class (Other Keyword)
1-25 (35 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists are quick to connect race and class in conversations about the dead. However, in our discussions of the living—especially on BIPOC archaeologists and their work—class takes a backseat to race, an outcome I call “wealth blindness.” I argue that, as professional...
Class and Status in the British Army at Fort Haldimand (1778–1784) (2015)
During the American Revolutionary War, the British outpost on Carleton Island was an integral connection between the cities of Montréal and Québec, and frontier military posts in the Great Lakes. Situated at the head of the St. Lawrence River, the diverse activity on Carleton Island included a military fortification, naval base, shipyard, merchant warehouses and civilian refugee settlements. In the eighteenth-century British Army, deep class and status differences existed between the officers...
Class Matters: The Historical Archaeology of Class in the American Experience (2013)
Class is probably the most confused and contested concept wielded in the social sciences. Perceptions run a wide gamut: from class as the single most important aspect of the American experience, one that has seldom been seriously contemplated or explored; to ideas that class is a stale, outdated, or dead concept, irrelevant to a sustained understanding of the modern world or the past that gave rise to it. These contradictory ideas are evidence that class has been defined and utilized in...
Coal Heritage Archaeology Project 2015 – Preliminary Results & Student Experiences (2016)
The Coal Heritage Archaeology Project’s inaugural excavations were carried out as part of a summer archaeological field school at West Virginia State University. Working in collaboration with Indiana University and the Rahall Transportation Institute, excavations focused on the residential houses at the former coal company town of Tams, WV and sought to better understand issues of material consumption, labor, and class. This poster presents the results of these initial excavations and explores...
Consumerism As A Strategy For Negotiating Racism: A Comparative Study Of African Americans In Jim Crow Era Annapolis, MD (2015)
Archaeologists have studied many different ways in which African Americans coped with the racist structures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America. One way in which this was done was through consumer choice as part of the capitalist market used to create African American consumer aesthetics. With this understanding, archaeologists can study how commodities were used to express internally imposed classes within the African American community. In this paper, the archaeological...
Examining Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century New York City through Patent Medicines (2016)
Patent medicines were immensely popular in the 19th century. They promised astounding cures, were unregulated and relatively inexpensive, and permitted individuals to self-medicate without an interfering physician. Archaeologists have often begun their interpretations of these curious commodities with the premises that they were lesser quality alternatives to physicians’ prescriptions and thus more appealing to poorer alienated groups (who used them passively as advertised) than to the...
Examining elite domestic practices in Postclassic Xaltocan, Mexico (2015)
The Postclassic site of Xaltocan has been the focus of archaeological investigation for nearly 30 years. Over this period a solid ceramic chronology for the site has been established thanks in large part to the pioneering efforts of Elizabeth Brumfiel and her students. While the vast majority of archaeological research at Xaltocan has focused predominately on commoner contexts, recent archaeological excavations of elite domestic spaces at Xaltocan inform and expand upon the current ceramic...
Excavating Personhood in the 19th-Century Graveyard (2016)
The St. George’s/St. Mark's Cemetery in Mount Kisco, NY, offers an ideal site in which to investigate the construction of 19th-century middle-class personhood. Previous studies have generally conceptualized the gravestone either as a passive reflection of social realities or as a site of the momentary suspension of social difference. The proposed study will marshal historical and archaeological evidence in demonstrating how gravestones functioned as active participants in the articulation of...
Fields and farms in Ireland, 1650-1850: landscape archaeologies of improvement (2013)
My PhD research, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, investigates of how Irish rural landscapes developed from 1650 to 1850, looking in particular at four case studies, in counties Clare, Tipperary, Meath and Derry. I explore how later historic rural landscapes reflect the massive social changes of the 17th to 18th centuries, and how archaeologists can contribute to understanding these changes. This paper will examine how rural landscapes inform our...
Forget We Not: Continuity and Change in Saba's Unique Burial Practices, Dutch Caribbean (2017)
This paper analyses continuity and change in burial practices through time on Saba, Dutch Caribbean, from first colonization in the mid seventeenth century to the modern era. The Saban tradition of stone-lined vaults surrounding the buried coffin is a cultural element from English migrants that dates back to early Welsh and Anglo-Saxon burial traditions, and continues into the present day. This practice, however, appears to be limited to the free dominant culture, as it has not been observed...
'Frail cabins' and 'princely mansions': architecture and social hierarchy in early modern Munster (2013)
In the opening section of his Gaelic language text The history of Ireland (1632), the Munster cleric Geoffrey Keating took English writers to task for their misrepresentations of Ireland. Keating was particularly aggrieved by their conflation of the habits and material culture of the Irish nobility and the ‘inferior people’. His explicitly class conscious rebuttal of outsiders’ accounts of Ireland forms part of a broader discourse among the native Irish literati concerned with social hierarchy...
Hey Girl, I See You: Identifying Women Within Household Assemblages (2017)
I was inspired by the work of Dr. Elizabeth Scott and her ability to shed light onto underrepresented, often invisible, groups of people. This paper looks into the shadows of our past in an attempt to better understand women of different ethnicities and classes. Using ceramic assemblages and women’s activity related materials, I examine how class and ethnicity can impact women’s visibility within the archaeological record. Analysis of this data shows distinct differences between women’s...
Huguenot Heritage: Revisiting Curated Collections in NYC (2016)
Previously excavated and curated collections are often seen as unworthy of serious scholarly attention. The drive to produce using entirely "new" excavations, artifacts, and data sets underlies and reinforces this pattern. This paper discusses two major components of using decades-old collections: research and responsibility. It first summarizes recent research demonstrating the accretion of class identity among French Huguenots in early 18th-century New York City. It then moves on to offer...
