To Possess the Cultural Capital to Carve Dolomite Marbles and Exchange Blue Beads: Constructing Community and Creating Spaces of Multicultural Encounters on the Nineteenth Century Wisconsin Frontier

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The midwestern “frontier” of the United States formed and was transformed by the lead mining rush of the nineteenth century. Dependent on the volatile market for and production of lead and shaped by the diversely positioned tastes, practices and motivations of the community’s non-native and native inhabitants and neighbors, the Gratiots Grove community in southwestern Wisconsin emerged from the entanglement of economic and social assemblages spanning metropoles, frontiers, and places in between. Settler-colonists from the east coast, the south, and across the Atlantic brought a range of economic, cultural, and gender expectations to Gratiots Grove that were changed, accommodated, and transgressed as they were performed in this “third-space” frontier context. The 19th century homestead of Susan and Henry Gratiot provides an example of how frontier landscapes afforded the negotiation and hybridization of gendered social practices of consumption, child-rearing, domesticity, landholding, and inter-cultural mediation with effects that reverberated beyond the frontier.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 978