Poverty And Plenty In The North

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Poverty And Plenty In The North," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This session seeks to explore some of the key dimensions behind material plenty and poverty in the archaeological record of the recent past (i.e. c. 1500-1900). How has the amount of stuff people acquired changed over time and how unevenly distributed is it? The empirical focus will be on the material record of Northern areas and bring together scholars in academia, museums, and the world of development-led archaeology where much of the data now derives. Although linked to inequality, the session will widen the view to consider the role of markets and inheritance practices, and how rural-urban distinctions as well as centre-periphery relations intersect with this question. We would like to encourage participants to discuss previous topics and how an increasing dependence on things might result in increasing inequality; rather than see material plenty as an index of inequality, how might it actually be constitutive of it?