Uncovering Evidence of Consumer Constraint in Archaeological Assemblages Using r-Matrices

Summary

The rapid increase in the cultural and geospatial distance between the individuals who produce household goods and the individuals who consume them which has occurred over the last few hundred years requires historical archaeologists to develop typologies which acknowledge artifact qualities which are meaningful to consumers as well as producers. In a previous SHA presentation, the author hypothesized that artifact qualities which only meaningful to producers should respond differently to increasing consumer constraint than artifact qualities which were observable by and meaningful to consumers. This presentation tests the above hypothesis using a modified Fst analysis to examine a data set of copper-alloy buttons recovered from early 19th-century sites in upland Virginia belonging to both free, white planters and enslaved, black laborers, whose consumption decisions were more likely to be constrained, to determine which qualities of buttons were most important to 19th-century Virginian consumers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions) 2017   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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PaperId(s): 343

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