Pushing the Boundary: The Game of Cricket in a Colonial Context.
Author(s): J. Eric Deetz
Year: 2016
Summary
By the early nineteenth century the game of cricket had gone through a major transformation. In the eighteenth century it was it a game played mostly by the landed gentry with all of the associated drinking and gambling. By 1800 it had become a game played by common people and had come to represent a less decadent way of life as espoused by idea of Muscular Christianity. The British took both the game and this ideology with them throughout their colonies. This paper examines the physical and social landscape of Victorian era cricket in the context of colonial expansion and how cricket came to be synonymous with the Empire. The archaeological evidence of sport is understandably scant. To what extent, if at all, can a single artifact (in this case a cricketer’s belt buckle) represent the story of a place and time?
Cite this Record
Pushing the Boundary: The Game of Cricket in a Colonial Context.. J. Eric Deetz. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434647)
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Keywords
General
Colonialism
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Cricket
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Victorian
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
Nineteenth Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 8