Supplying Life and Death: General Goods Stores in Nineteenth-Century Upstate New York

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the nineteenth century, residents of the Towns of Cazenovia, Fenner, and Nelson, NY were able to purchase a variety of necessary goods at general stores. These establishments provided items from furniture, to mourning wear, to ceramics, to coffins, and many things in between. Today, the idea of buying dinner plates alongside grave goods seems almost unbelievable: this poster explores the overlap in consumer spaces between the realms of the living and dead in nineteenth-century New York state. Through archival and geospatial analysis, I examine the situation of general goods stores on the landscape, the kinds of advertisements they circulated, and the larger role these venues played in social and economic networks of the region. Understanding the role of general goods stores in this context draws connections between two often-separated aspects of historical archaeology: dead spaces and living ones. By studying these stores in their composite, taking the ceramics alongside the coffins, we gain a more complete picture of life in nineteenth-century rural America and the constraints, needs, and values that made such sites necessary for people in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38845.0