Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Twenty first century historical archaeology is a big tent, with scholars pursuing diverse research agendas from the deeply scientific to the overtly humanistic. Archaeologists are also deeply engaged in working with descendant communities and are striving to build a better future through activism. This session, inspired by a conversation a decade ago with the late archaeologist Stanley South, argues that artifacts, even single artifacts, are and must be central to our efforts to present a useful past to varied public audiences. This approach, which drills down to the individual artifact might be called nano-archaeology. A series of artifact biographies are presented as a means of linking past and present in meaningful ways.

Other Keywords
Ceramics • Artifacts • Fishing • Material Culture • Artifact • Race • Windows • Reuse • Attribute Analysis • Community

Geographic Keywords
North America • New England • Chesapeake • Northeastern United States • Virginia • Caribbean • Iberian Peninsula • American South • Mid Atlantic States • Western United States & China

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-16 of 16)

  • Documents (16)
Documents
  • Bonbons in Brooklyn: The Many Lives of Candy Tongs (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth D. Meade.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Chocolate is one of very few things that can bring joy to nearly everyone and yet, little evidence of the consumption of chocolate has been documented in of New York City’s historical archaeological record. A 2016 CRM investigation documented 19th century shaft features in the rear yards of...

  • Context is Everything: From Florida Back to Europe, a Personal Nautical History (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon L. Herrmann.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Twenty-first century historical archaeology has numerous paths for studying 16th-century shipwrecks’ archaeological and nautical history. These paths are usually studied through the lens of local context rather than looking at individual artifacts in relation to other global shipwreck sites. In...

  • The Cultural Significance of Historic Bone Tools (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie-Lorraine Pipes.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Bone tools are commonly found on historic sites, but to date no one has discussed them, identified their makers, nor considered their uses. Without an interpretive framework, bone tools have fallen into a void and become a lost source of information. Recent investigations at a few...

  • Diaspora and Double Happiness: Tracking Rice Bowls Across the Pacific (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura W. Ng.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Double Happiness is a ceramic pattern that was popular during the 1850s and 1860s at Chinese diaspora communities in the Western United States, but is rare in post-1870s sites. My recent archaeological investigations in China indicate, however, that Double Happiness was abundant in the home...

  • A Gold And Rock Crystal Jar From The Viking-Age 'Galloway' Hoard (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Goldberg.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Galloway Hoard is the richest and most varied assemblage of hoarded objects surviving from Viking-age Scotland. Beyond the silver bullion so often found in Viking-age hoards there is also an unusual assemblage of Anglo-Saxon metalwork, ecclesiastical items, heirlooms, and the rare...

  • "It Came From Too-loo-ar’s Ship": A Relic From Sir John Franklin’s HMS Erebus (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Moore.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. On May 9, 1869, Charles Francis Hall, an American explorer tracking the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845, examined a strip of sheet copper with telltale Broad Arrow markings. He was in an iglu on the sea ice off King William Island (in present day Nunavut, Canada), near to where Franklin’s...

  • Knowing Your Neighbor: Ceramic and Glassware Consumption Patterns and Sociality in a 19th-Century African American Household (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Will Williams.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Artifacts recovered in the summer of 2021 at 263 Dunkerhook Road suggest the 19th-century property was the location of a vibrant community social life. Recovered were numerous artifacts related to tea and alcohol use and service. The ceramic consumption pattern in this African American...

  • Musket Balls as Fish Net Sinkers: A Biographical Analysis of Material Reuse from the 18th-Century British Virgin Islands (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Kostro.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. When identifying and cataloging artifacts, archaeologists use a variety of techniques to increase the understanding of a site based on the analysis of excavated artifacts. A widely used method is to classify artifacts by their function– although function is often difficult to pinpoint for...

  • The New Kent Island? Using Pipes to Analyze Anglo-Susquehannock Relationships along the Potomac River (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca J. Webster.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In circa 1640, John Mottrom, a planter and Indian trader, established his manor complex, Coan Hall (44NB11) in Northumberland County, Virginia. Mottrom’s manor house became the center of the Chicacoan settlement, a consortium of primarily former Kent Islanders who were exiled after the Maryland...

  • A Patriotic Creamer (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Meta F. Janowitz.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. A tenet of historic archaeological research is that when ceramic vessels are purchased, they have certain meanings for those who choose to and are able to acquire them. Whether or not we can correctly interpret these meanings is a matter of debate. Do we know enough about the economics of the...

  • Peering In and Locking Out: Windows and Doors at William Warren’s Cabin on the Minnesota Frontier (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Robbie B Mann. Zachary Boettcher. Michael Wilson.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. William Whipple Warren was the son of an American fur trader and an Ojibwe-French mother. As a person of mixed ancestry, Warren was a cultural broker, who wrote the first history of the Ojibwe from an Indigenous perspective. He built a cabin on the Mississippi River in ca. 1850 lived here until...

  • A Simple Toy Soldier: An Exploration of Aritfacts as Metatext (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only William A Farley.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Artifacts can help us build narratives, understand motivations, decode culture, and even empathize with long-passed people. They are the material basis for our discipline and, in some ways, the thing that makes that discipline a unique avenue for exploring the past. Sometimes individual...

  • That Sherd with the Fingerprints: Altering Public Perceptions of Ceramics and Slavery in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew C. Greer.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. One of the benefits of archaeology is our ability to use individual artifacts to tell complex narratives that alter how people view the past. For instance, local ceramic production in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley has long been seen by both scholars and the public as something inherently white,...

  • The Trent House Personified: Using Artifact Biographies to Tell the Tale of a Storied House (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard F Veit. Richard Hunter. Jim Lee.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeological excavations at the William Trent House in Trenton New Jersey have revealed thousands of pre-contact and historic artifacts reflecting the occupation of this site from deep prehistory to the present. This site is one of the Delaware Valley’s most significant historic sites. This...

  • What the Animals Tells About Us. Survival Strategies of the Guerrilla Warfare in Northwestern Iberia Through the Faunal Remains (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Tejerizo-García. Antonio J. Romero-Alonso.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The recent development of Contemporary Archaeology in the Iberian Peninsula has prompted the progressive incorporation of well-known archaeological methodologies to delve into recent historical processes. This is the case, for example, of taphonomic and zooarchaeological analysis, even though...

  • The Willing Suspension of Documentary Evidence: Centering the Artifact and Considering Tacit Knowledge (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Bell.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Toni Morrison wanted to see books “where the gender of the narrator is unspecified. Gender, like race, carries with it a panoply of certainties.” What panoply of certainties do readers mobilize when thinking a character is female? What tacit knowledge do archaeologists bring to a site when...