Commerce With The Colonies: Supplying Domestic Commodities In The City Of Christchurch, New Zealand, 1850-1900

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Nineteenth-century British colonial cities existed both within a global landscape of British colonialism, characterised by an exported, shared British ‘colonial’ culture, and as urban entities within which locally distinct identities and communities developed. The scale of archaeological work in Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand, since the 2010-2011 earthquakes has provided the opportunity to explore this juxtaposition – and interconnection – of the local and global within the nineteenth-century city through an archaeological dataset that is unusually weighted towards the commercial and industrial aspects of urban life and development. This paper investigates the changing identity of colonial Christchurch through material culture analysis on a city-wide scale, with a focus on the global trade systems and local commercial enterprises that supplied and distributed domestic commodities to Christchurch, and other British colonial cities, between 1850 and 1900.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow