Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism
Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2020
This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Current approaches to adornment use notions of dress, the body, and performance to unravel how complex intersections of identity (including race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality) are shaped by and shape power relations in colonial encounters. Objects such as beads or buttons materialize social identities in everyday practices of adornment. This session embraces this perspective while simultaneously thinking beyond ornamentation to the many other entanglements of these objects, including globalization, commoditization, (over)consumption, craft production and industrialization, indigenous sovereignty / political agency, and colonial dispossession. How do intimate practices of bodily dress, social identification, and interpersonal politics impact and structure the historical and theoretical contours of colonialism, writ large? By demonstrating the importance of adornment while also critiquing its limits, the diverse theoretical and methodological approaches presented here place the study of personal adornment into conversation with many other themes and topics in historical archaeology.
Other Keywords
Beads •
Colonialism •
Wampum •
Adornment •
shell beads •
Native American •
Basketry •
Glass Beads •
Collections •
Statistics
Temporal Keywords
17th Century •
20th Century •
early colonial •
19th Century •
18th Century •
Seventeenth Century •
Early modern •
1750-1900 •
1500-1650 CE
Geographic Keywords
Coahuila (State / Territory) •
New Mexico (State / Territory) •
Oklahoma (State / Territory) •
Arizona (State / Territory) •
Texas (State / Territory) •
Sonora (State / Territory) •
United States of America (Country) •
Chihuahua (State / Territory) •
Nuevo Leon (State / Territory) •
Delaware (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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Domesticating the Button: Household Consumption Patterns of Copper-Alloy Buttons In the 18th-Century Overhill Cherokee Towns (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper examines the ways individuals and households living in the Overhill Cherokee Towns during the third quarter of the 18th century interfaced with the greater Atlantic World through the close examination of copper-alloy buttons. I take a materialist approach to consumer behavior, contextualizing the...
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East Meets West: Indigenous Use of Indo-Pacific Cowries on the Great Plains (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Indo-Pacific cowrie shells entered North America in the late 17th and early 18th centuries as part of colonial expansion reliant on a global network of trade that commoditized both people and animals. Over the course of the 19th century, Indigenous people of the mid-west and Great Plains incorporated these...
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Embodying Survivance: Western Apache Production Practices in the Reservation Era (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological narratives of settler colonialism often characterize Indigenous survival strategies dualistically, encompassing either active rebellion against or total acquiescence to colonial power. Consequently, amendments to the production and design of traditional clothing and jewelry items are interpreted...
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Glass Beads and Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: A Social Network Approach to Exploring Identity in the Colonial Southeast (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Beads and other ornaments were important objects involved in early colonial entanglements between Europeans and Native Americans, with the color, texture, and physical properties of beads fostering the embodiment of new social roles within changing colonial worlds. In this paper I discuss how such objects were...
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The Leedstown (Virginia) Bead Cache: A Contextual Approach (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 1937, while surveying Native American archaeological sites below the falls of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, archaeologist David Bushnell described an unusual cache (reportedly a buried box) of glass beads discovered at Leedstown. Since Bushnell’s discovery, beads from Leedstown have appeared in a...
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Peake, Wampum, or Sewant?: An Analysis of Shell Bead Terminology in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Beads and the terminology used to describe them provide a powerful look into the colonial relationships negotiated by both indigenous groups and European settlers. Peake, wampum, and sewant are terms used to describe tubular white or purple shell beads that developed as a result of interactions between...
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A Political Economy of Adornment: Indigenous Mass Consumption and Euro-American Shell Bead Factories in 19th Century New Jersey (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Between 1750 and 1900 CE, Euro-American colonizers of northern New Jersey appropriated the production of wampum, a Northeastern Indigenous style of shell bead. The industry began as a widespread small-scale cottage industry, and it culminated in the Campbell Wampum Factory (1850-1900), famous for its mass...
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Power in Numbers: Reconstructing Provenience Through an Investigation of 283,000 Beads (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Schumacher Collection, which was excavated in 1877 from Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, contains approximately 283,000 shell and glass beads that lack provenience data. While beads are often examined through a framework of personal adornment and identity construction, antiquated...
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Wampum’s Pre-Colonial Origins: An Indigenous Story (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Scholarly and popular discourse on the history of wampum emphasizes the influence and agency of Europeans – as suppliers of tools, traders, tribute-takers, and eventually as direct producers. Conceptually, many scholars view the wampum tradition as “complete” only when large numbers of white and purple marine...
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Wood and Wampum: Transformative Expressions of Indigenous Power (2020)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. While surveying wampum in museum collections, I encountered a unique category of ethnographic objects: Northeastern Native American wooden clubs and bowls embedded with wampum beads. These seventeenth century objects include beads that — from the obvious evidence of drilled holes and traces of fiber weft —...