New Ceramic Economic Indices for the Historical Archaeology of the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Centuries

Summary

Since the 1980s, historical archaeologists have productively used Miller's ceramic economic indices (CEIs) to quantify ceramic expenditure patterns. However, the Miller CEIs are suited primarily to antebellum assemblages. This temporal limit is problematic, constraining our use of ceramics to investigate postbellum economics and consumerism. We redress this problem by presenting a new set of CEIs, which we created expressly for ceramics manufactured between 1880 and 1929, by gathering ceramic price data from 30 mail order catalogs published during this period. The resulting CEIs extend ceramic economic scaling to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ceramic assemblages. To assess the utility of the new CEIs, we applied them in a study of ceramic assemblages from urban Springfield, Missouri. The Springfield study suggests the new indices can be applied with relative ease, and raises new questions about economic and racial dynamics from historic times through the present in this midwestern city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology And The Urban Landscape   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 850