Archaeology of Reform / Archaeology as Reform

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Sables.

The 20th century has widely been portrayed in the British media as the people’s century. This paper will examine the part played by archaeologists in the formation of this idea which, in my opinion, not only fails to reflect many of the stresses within British society, but also underplays the value of significant areas of British heritage. The result is that large sections of the recent past are seen as something that is ‘best not talked about’ to the public (Faull, pers comm, 2011) and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Philip J Carstairs.

Soup kitchens emerged in nineteenth century Britain and America as part of the pattern of industrialisation and urban expansion, although the tradition of such charitable provision is a good deal more ancient.  Significant factors in the development of these charities were urban expansion and mass immigration from Eastern Europe and Ireland.   Almost all the buildings that accommodated such soup kitchens have disappeared, either having been demolished or been converted to other uses.  This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Christensen.

Studies of reformers and the sites associated with them provide an opportunity to examine how people in the past sought to better their world and in turn, powerfully connect to contemporary efforts to reform society.  In this paper, I detail the collaborative archaeological projects undertaken at two sites associated with female reformers – Matilda Joslyn Gage and May Cheney – noting the ways in which non-hierarchical, feminist-inspired research practices were employed in attempts to connect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Flexner.

When scholars speak of "the Modern World", they often refer to capitalism, nation states, and colonialism. It is often assumed that the transition to modernity correlates with increased secularism, though recent scholarship challenges this idea, specifically linking certain concepts about modern subjectivity to the philosophy of the Protestant Reformation. Tracing the impact of the Reformation across time and space is crucial to understanding modernity, especially in situations where some of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peta Longhurst.

The mental asylums of the nineteenth century, influenced by the concepts of moral therapy and non-restraint, were intended to be curative environments capable of reforming the mad. The architecture and built environment of these institutions was in essence the treatment, making the asylums both highly ideological and also inextricably physical. Through a comparative analysis of four such institutions in New South Wales, this paper will examine the tensions between the social and material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liz Anne Thomas.

The new poor laws of the nineteenth century were a system based on the ideologies associated with Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus; ideologies prevalent during the period of Improvement. The new poor laws introduced in to England and Ireland during the middle of the nineteenth century were dominated by the Malthusian theory of population and were administered as a means of discipline rather than a means of relief. To enable the improvement of society, to restore ‘the proper social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yvonne M Marshall.

I firmly believe in open-ended research because profound insights unrelated to stated objectives can arise from research projects. This paper explores the nature of indigeneity in our modern world of trans-nationals and international commuters, of being everywhere and nowhere, using the unlikely forum of a modest archaeological research project focusing on the Greenham Common Peace Women’s protests of 1982-1995. Indigeneity is conventionally understood as a relationship to place, or as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renée M. Blackburn. Suzanne Spencer-Wood.

Playgrounds contributed to several domestic reform movements. Community mothering in playgrounds formed part of social settlements, the public cooperative housekeeping movement, and the municipal housekeeping movement. Playgrounds were also part of the public health reform movement and the Cult of Real Womanhood that promoted exercise  to strengthen the working class and to address the perception of women’s sickliness in the Cult of Invalidism. In the City Beautiful movement playgrounds and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Springate.

There is more to the concept of reform than just change. The term suggests improvement and betterment -- but by whose definition and direction? Serving as an introduction to the Archaeology of Reform/Archaeology as Reform session, this paper explores the meaning and nature of reform and how archaeology can both illuminate and facilitate it.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynne McKerr. Eileen Murphy.

Although integrated schooling has an increasingly high profile in the religiously divided society of Northern Ireland, an attempt was made during the 19th and early 20th centuries to provide secular education through the Irish National Schools system. In a survey of a small sample of former schools (n=8) from two case study areas in the north of Ireland, urban schools were found to be considerably larger, allowing for more differentiation in age sets and gender.  In addition, the urban schools...