Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Twenty first century historical archaeology is a big tent, with scholars pursuing diverse research agendas from the deeply scientific to the overtly humanistic. Archaeologists are also deeply engaged in working with descendant communities and are striving to build a better future through activism. This session, inspired by a conversation a decade ago with the late archaeologist Stanley South, argues that artifacts, even single artifacts, are and must be central to our efforts to present a useful past to varied public audiences. This approach, which drills down to the individual artifact might be called nano-archaeology. A series of artifact biographies are presented as a means of linking past and present in meaningful ways.