(What’s) Left of the Commodity: Archaeology and the Creative Resuscitation of Spent Goods

Author(s): Justin E. Uehlein

Year: 2018

Summary

Hobo jungles and other transient laborer and homelessness related sites present a sustained material critique of Capitalism. These kinds of sites provide insight into the creative strategies people employ to circumvent commodity markets when capital is not available. Whether residual evidence of an intentional statement against an oppressive system, or of a means to persist in the most desperate of situations, the assemblages left behind by people who reside on the fringes of capital display both the inherent abuses of that system, as well as the imaginative ways that people navigate, resist, and circumvent it. This paper draws on archival and archaeological data from a former hobo jungles site near Delta, Pennsylvania and asks two questions: how, if at all, did hobos manipulate junked commodities to better suit their needs? And, if they did, do these materials present a new productive schematic or are they simply an extension of capitalism? 

Cite this Record

(What’s) Left of the Commodity: Archaeology and the Creative Resuscitation of Spent Goods. Justin E. Uehlein. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441359)

Keywords

Temporal Keywords
1880-1950

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): 469