The Revelatory Power of an Artifact in Context
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2014
During the course of archeological investigations sometimes single artifacts can be touchstones for larger, deeply cultural stories about the artifacts, the sites where they were found, and the people that used them. We are not proponents of focusing analysis on single artifacts at the expense of the 99% of the material culture that we recover, but many of us have come to accept that archeology is a balancing act between creating generalized understanding of our sites using quantitative summaries of artifact classes and their distributions and the qualitative interpretations of individual artifacts. However, on rare occasions, a single artifact (or a relatively small number of a particular class of artifacts) can hold incredible explanatory power because of their particular context. This session explores some examples of this phenomenon’artifacts which, because of what they are and where, when, and how they were found, unlock powerful interpretive information about the site, past actors and their relationships.
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-20 of 20)
- Documents (20)
‘Allah the Divider’ was Lost in the Public House: A Pocketknife with Arabic Inscriptions from Colonial Brunswick Town (2014)
Hold Your Horses: Systematic metal detection survey as a methodology to reveal horseshoe and animal shoe typologies across 18th and 19th Century cultural landscapes in Georgia including battlefield sites of the American Revolution (2014)
Japanese porcelain cups from a Hawaiian ranch cabin: alcohol, tea, and the socialization of immigrants (2014)
Strawberry (Battle) Fields and Gender: A Woman’s Cloisonné Pendant from a Bombarded Encampment of the American Civil War (2014)
Symbolism, Nationality, Identity and Gender as Interpreted from an Eighteenth Century Ring from French Colonial Context (2014)