The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers - Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River (THE PLENUM SERIES IN UNDERWATER ARCHAEOLOGY) (The Springer Series in Underwater Archaeology)

Annalies Corbin is one of the leading lights of US underwater archaeology. This book reflects her tremendous engergy and accomplished scholoarship. Accessible to the professional and the layman. Highly recommended for archaeologists, historians, and steamboat or old west enthusiasts.

This book is a material culture analysis of passengers' belongings found on the steamboats Bertrand and Arabia, which served nineteenth century emigrants traveling west on the Missouri river. The research utilizes documentary sources, photographs, and archaeological artifacts. The book is heavily descriptive and will be regarded as a reference manual for western artifacts and for steamboats that operated on the Missouri river.

Booknews

The Society of Historical Archaeology in Atlanta invited Corbin (U. of Idaho) to publish her master's thesis in the series. She examines artifacts from the substantial steamboats the and the , which plied the Missouri from 1856 to 1865. Unlike earlier work on the material, she links the remains to emigrant migration patterns. She establishes a profile of the passengers by analyzing the content of passenger boxes with a view toward gender, group dynamics, and socioeconomic status. She combines documentary sources, photographs, and the archaeological artifacts to help posit hypotheses about 19th- century emigrant travel westwards. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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, Iwouldrespondthatthetheseswould win withouteventakingtime to ponderthe 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 offthe 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. Preliminaries......Page 1 Contents......Page 16 1. Introduction: Westward Expansion toward Fort Benton, Montana Territory......Page 20 2. The Steamboats Arabia and Bertrand......Page 30 3. Methodology......Page 40 4. Bertrand Box 74......Page 48 5. Bertrand FPC-8.......Page 70 6. Bertrand MSC-128......Page 90 7. Bertrand FSC-234......Page 96 8. Arabia Carpenter’s Box......Page 108 9. Quantitative Analysis......Page 120 10. Conclusions......Page 128 Appendices......Page 134 References......Page 246 Index......Page 252 An "empty" North American continent seemed to pull new inhabitants ever westward.