A Political Economy of Adornment: Indigenous Mass Consumption and Euro-American Shell Bead Factories in 19th Century New Jersey

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Between 1750 and 1900 CE, Euro-American colonizers of northern New Jersey appropriated the production of wampum, a Northeastern Indigenous style of shell bead. The industry began as a widespread small-scale cottage industry, and it culminated in the Campbell Wampum Factory (1850-1900), famous for its mass production facilitated by water-power, drilling machines, and reliance on non-white labor. Shell bead styles produced at these sites—including wampum and hair pipes—were traded with Native nations everywhere from the Great Lakes to the Northern and Southern Plains. Here, I analyze debris from shell bead production sites to estimate efficiencies, standardization, scales of output, commodity typologies, and working conditions of labor. I argue that Indigenous uses of shell beads pushed the limits of capital and labor, of shells and machines, and structured the local political economy in the process, its successes and failures, accumulations and dispossessions in the industrializing environs of New York City.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 344