Underpinning a Plantation: A Material Culture Approach to Consumerism at Mount Vernon Plantation

Summary

This paper adopts an object-centered, material culture approach that triangulates between three primary sources – George Washington’s orders for goods through the consignment system, inventories from a local, Scottish-owned store, and the archaeological record at Mount Vernon plantation – lending fresh insight into the nature of the mid-eighteenth century consumer revolution and addressing questions about elite and non-elite consumer behavior.  By quantifying the robust dataset of Washington’s purchases for straight pins in comparison with those available locally and through the application of archaeometric tools to analyze straight pin assemblages excavated at Mount Vernon, it becomes clear that while straight pins were available to all segments of the colonial population, the decision to invest in mass quantities of particular types of pins was a pattern characteristic of elite planters, at least in the case of Washington. The results will be compared to other eighteenth-century pin assemblages suggesting variation in consumer motivation.    

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 187