Generally individuals in history are known for a particular reason – they somehow influenced history. Very little is known about the ordinary person who lived in the past. But historical archaeologists – through their interpretation of the material culture and historic record – can study the past on an individual level. This brings archaeological interpretation from a micro to a macro level – as opposed to the traditional level of society to community to individual interpretation.
The cases presented in this volume engage material culture that is owned or used by a single person and is thus associated with an individual at some point in its uselife. The volume takes bodkins, shoes, beads, cloth, religious items, grave goods, as well as subassemblages from well-defined contexts from New England, the Chesapeake, New Orleans, Hawaii, Spanish colonial America, and London in the pursuit of the individual and the textured interpretation this analytical scale provides.
This volume promises to present innovative approaches to a host of archaeological materials, drawing widely on the range of archaeological research for the historical period today. Capitalizing on several topics and research threads with great currency, such as the examination of material culture and interest in various and intersecting lines of identity construction, as well as presenting an international and multiregional approach to these topics, this volume will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material culture scholars, and social historians interested in a wide variety of time periods and subfields.
Table of Content
Introduction: The Material Lives of Individual People 1. Material Expressions of French Identity on the Edge of Empire at Eighteenth-Century Fort St. Joseph, Michael Nassaney and José António Brandão 2. Mission Santa Catalina’s Mondadiente de Plata: The Intersection of Personal Hygiene and Identity Formation in Spanish Colonial Georgia, Jessica Striebel Mac Lean 3. Single Shoes and Individual Lives: Working Class Bostonians and The Mill Creek Shoe Project, Carolyn L. White 4. Microhistories and Madames in Colonial and Antebellum New Orleans, Shannon Lee Dawdy 5. Working Out Their Differences in the 17th-Century Chesapeake, Julia A. King 6. Material Manipulations: Beads and Cloth in the French Colonies, Diana De Paolo Loren 7. Consuming Individuality: Collective Identity along the Color Line, Paul R. Mullins 8. Beyond Consumption: Character Ideals, Social Relationships, and Material Culture in the Shaping of Identity, Christa M. Beranek 9. Bodkin Biographies, Mary C. Beaudry 10. Folk Housing in the Middle of the Pacific: Architectural Lime, Creolized Ideologies, and Expressions of Power in 19th-century Hawaii, Peter R. Mills 11. Connecting Past Individuals: The Buicchi Brothers, Nigel Jeffries 12. Widow Pratt’s Possessions: Archaeology of a Newport, Rhode Island, Household, ca. 1720-1750, Christina J. Hodge 13. Thinking About Individual Lives, Rebecca YaminMore ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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