“And in his needy shop a tortoise hung”: Construction Of Retail Environments And The Agency Of Retailers In Historical Archaeology
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020
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.
Other Keywords
Material Culture •
Retail •
Medicine •
Racism •
Colonial •
consumer culture •
Trade catalogues •
Retail history
Temporal Keywords
20th Century •
Nineteenth Century •
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries •
1860s to 1907
Geographic Keywords
AUSTRALIA •
Commonwealth of Australia (Country) •
Queensland (State / Territory) •
Australia (Continent) •
Victoria (State / Territory) •
New South Wales (State / Territory) •
Tasmania (State / Territory) •
South Australia (State / Territory) •
Western Australia (State / Territory) •
Australian Capital Territory (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-4 of 4)
- Documents (4)
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Building Trust, Establishing Authority, and Communicating Efficacy: The Visual and Material Experience of Apothecary Shops in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from 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. Apothecaries in the early modern world existed somewhere between medical professional and shopkeeper and were conduits for the importation and consumption of plants and other materials from across the world. Due to the inability of most customers...
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"A Large and General Assortment": Fancy Goods Stores and the Retailer-Consumer Relationship in Christchurch, New Zealand. (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from 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. The opportunity to investigate the material culture of a place from behind the commercial veil is rare. Processes of distribution and retail are often under-represented in the archaeological record and overshadowed by the refuse of domestic...
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Reconstructing the Retail Mind: the Analysis of Store and Mail Order Catalogues (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from 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 paper reflects on 15 years of close analysis of over 55,000 prices in store and mail order catalogues and price lists of major Australian, English, American and Canadian retailers dating from the 1860s to 1907. These rare and dense resources...
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Shopping with the Hooded Order: The Ku Klux Klan Retail Landscape in 1920’s Indianapolis, Indiana (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from 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. The Ku Klux Klan is best-known for theatrical public events and subterranean violence, but in the 1920’s it was Indianapolis, Indiana’s most popular social organization, and it aspired to be viewed as a prosaic feature of everyday social life....