consumerism (Other Keyword)
1-25 (29 Records)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. While farmsteads are relatively abundant in the historic and archaeological record, there are many issues with the current practices used to identify, evaluate, record, and study them. However, farmsteads represent a way of life that was once customary to much of the American population, and therefore deserve adequate archaeological attention. This Master's thesis studied a late...
The Archaeology of Citizenship (2013)
This paper examines how a wide variety of communities and individuals have constituted and articulated what it means to be an American using material culture as a medium of social action. I oscillate back and forth from the institutions imparting ideals about American citizenship to the individuals on the receiving end of such ideological instruction. The vantage point historical archaeology affords permits a reading of citizenship that is multiscaler in methodology, nuancing previous studies of...
Beer Bottles and Helmet Plumes: Military Consumerism at Fort Davis, Texas (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper investigates consumption patterns in the context of a 19th century U.S. military fort. Specifically, the authors discuss an assemblage recovered during a surface survey conducted on private property in Fort Davis, Texas. The sheet midden materials we are discussing were deposited by military personnel from the mid-1880s through the fort’s official abandonment in 1891....
Bringing the Neighborhood Back to Life: Working-Class Consumption and Immigrant Identity in 19th-Century Roxbury, Massachusetts (2015)
Working with the past always presents a bevy of challenges for researchers, and when material collections fall into disuse, it can be especially difficult to appreciate their intrinsic value. Incorporating new technological methods (GIS) and primary document research allows archaeologists to synthesize original excavation and background information in innovative ways. The Southwest Corridor Project (Roxbury, Boston, MA), excavated in the 1970s, is a perfect collection for these purposes. ...
British Colonial Trade Goods in the Nevada Frontier (2013)
In the mid 19th century, Virginia City, Nevada attracted people from all over world by producing a steady stream of silver and gold that lined pockets and coffers around the world. During the summer of 2010, excavations were performed along South Howard Street, Virginia City by the University of Nevada, Reno in an effort to uncover evidence of community identity. Many artifacts were recovered, including a container seal bearing a George Whybrow Company logo, along with the name of its export...
The Children at 2925 Richmond Street and the Parents that Raised Them (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Archaeology of the Delaware River Waterfront Symposium of Philadelphia Neighborhoods" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In archaeological research, often the most ignored subjects are children. This paper discusses children related artifacts, found at 2925 Richmond Street in Philadelphia, PA, including but not limited to children’s ceramic wares, medicine bottles, and toys. This paper strives to answer...
Chronologies of English Ceramic Ware Availability in the 17th-Century Potomac River Valley (2018)
The mercantile networks that connected England to its North American colonial enclaves in the 17th century were tenuous and often fleeting. At the time, the manufacture and exchange of household goods mostly took place within local or regional networks. Thus, colonial access to objects made in the British Isles depended upon the local or regional networks merchants could access on both sides of the Atlantic Basin. Such mercantile uncertainty complicates the traditional means by which historical...
Commoditization, Consumption and Interpretive Complexity: The Contingent Role of Cowries in the Early Modern World (2016)
The commoditization of cowrie shells in the 17th and 18th centuries was central to the economics of the consumer revolution of the early modern world. Cowries drove the Africa trade that cemented economic relationships between rulers, investors, merchants, and planters in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From their origins in the Pacific, to the markets of India, from Europe to West Africa, and from West Africa to the New World, cowries played a central role as both commodities and...
The Comparative Archaeology of Anglo-American Slavery Regimes: Reconsidering the Chesapeake from the Perspective of Bermuda (2013)
Recent comparative scholarship by historians of Anglo-American slavery has emphasized the dynamic relationship between statute law and social practice, particularly as this relationship bears on such issues as economic agency, resistance to enslavement, and collective identity. This paper revisits selected quarter sites excavated in Tidewater Virginia in view of the material life of enslaved Bermudians during the eighteenth century. Recent discoveries at a c. 1720-1860 domestic site in the...
Consumerism, Market Access, and Mobility at St. Barbara's Freehold, St. Mary's City, Maryland (2018)
The St. Barbara's Freehold Tract in St. Mary’s City served as the center of a large plantation owned by the Hicks and Mackall families from the mid 18th century to the end of the Civil War. At the plantation’s height in the early 19th century, 40 people were held in bondage, living in log quarters scattered across several hundred acres. In 2016, archaeologists from St. Mary's College of Maryland identified and tested a complex of quarters dating to ca. 1750-1815. Archaeological and historical...
Culture Embossed: A Study of Wine Bottle Seals (2018)
Over the course of the eighteenth century, consumer goods became widely available to larger segments of the colonial population through the local retail system. As access to an array of goods opened to consumers across the socio-economic spectrum, one way that the colonial gentry distinguished themselves and communicated their social standing and pedigree was through the application of initials, names, crests, and coats of arms to otherwise indistinguishable items of material culture. Recently,...
Domesticating the Button: Household Consumption Patterns of Copper-Alloy Buttons In the 18th-Century Overhill Cherokee Towns (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines the ways individuals and households living in the Overhill Cherokee Towns during the third quarter of the 18th century interfaced with the greater Atlantic World through the close examination of copper-alloy buttons. I take a materialist approach to consumer behavior, contextualizing the...
"Finery and Small Comforts": The intersection of gender, consumerism, and slavery in nineteenth century Virginia (2015)
In the context of enslavement, supply constrained individual expression and consumer choice at varying scales. Within a plantation household, supply took the form of provisions selected by the master for enslaved laborers. At the scale of local markets and stores, supply and variable adherence to laws constrained which goods were available to slaves who were able to purchase or trade for them. In this paper, I synthesize historical and archaeological evidence to consider how supply and...
