Commodification, Taskscapes, And The Alienation From Landscape At The Biry House In Castroville, Texas

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Working on the 19th-Century" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Scholars have employed Ingold’s concept of the taskscape in order to understand how past population interacted with their landscape. In a historic context, taskscape connections between past populations and their landscape become harder to understand due to commodity fetishism, when the capitalist market both spatially and socially alienates those using an object from that object’s production. This alienation of person from thing also causes the taskscape to become disjointed, resulting in the proliferation of multiple taskscapes. However, these historic analyses can still be achieved by studying material remains and this paper examines a specific case study: the Biry House ceramic assemblage from Castroville, Texas. Since the historic ceramics within this assemblage constantly move in and out of a commodity state throughout their social lives and operate through multiple taskscapes in a capitalist market, these materials could be an indicator of how past populations were alienated from their landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Working on the 19th-Century

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 506