Home Space: Mobility and Movement in the Creation of a Working-class Urban Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Historical archaeologists often interpret artifacts through the lens of household and family as the location for the development of practice and identity. Economic uncertainty for working-class households in historic urban contexts, however, meant that some families moved as many as several times a year, often within the same neighborhood. The proliferation of non-traditional households such as boarding houses and brothels further complicate the association of recovered material to a discrete household or family. Using archaeological collections curated at the Boston City Archaeology Laboratory, we interrogate the shared experience of individuals in Boston’s 19th-century North End neighborhood and explore the possibilities of multi-scalar analysis to understand the creation of neighborhoods as homes and how material culture can be used to better understand how these urban landscapes were created through adornment, embodiment, and interaction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 625