the issue. The issue is clearly one of often naïve and rarely eloquent theses full of good primary data versus sometimes more sophisticated and better written works full of irrelevant theory and meaningless statistics. Perhaps this is an overstate- ment of the situation, but it is not too far off the mark. The University Microfilms International efforts to make the titles of disser- tations in North America and the English-speaking portions of Europe available through Dissertation Abstracts is commendable. With only one minor exception, dissertations in historical and underwater archaeology in the United States are to be found listed in Dissertation Abstracts and thus are available for purchase. Unfortunately, there is no comparable source for the multitude of institu- tions producing masters’ theses in historical and underwater archaeology. If the subject matter is clearly anthropological and predates 1977, the title might be in McDonald (1977). If by chance the work was conducted in Virginia, it would probably be listed in Wittkofski (1991). What is needed in the field of historical and underwater archaeology is a current finding aid for titles in graduate studies. This is a worldwide problem, not one just involving Great Britain, Australia, and English- and French-speaking North America. One fortunate enough to find a likely title must then face the frustrating task of obtaining a copy through interli- brary loan, which involves the strangely possessive charter of the librarian con- trolling the thesis. “We cannot send a copy because it might be lost “ (in spite of having two copies), “No, we cannot make a copy because that might damage the original” (why not use the second copy?). Ultimately, one finds a colleague who vii viii Foreword finds a student to go to the library in question and make a copy on the multitude of copy machines available on every floor. If this sounds all too familiar, it is because we have all been through the process in one way or another. For the agency archaeologist in a small town who must depend on the local public library for interlibrary loan, the frustration is increased many times over. Is there a solution beyond going after a federal grant to compile a bibliogra- phy every few years? One solution is to publish quickly those theses worthy of publication. Every so often, a thesis comes along that contains not only the useful and extensive data of a typical thesis but is written in a mature way with reason- able theoretical elements more typical of a dissertation. The thesis written by Annalies Corbin is one such work. We clearly need to publish more theses of this quality. This work is doubly useful because it involves and is valuable to both terrestrial and underwater archaeology. There are several factors making this thesis unusual and valuable in histori- cal and underwater archaeology. The most obvious is the difficulty in assigning it to one or the other of the two fields. The rich array of artifacts so thoroughly enumerated is typical of a terrestrial site, yet it was the hazards of shallow water navigation that put them in storage for later excavation. The preservation was not bits and pieces, as we so often find in terrestrial sites, but the complete contents of the various boxes and trunks, labeled “artifact sets.” What makes this compilation even more useful and of inestimable value not only to archaeologists but to social anthropologists working with nineteenth century culture is the ability to identify the people who lost the various containers. Corbin has not only been able to iden- tify all but one of the numerous individual owners but has gleaned facts of their “social persona” (Goodenough, 1965:7) including traveling family groupings. As she expresses it, this is a study of the “types of people who used river transporta- tion for westward migration.” The generous use of photographs, a full listing of the artifacts from both the Bertrandand the Arabia, and the excellent artifact preservation make this volume a valuable contribution that will become a standard reference manual for many years to come. The artifact descriptions contained in Appendixes A–G include data often neglected in archaeological reports such as the precise size and the manufacturer when known. In many cases, grouping the artifacts into the “sets” contained in one box tells a great deal about what a craftsman or homemaker of that period considered necessary for his or her work. The use of a typological classification created from two complementary systems and a knowledge of the occupation of the owners have resulted in a very high degree of artifact identifi- cation. This has been viewed in terms of a series of clearly stated, predictive hypotheses. This analysis has predictive value to others; it is not pursued just to prove a pet theory as is so typical today of many archaeological dissertations. Another major consequence of this publication is the additional research that it will spawn. The questions answered are far outnumbered by the questions Foreword ix that this work asks. Appendix H—a listing of Missouri River shipwrecks-should help to further research of other sites in what is in reality the interior of a major land mass. Corbin shows that even at the upper reaches of navigation on the Mis- sissippi-Missouri system there are important resources that need to be identified, protected, and investigated. Even more important, these resources are vital to our study of material culture in general and to the study of the frontier in detail. To return to the original question, why save all master’s theses? The work published here provides a clear and concise example of why all theses in under- water and historical archaeology should be available in published form. REFERENCES Goodenough. Ward H., 1965. Rethinking “Status” and “Role.” In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology,ASA Monographs, pp. 1–24. New York, Praeger. McDonald, David R., 1977, Masters' Theses in Anthropology: A Bibliography of Theses from United States Colleges and Universities. New Haven, HRAF Press. Wittkofski. J. Mark, 1991, Theses and Dissertations Relevant to Virginia Archaeology, Architec- ture, and Material Culture. Virginia Department of Historic Resources Bibliography Series, No. 3, revised. Richmond. RODERICK SPRAGUE University of Idaho Moscow. Idaho
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