modern material culture (Other Keyword)
1-3 (3 Records)
A boon to the archaeological study of American lifeways in the past and present, the massive assemblages of discarded objects at landfills poignantly speak to an era of unrivaled consumption and waste. Aggregated through municipally sanctioned collection services, these assemblages, however, are rarely representative of the full range of household-level discard behaviors. Illegal dump sites, in contrast, comprise assemblages that cannot be easily or quickly discarded through regular garbage...
Identity Performance and Material Culture: Exploring the Limits of Archaeological Inquiry Into Social Group Identity with a Massive Assemblage of Bar-Associated Trash from Urban America (2015)
Social identity is an elusive subject of inquiry in the archaeological past. Even in the contemporary, we know that expressions of identities are temporary and relational as well as an outcome of socially performative assertions, contestations, and negotiations. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of social identities is a driving aspiration of all archaeological inquiry at one level or another. This paper highlights a multi-year project that explores how discontinuous variation in socially...
Into the Lumberjacks Life: An Archaeological Study of Quebec’s 20th Century Lumber Camps (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Communicating Working Class Heritage in the 21st Century: Values, Lessons, Methods, and Meanings" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. I present the preliminary results of an archaeological investigation conducted at a 1940s lumber camp site in the Temiscouata region of eastern Québec. Combining archaeology and oral history, I capture the daily life and struggles faced by the communities of lumberjacks, as the industrial...