Consumption (Other Keyword)
1-25 (68 Records)
This paper aims to understand processes of change and continuity by examining how the introduction of European manufactured glass beads in the 16th-19th centuries affected preexisting native shell bead consumption strategies in Southern California. Data from two different coastal burial sites that were occupied by the Tongva/Gabrieliño people will be analyzed; one from an 1877 excavation on Santa Catalina Island that has virtually no provenience information, and another from more recent...
After Mose: Material Culture of British St. Augustine (1763-1784) as a Plantation Society and Periphery (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Fort Mose Above and Below: Terrestrial and Underwater Excavations at the Earliest Free Afro-Diasporic Settlement in the United States" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. St. Augustine, FL has been critical in historical archaeology’s examination of Spanish colonialism writ large. The “British Period” from 1763 to 1784 can be considered a short footnote compared to the two centuries of Spanish control...
The Age of Consumption: A Study of Consumer (and Producer) Behavior and the Household (2013)
Historical archaeologists have long noted the importance of consumer behavior, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, archaeological interpretations of consumer behavior tend to focus narrowly on race or status. While anthropologists have often emphasized the importance of factors such as the household's age structure, lifecycle, and kin relationships within the context of the wider community, archaeologists have paid less attention to these factors. Using data from the...
An Analysis of Calluna Hill (59-73): Pequot Cultural Entanglement and Complex Consumption During the Pequot War (2017)
This paper includes an overview of the Calluna Hill site (59-73) in Mystic, Connecticut, a 1637 Pequot village burned down immediately after the English siege of Mystic Fort. The site offers the opportunity to explore important methodological and theoretical questions. Here I focus on the village as the location of intense intercultural exchange and cultural entanglement. Calluna Hill offers insights into the complex ways that the Pequot consumed European-made goods and participated in...
Archaeologies of Value in the Modern World (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Towards a More Inclusive Archaeology (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In this paper I will review a sample of theoretical approaches to the concept of value derived from the social sciences through the lens of modern world archaeology. This is an era for which the relative abundance of goods tends to prejudice our conception of the complex nature of value construction. I argue that the...
Asian Export Porcelain at the New York City Archaeological Repository (2016)
This paper explores how a detailed analysis of Asian export porcelain at the New York City Archaeological Repository may enrich our understanding of the city's archaeology. For example, dates based on stylistic and technical characteristics of Asian export porcelain may refine the dating of archaeological contexts based on other lines of evidence. New York City's development as a global entrepot may also be further elucidated by identifying and comparing the points of origin and maritime...
Between consumption and extermination: archaeologies of modern imperialism (2013)
In this introduction to the session, an outline of the existing and possible archaeologies of imperialism will be sketched. Emphasis will be put on the potential of archaeology to construct alternative narratives on Western colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It will be argued that this kind of archaeology has to take into account violence (both physical and symbolic), but also forms of hybridization, war as well as trade and exchange, open and subtle resistance, and hegemonic...
Black Virginians and Locally Made Ceramics in the Shenandoah Valley (2018)
One thing for which Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley is known is its active antebellum ceramic industry. While predominantly German and Scots-Irish peoples colonized the region from the 1730’s onward, it was the Germans who brought their potting traditions to the Valley. By 1745, German potters began to fill local needs for ceramics, a trade which grew in importance over the next century and a half. These vessels took on more than just utilitarian roles, as choosing to purchase locally made ceramics...
Blurred Boundaries: Internal and Illicit Plantation Economies (2015)
Craft production, hired time, personal cotton plots, theft, and diverse trade networks created a patchwork of economic opportunities for several hundred slaves on Witherspoon Island, a 19th century cotton plantation in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina. This paper explores the impact of household and community involvement in a myriad of economic practices that were at times sanctioned, expressly forbidden, or tacitly accepted by the plantation management. When the archaeological and...
British Transferware in Portugal (1780-1900). (In)equality, identity and style. (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Studies of Material Culture (General Sessions)" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. British transfer ware begins to be identified in the Portuguese archaeological record around 1780s. At this time it is an elite’s product and only identified in wealthy contexts. Transfer ware only started to be made in Portugal around 1850. By then lower income households were able to consume this fashionable...
"A burden of one’s own choice is not felt": observing ceramic production technology, exchange and consumption in the Late Mycenaean Saronic Gulf. (2015)
It is widely recognized that Mycenaean states varied in their structure and organisation, were linked to different types of crafting industries, a range of trade networks and a host of consumer preferences. The Saronic Gulf is a paradoxical space that physically separates Mycenaean geopolitical states/regions, while its waters facilitate the interregional movement of people, goods and ideas. The application of thin section petrography and INAA to observe the movement of pottery, the most...
Champagne and Angostura Bitters: Entertaining at a Galapagos Sugar Plantation, 1880-1904 (2016)
From 1880 to 1904 Manuel J. Cobos ran the El Progreso Plantation in the highlands of San Cristóbal in the Galapagos Islands. This operation focused on sugar, cattle, coffee, and fruit production, exploiting the labour of convicted prisoners and indentured peons from mainland Ecuador. Excavation of the household midden in 2014 and 2015 demonstrates that Cobos imported a variety of goods that tied this remote location in Pacific South America to a global supply chain of luxury consumer products...
