class (Other Keyword)
26-32 (32 Records)
This paper focuses on the continuing work at the African American community of Timbuctoo in Westampton, New Jersey. While our initial guiding questions sought to uncover cultural retentions that could be retraced to West Africa, the realities of our archaeological work shifted our focus to a complex discourse on social and economic class. Specifically, this paper discusses the practice of home canning as a medium to resist and improvise against economic marginalization. Through this discussion,...
Thinking About Urban Approaches to Interpreting Class in the 19thC: Labor, Residence and Economic Choice at Rock Hall, Lawrence, NY. (2016)
During the first half of 19th C, dramatic economic changes are evident at the household level. Straddling the urban-suburban divide, residents of Rock Hall on the South Shore of Long Island hybridized farming and summer tourism as they sought to improve their family’s position. A microcosm of economic choices, this household combined labor and residence in ways that used, and rendered them beholden to, the urban juggernaut of the City while remaining rooted in a distinct local economic...
"This law is no good": Excavating the Appeal of Right-Wing Populism in Rural New York (2018)
Polls conducted by Reuters-Ipsos after the 2016 election revealed that 75% of American voters wanted "a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful," and 68% agreed that "traditional parties and politicians don’t care about people like [them]." A brand of right-wing populism emerged to speak to these concerns, and ultimately it helped deliver Trump to power. In this paper, I explore the roots of the appeal of this political movement in one rural region that voted...
Transfer-Printed Aesthetics in the Hudson River Valley (2018)
The Hudson River has been a thoroughfare for transporting goods since the early seventeenth century. The Industrial Revolution and the subsequent development of railroad lines and the Erie Canal magnified the role of the Hudson River from Albany to New York City as a major economic artery for the new republic. At the same time, the Staffordshire potteries began producing transfer-printed ceramics for the world market. Manhattan’s docks were flooded with all forms of consumer goods. These goods...
Tsimshian households and trade: the view from Casey Point (2017)
Large-scale excavations at GbTo-13 and GbTo-54 near Casey Point, Prince Rupert Harbour, revealed house remains whose differential contents of exotic features, goods, and wealth or status-signalling artifacts strongly suggest that one household ranked above others. All labrets and all mountain goat horn cores were associated with a single house. Even the households lacking these prestige goods have more wealth items than at almost any regional assemblage. The extraordinary amount of bracelets...
Wood Work: Excavating the Wilderness Economy of New York’s Adirondack Mountains (2016)
At the end of the 19th century, New York's legislature responded to the clarion call of conservationists concerned for the state's diminishing timber resources and threatened watershed by creating the Adirondack Forest Preserve, which kept millions of acres of public land in northern New York "forever wild." At the same time, the Adirondack logging industry witnessed tremendous growth on account of expanded railroad networks and paper industry innovations that opened up new areas of private land...
Working-class culture in the urban landscape of twentieth-century Sheffield (2018)
This paper will examine the legacy of early twentieth-century working-class cultural practice encoded within the archaeology of the post-industrial landscape of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom. Sheffield was a booming industrial city, specialising in the metal trades, which underwent a considerable building boom towards the end of the nineteenth century. The north-city suburb of Firth Park saw the rapid expansion of domestic housing stock and the opening of Sheffield’s first public park in this...