personal adornment (Other Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
In recent years personal adornment artifacts and their relation to identity performance have gained interest among historical archaeologists. This paper analyzes personal adornment artifacts recovered from Fort Davis, Texas during FODAAP’s 2014 field season to show how Buffalo Soldiers negotiated identity within a frontier community. Fort Davis, a nineteenth century U.S. Army base located on a major frontier, was home to all of the army’s all-black regiments and an ethno-racially diverse...
Forging Identity: The social and symbolic significance of torques in the Iron Age Castro Culture (2017)
The Iron Age Castro Culture of northwestern Iberia was steeped in the crosscurrents of disparate cultural influences. Linked to areas of temperate Europe by Atlantic trade routes, the Castro Culture was also subject to the encroachments of Mediterranean powers moving through the Iberian Peninsula. These diverse influences manifested in the Castro Culture in a variety of ways, including in methods of personal adornment. The gold and silver torques left by the Castro people are the best example of...
An Intersectional Analysis of Personal Adornment at the African Meeting House in Boston (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "An Archaeology Of Freedom: Exploring 19th-Century Black Communities And Households In New England." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Built in 1806, the African Meeting House in Boston was a prominent social institution for the free Black community residing on Beacon Hill. Beyond functioning as a church, the African Meeting House was used as a school, housing for community members, as well as a meeting space...
Personal Adornment in the Context of Antebellum Slavery at Poplar Forest (1830-1858) (2013)
Objects classified as personal adornment are often vested with meanings that reveal significant insight into their owners because they are personal. The context in which objects are used is critical to understanding potential meanings. This essay considers the recontextualization of personal adornment items, particularly glass beads, a pierced coin, and an alloy fastener, used by enslaved laborers at antebellum Poplar Forest plantation. The enslaved mobilized these forms of material culture in...
Plymouth Memory Capsule: A 19th-Century Tale of Woe? (2017)
While searching for remnants of 17th-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts, a collection of organic materials and Victorian-era artifacts of personal adornment—all associated with a female—were uncovered in during excavations associated with Project 400 carried out by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Massachusetts Boston. This unexpected cache provides a rare glimpse into the town of Plymouth’s rich history. This memory capsule filled with domestic items including a...
The Private Side of Victorian Mourning Practices in 19th-century New England: The Cole’s Hill Memorial Cache (2018)
Excavated from Cole’s Hill in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts, a cache comprising of a collection of 19th century personal adornment artifacts, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and organic materials, potentially provides an alternative view of mourning and memorialization practices in Victorian-era New England. The associated artifacts possess characteristics indicative of Victorian mourning symbols and material types. However, no other current examples of this mourning practice exist in the...
Signs of Authority? Symbolic media and items of personal adornment from Cache Cave (2015)
Along with a remarkable utilitarian perishable assemblage, a number of objects recovered from Cache Cave can be considered from ideological or symbolic perspectives. These include a number of ornamental and personal items that clearly indicate something other than the storage of everyday objects within the cave. This assemblage contains a variety of beads, a coyote femur tube, an exquisite chert knife, and several other enigmatic objects made of animal bone, skin, wood, and shell, including...
Style and Substance: Button Production, Use, and Choice at the Buffalo Forge Iron Plantation (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When several different types of buttons are recovered from an archaeological site, how can we parse and explain differences in choice and use? And what might we learn about the different people who made, used, or reused them? This paper explores these questions through study of a diverse button assemblage recovered from two women’s...
Up Close and Personal: Objects as Expressions of Identity at the Abiel Smith School (2018)
Archeological artifacts discovered at the Abiel Smith School (ca. 1834-1855) include personal objects like jewelry, buttons, combs, and toys. Such items used for adornment, grooming, or leisure can provide insight into how the students perceived themselves in terms of individual, communal, and ethnic identity. This paper will examine these objects as a means to answering the following questions: Can specific personal objects help us understand the students’ cultural backgrounds? To what...