Chitons and Clams, Cash and Carry: an archaeological exploration of the impact of enslaved children’s foraging strategies on 18th-century enslaved households in Jamaica (2016)
Attempts at understanding the economic and social strategies used by enslaved people in the early modern Atlantic World require sophisticated models of human interaction, models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. Here Optimal Foraging Theory provides the framework for identifying the fishing and foraging activities of enslaved children and adults laboring at the Stewart Castle Estate, an 18th-century Jamaican...
A Class Apart. Shifting Attitudes about the Consumption of Fish (2018)
As a class of animals, fish have been an important food source since the dawn of time. In many parts of the world their economic and dietary importance has not wavered. However, in the New World, attitudes about the consumption of fish have varied considerably since the 17th century through the 21st century. Cultural influences have promoted fish and maligned fish at various times. Positive and negative attitudes reflect biases based on associations with religious groups and practices, ethnicity...
Class, Ethnicity, and Ceramic Consumption in a Boston Tenement (2015)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House, which was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century, was repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century, becoming...
Colonialism and Cuisine: Change and Continuity in Soapstone Consumption during the Contact Period in Alta, California (2017)
This paper investigates the processes of colonialism and identity politics in the Santa Barbara Channel region through the lens of consumption. The establishment of colonial institutions became entangled with pre-existing indigenous industries, thus creating change and continuity in a variety of practices. Here, I focus on soapstone vessels as they were utilized for cooking and storing foods before, during, and after the mission period. A drastic shift in the morphological characteristics of...
Community Formation, Consumption, and Gender at Camp Nelson’s ‘Home for Colored Refugees’ (2013)
Following the tragic expulsion of four hundred African-American women and children from Camp Nelson, KY in November 1864, of which 102 died, these refugees were allowed to return and the ‘Home for Colored Refugees’ was constructed. This expulsion also led to the emancipation of these refugees by the Congressional Act of March 3, 1865. By the summer of 1865 this ‘Home’ housed over 3000 former slaves who lived in a variety of housing, including duplex cottages, tents, dormitories, and home-made...
Connected through Things: Connectivity in Iron Age Mallorca (2017)
This presentation examines connectivity in the Late Iron Age on the island of Mallorca. While most case studies of connectivity in the western Mediterranean involve the movement of people and/or the construction of new settlements by non-local people, there is little evidence that this occurred in Mallorca. However, there is still abundant evidence that indigenous Iron Age Mallorcans were increasingly connected to the broader Mediterranean and that non-local goods were being consumed throughout...
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...
Consumerism on the Margins: Shop Ledgers and Materialized Social Status in Coastal Co. Galway, Ireland. (2016)
In contrast to the marginality ascribed to Western Ireland during the 19th and 20th centuries, islanders’ and coastal mainlanders’ participated in transnational trade networks expressed through everyday material decision-making, seasonal and intermittent international interactions, and ideologies of social status. Historically, coastal communities in Western Ireland have been characterized as marginalized and geographically isolated from participation in mainstream consumerism and national and...
Consuming in Empire: The Materiality of Household Consumption at Postclassic and Colonial Xaltocan, Mexico (2015)
Consumption, as Paul Mullins explains, "revolves around the acquisition of things to confirm, display, accent, mask, and imagine who we are and who we wish to be." Consumer choices of goods in the marketplace relate to the desire to connect oneself with particular networks of people and places on the landscape, and these connections play a role in the formation of personal and household identity. Here, I present research on the social dimensions inherent in economic practices, which are notably...
Consuming the French New World (2017)
All of France’s New World colonies were based on relationships with particular geographies, according to the products and resources wanted by the Crown, which may be thought of as the ultimate "consumer" of French colonial landscapes. Colonists and French descendant communities engaged with these different landscapes for both commercial and family subsistence purposes. Obtaining, producing, and moving such resources as furs, wheat and flour, hams, bear oil, salt, and sugar required a variety...
Consumption Patterns of a Pre-World War II-Era Japanese American Community on Terminal Island (2017)
Transmigration and diaspora are topics which archaeologists have recently begun contributing to in more detail (Lilley 2004, Ross 2010; Ross 2011). These concepts assert the fact that cultural interchange exists when immigrant or migrant communities settle in new lands, and rejects the idea of homogenization, accultraltion, or complete resistance and can be addressed in archaeology via consumption. Consumption patterns, though seemingly unimportatnt, have the ability to shed light on almost...
Consumption Practice and the Authenticity of "Irishness": Everyday Material Life on the Islands of Inishark and Inishbofin, Co. Galway, Ireland (2018)
How were mass-produced consumer goods incorporated into everyday expressions of local and national identity in 19th and early 20th century Ireland? While archaeologists have explored the myriad ways that mass-produced goods circulated throughout the British Empire through networks of trade and exchange, less attention has been given to the way specifically British manufactured goods were incorporated into meaningful practices of material consumption within Irish communities. This project...
Consumption, Survival, and Personhood in Native North America (2013)
For many decades, archaeologists treated European-manufactured material culture recovered from Native American sites as straightforward indicators of cultural loss. Contemporary Native American historical archaeologies take a different tack, placing patterns of consumption on center stage. Rather than typifying European-manufactured material culture as a reflection (or a juggernaut) of cultural change in Native North America, these new approaches use such assemblages to address the nuances of...