The Revelatory Power of an Artifact in Context

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.