Style and Substance: Button Production, Use, and Choice at the Buffalo Forge Iron Plantation

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

When several different types of buttons are recovered from an archaeological site, how can we parse and explain differences in choice and use? And what might we learn about the different people who made, used, or reused them? This paper explores these questions through study of a diverse button assemblage recovered from two women’s and family quarters at Buffalo Forge, a 19th century iron plantation in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Integrating archival, archaeological, and geospatial data, this work assesses a range of button materials, decoration, purposes, proveniences, and provenances, investigating differences between availability of buttons (and other clothing-related items) in local forge and country stores and presence of buttons associated with domestic economies and non-local access on the site. While this paper focuses on buttons recovered from the antebellum period, button discard from later periods is also examined.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow