Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism

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.