Identifying with the Help: an Examination of Class, Ethnicity and Gender in a Post-Colonial German Houselot (2015)
The German presence within the Mississippi River valley, has received little attention through archaeological investigation. German outbuildings (as well as those living and/or working within outbuildings) have received even less reflection and deserves to be addressed to better understand what life was like within the American interior for "the help" during the country’s formative years. Bought in 1833 by a German family, the Janis-Ziegler property quickly moved from one centered in French...
In the Crossfire of Canons: A Study of Status, Space, and Interaction at Mid-19th Century Vancouver Barracks, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Washington (2016)
The U.S. Army’s Fort Vancouver in southwest Washington served as the headquarters for the U.S. Army’s Pacific Northwest exploration and campaigns from 1849 to World War II. During the mid-19th century, members of the military community operated within a rigid social climate with firm cultural expectations and rules of behavior that articulated with Victorian notions of gentility. Excavations of residential areas occupied by junior officers, non-commissioned officers, laundresses, and enlisted...
Intersectionality, Strategic Essentialism, Third Spaces, and Charmed Circles: Using Dead Ladies’ Garbage to Explain Today’s America (2017)
Audre Lorde wrote, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." And yet, certain identities and struggles are forefronted every day. In 1903, middle-class women founded Wiawaka Holiday House in New York’s Adirondacks for "working girls" to have an affordable vacation away from unhealthy factories and cities. Using strategic essentialism and Third Space, a 1920s assemblage from Wiawaka demonstrates the deeply dependent relationships among race,...
Landscapes of Desire: Mapping the Brothels of 1880s Washington, DC (2016)
From 1860-1915, brothels were prominantly loaced within Washington, DC’s urban landscape. This paper focuses on brothels in 1880s Washington, examining the spatial dynamics of the main brothel neighborhood, the Hooker’s Division. I argue that experiences of Hooker’s Division brothels were shaped by the space within the city that the neighborhood occupied, and simultaneously, Washington’s sex workers contested social norms thereby changing the symbolic implications and tangible reality of the...
Making Waste Singular: The Ecological Life of Industrial Waste in Mill Creek Ravine (2019)
This is an abstract from the "One of a Kind: Approaching the Singular Artifact and the Archaeological Imagination" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Industrialization is defined by the mass production of commodities, explicitly produced to be non-singular objects. However, as scholars such as Igor Kopytoff have argued, commodities are singularized through their unique histories of social relations. Alongside the production of commodities,...
Making Women: Gender, Sexuality, and Class at an Early Twentieth Century Women’s Retreat (2015)
The intimacy of guest artifacts like toiletries, cosmetics, and corset hooks from an early twentieth century privy deposit are compared with the contemporary assemblage recovered from the yard of the male caretaker of a women’s retreat located on the shores of Lake George, New York. Founded in 1903, Wiawaka Holiday House provided affordable vacations for "Girl Guests" (single women who worked in the garment factories around nearby Albany) free from the potentially corrupting presence of men....
The Materiality of Affluence and Taste in Trump Tower (2018)
This paper examines Donald Trump’s New York City apartment as a populist performance of affluence that simultaneously justifies ostentatious shows of wealth and defends idiosyncratic individual taste. Rather than reduce the grandiose penthouse simply to a transgression of "good taste," this paper examines a distinctive notion of material wealth that embraces pretentious and idiosyncratic expressions of style and affluence. In a conservative world that has often been characterized by stylistic...
The Negotiation of Class, Rank and Authority within U. S. Army Commissioned Officers: Examples from Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856-1866. (2016)
As part of the Federal policy toward colonizing the West Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, 1856-1866, were established to guard the Oregon Coast Reservation and served as post-graduate schools for several officers who became high ranking generals during the American Civil War. During their service these men, often affluent and well educated, held the highest social, economic and military ranks at these frontier military posts. This paper examines the material culture excavated from six of the...
No Fresh Water Except That Furnished by the Rains: Cisterns in Key West, Florida (2013)
Nineteenth-century Key West was one of Florida's largest cities, an important port, an administrative center, and a host to U.S. Naval and Army bases. Yet the island lacked natural fresh water sources, necessitating the use of cisterns to capture rainwater. Recent exavation of three examples provided opportunities to examine cistern construction, adequacy, and water consumption. Water use also had implications with respect to gender and class during the 19th century. Water chiefly related to...
Painted Women and Patrons: Appearance and the Construction of Gender and Class Identity in the Red Light District of Ouray, Colorado. (2016)
Appearance-related artifacts from the Vanoli Block (5OR30), a late 19th and early 20th century sporting complex in the mining town of Ouray, Colorado, indicate that both the women working in the cribs and their patrons projected a working-class appearance. An examination of artifacts through the lenses of performance and practice theory is supplemented with historical data regarding class, gender, and costume, and suggests that the sartorial choices made by these women and men emerged from the...
Performing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Ceramics in the Shenandoah Valley (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists have studied race in Antebellum Virginia for decades. But these works have focused predominantly on Blackness, and to a lesser extent Indigeneity. Whiteness, however, has been largely ignored, and the few works that have addressed white racial identities have addressed notions of whiteness among local elites instead of the...
"A permanent blemish...in the centre of the village": Class and the National Cultural Heritage Movement in Plymouth, Massachusetts (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "New Research on the “Old Colony”: Recent Approaches to Plymouth Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The late 19th century saw the rise of the National Heritage movement in the United States. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, this movement focused squarely on the Pilgrims’ arrival on the Mayflower in 1620. In 1894, a group of prominent community members known as the Trustees of the Stickney Fund began...