“And in his needy shop a tortoise hung”: Construction Of Retail Environments And The Agency Of Retailers In Historical Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "“And in his needy shop a tortoise hung”: Construction Of Retail Environments And The Agency Of Retailers In Historical Archaeology," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This session will focus on the archaeological indications of the agency of retailers, examining the methods that they employed to attract, sell to, establish trust with, and retain customers through the layout, design, and material experience of their shops. The session will build on the work of Cook et al’s paper Shopping as meaningful action (1996) and Crook’s paper Shopping and Historical Archaeology (2000). These papers sought to move the study of retail spaces and behaviours in the archaeological record away from prevailing economic approaches, obsessed with value of goods and imperfect indicators of socio-economic status. Like these two papers, this session will emphasise the symbolic and social aspects of shopping and consumption, but where these papers focused on the agency of the shopper or consumer, this session will bring the focus onto the retailer, who until now has been largely overlooked.