Forming The Footprint Of A City: 19th Century Consumerism And Material Identity In Christchurch, New Zealand (2016)
The volume of archaeological work undertaken in Christchurch, New Zealand, since the 2011 earthquake has uncovered a vast quantity of material culture related to the 19th century settlement and development of the city. The challenge of interpreting this material has revealed several unique opportunities to examine questions of consumption and agency in the formation of the city’s material identity. In particular, the city-wide scale of archaeological excavation in combination with a site by site...
Frontier Access in East Tennessee: A Ceramic Analysis of Ramsey House (40KN120), Bell Site (40KN202), and Exchange Place (40SL22) (2013)
Three frontier-era East Tennessee homesteads were chosen to conduct ceramic analyses as a beginning point of understanding consumer access. Ramsey House, Bell Site, and Exchange Place were each occupied beginning in the late 18th century and continued into the first quarter of the 19th century. The results of examining household ceramics, newspaper advertisements, and day book transactions suggest frontier-era East Tennessee residents were unfairly portrayed as disconnected, non-consumers. The...
Gender and Health Consumerism among Enslaved Virginians (2016)
This paper explores health consumerism of enslaved laborers in antebellum central Virginia. Health consumerism incorporates the modern sense of patients’ involvement in their own health care decisions and the degree of access enslaved African Americans had to resources that shaped their health and well-being experiences. To emphasize the multilayered nature of health and illness, this analysis engages Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes "three bodies model." The three elements comprising this...
Gender, Gentility, and Revolution: Detecting Women’s Influence on Household Consumption in Eighteenth Century Connecticut (2013)
Some historians and archaeologists argue that women were influencing their husbands’ spending habits by the middle 18th century. Using the archaeological remains from a farming community in southeastern Connecticut, this paper attempts to read gender into the archaeological record to elucidate household shopping patterns before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. Were rural women’s consumer preferences influenced by emerging 18th century ideas regarding gentility? Would this genteel...
Health and Hygiene in Lower Mid-City: An Example of Urbanization, Consumerism, and Americanization in Lower Mid-City during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (2018)
As part of the rebuilding process following Hurricane Katrina, twelve city squares in the Lower Mid-City National Register District were investigated archaeologically within the new VA New Orleans Medical Center project area. This study drew on extensive archaeological and archival data to present a holistic story of the working-class residents who helped shape New Orleans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Archaeological data from each of the house lots revealed everyday practices...
Marginality in a Connected World: Consumption and Consumerism in 19th-Century Rural Ireland (2017)
Although, the rural Irish are often characterized as a geographically and economically isolated people, their material culture reveals that in the nineteenth century, they were part of a growing global economy—one that circulated both goods and people around the British Empire and beyond. While the industrial revolution and the spread of capitalism allowed for greater access to a variety of goods for the rural Irish, they also maintained a class system that perpetually confined the rural poor to...
New Ceramic Economic Indices for the Historical Archaeology of the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Centuries (2018)
Since the 1980s, historical archaeologists have productively used Miller's ceramic economic indices (CEIs) to quantify ceramic expenditure patterns. However, the Miller CEIs are suited primarily to antebellum assemblages. This temporal limit is problematic, constraining our use of ceramics to investigate postbellum economics and consumerism. We redress this problem by presenting a new set of CEIs, which we created expressly for ceramics manufactured between 1880 and 1929, by gathering ceramic...
Nineteenth Century Race, Gender, and Consumerism in Virginia (2016)
This paper uses historical and archaeological evidence to which consumer goods were available to enslaved men and women in nineteenth century Virginia. At the scale of local markets and stores, supply and variable adherence to laws constrained which goods were available to slaves who were able to purchase or trade for them. By comparing purchases of enslaved African Americans with purchases of whites at the same store, I assess which goods were accessible to each group. I use archaeological data...
Popular Plates, Personal Traits: The Biry House and a Ceramic Analysis from Castroville, Texas (2016)
The 1840’s witnessed an influx of immigrants flocking into the United States in search of economic opportunity and stability. The Biry family, along with several other Alsatian families, followed suit in 1844. They established the town of Castroville, Texas and continue to celebrate their Alsatian heritage today. While they did find opportunities within Texas, they were also forced to engage in negotiations of national, ethnic, and class identities. This paper reflects on these negotiations by...
Provisioning a 19th Century Maya Refugee Village; Consumer Culture at Tikal, Guatemala. (2018)
In the late-nineteenth century Maya refugees fleeing the violence of the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901) briefly reoccupied the ancient Maya ruins of Tikal. Unlike the numerous Yucatec refugee communities established to the east in British Honduras, those who settled at Tikal combined with Lacandon Maya, and later Ladinos from Lake Petén Itza to form a small, multiethnic village in the sparsely occupied Petén jungle of northern Guatemala. This paper discusses the analysis of the mass-produced...
Race, Gender, and Consumerism in Nineteenth Century Virginia (2017)
This paper uses historical and archaeological evidence to consider which consumer goods were available to enslaved men and women in nineteenth century Virginia. At the scale of local markets and stores, supply and variable adherence to laws constrained which goods were available to slaves who were able to purchase and trade for them. By comparing purchases of enslaved African Americans with purchases of whites at the same store, I assess which goods were accessible to each group. I use...
Raise a Glass: The Late Hellenistic Origins of Domestic Glass Tableware (2015)
For over three millennia after its discovery in the early Bronze Age, glass in the Near East was used almost exclusively in palatial, religious, and funerary contexts, ascribed with high status reflecting the intrinsic or perceived value of the material. But during the last few centuries BCE this pattern changed, as glass cups and bowls began to appear in domestic and other urban areas in greater quantities. This transition occurs before the discovery and diffusion of glass blowing in the first...