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)
Documents
  1. ‘Allah the Divider’ was Lost in the Public House: A Pocketknife with Arabic Inscriptions from Colonial Brunswick Town (2014)
  2. Donning Identity: Traditional Chinese Buttons from a Historic Railroad Town in Northern Idaho (2014)
  3. Grave markers as Artifact and Document: Using a Family Cemetery to Teach Archaeology (2014)
  4. A group of late 16th century Chinese porcelains with datable English mounts (2014)
  5. 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)
  6. Japanese porcelain cups from a Hawaiian ranch cabin: alcohol, tea, and the socialization of immigrants (2014)
  7. Later, they sailed out and eastward from there along the shore...: New evidence for Norse voyaging from L’Anse aux Meadows (2014)
  8. A Millennium Platter for the Old Block House: The Potential Interplay of Faith and Material Culture (2014)
  9. NMV: A Number of Marked Vessels from Colonial Harvard College (2014)
  10. Out of the Woodwork: The Graffiti of the Pershing Launch Site at Green River, Utah (2014)
  11. Performing a Rapid and Certain Cure: A Patent Medicine Bottle from the American Cotton Frontier (2014)
  12. The Revelatory Power of a Button: Families Divided, Families Reunited (2014)
  13. The Revoloutionary War «USA» Button: A Study in Qualitative Archaeology (2014)
  14. Sarah’s Slate: a Child’s Image of Home (2014)
  15. Sets and Sensibility: Tea Service and the Excavation of Ideology and Desire (2014)
  16. A Shoe: Soul of the Salubria Attic in Culpeper County, Virginia (2014)
  17. Strawberry (Battle) Fields and Gender: A Woman’s Cloisonné Pendant from a Bombarded Encampment of the American Civil War (2014)
  18. Symbolism, Nationality, Identity and Gender as Interpreted from an Eighteenth Century Ring from French Colonial Context (2014)
  19. Two Atlantic Worlds Collide in Arkansas: Spanish Coins from the 1830s Mercantile District in Historic Washington, Arkansas (2014)
  20. Union Occupation of the Frazer Farmstead (15Hr42) during the American Civil War (2014)