Research connecting the land and the sea

Chelsea Cohen is a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Fellow, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology in the School of Arts & Sciences, and a museum educator. Her dissertation research focuses on the relationship between British maritime culture, agroforestry, and the development of port cities in the 18th-century Chesapeake. Trained as both a historical and maritime archaeologist, she combines terrestrial and underwater methods to connect the land and sea.

"I came to work as an archaeologist with an interest in how colonialism articulates across watery spaces, but my focus on the 18th-century Chesapeake was the result of a contract archaeology job I had been working right before starting at Penn," says Cohen. "I was brought in as a consulting maritime archaeologist during the excavation of three ships that were reused as part of a historic wharf in Alexandria, Virginia. … I could not shake the question of why these ships had been so purposefully reused in this wharf. The more I looked, the more it became apparent that this reuse was one piece of material evidence of a much larger set of changes to the landscape that followed Euro-American development in the Chesapeake region."

Cohen highlights particular challenges in her field. "The challenges that are foregrounded in my work are accessibility and fostering greater public understanding of the scholarship of early America," she says. "Remarkable work is being done to address understudied histories and the violences perpetuated by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and other fields. Not enough of that work makes it out of the academy, though."

Read more at The McNeil Center for Early American Studies.