Buttoning Up The Social Fabric: Clothing Fasteners Of An Alsatian Immigrant Household
Author(s): Maxwell Forton
Year: 2017
Summary
Excavations of the Biry House of Castroville, Texas have produced a diverse assemblage of clothing buttons dating from the 1840s through the 1930s. This paper explores how these buttons are being used to create a more holistic understanding of the lives of these Alsatian immigrants and their descendants. Such buttons are a common occurrence among domestic assemblages of the 19th and 20th century, but these humble artifacts may actively shape the narratives of individual lives and the communities they inhabited. Clothing buttons are the fossils of the fashion world, resisting the wares of time, but still conveying the diverse expressions of identity and social relationships articulated in clothing. Themes of gender, economic choices, and changing domestic practices may all be explored through the buttons of the Biry House. In this sense buttons may be seen as not only fastening garments, but also the very social fabric of Castroville.
Cite this Record
Buttoning Up The Social Fabric: Clothing Fasteners Of An Alsatian Immigrant Household. Maxwell Forton. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435330)
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Keywords
General
Alsatian
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Buttons
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Household
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Texas
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1840-1940
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): 164