A Simple Toy Soldier: An Exploration of Aritfacts as Metatext

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Artifacts can help us build narratives, understand motivations, decode culture, and even empathize with long-passed people. They are the material basis for our discipline and, in some ways, the thing that makes that discipline a unique avenue for exploring the past. Sometimes individual artifacts come to have meaning to archaeologists outside of their pure analytical value. What happens when an artifact itself becomes a symbol of an archaeologist’s work? Or for the ongoing work of teams of archaeologists at a long-standing site? In this paper I will explore the metatextual power of artifacts through a case study from the Henry Whitfield House in Guilford, Connecticut – where in 2018 we found a simple ceramic toy soldier that has come to stand in for so much more.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow