Material Worlds

Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity

Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, Lori A. Lee, Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, Lori A. Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367875268
• eBook ISBN: 9781317327288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Material Worlds examines consumption from an archaeological perspective, broadly exploring the intersection of social relations and objects through the processes of production, distribution, use, reuse, and discard. Interrogating individual objects as well as considering the contexts in which acts of consumption take place, a range of case studies present the intertwined issues of power, inequality, identity, and community as mediated through choice, access, and use of the diversity of mass-produced goods. Key themes of this innovative volume include the relationship between colonial, political and economic structures and the practices of consumption, the use of consumer goods in the construction and negotiation of identity, and the dialectic between strategies of consumption and individual or community choices.

Situating studies of consumerism within the field of historical archaeology, this exciting collection reflects on the interrelationship between the material and ideological aspects of culture. With a focus on North America from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, Material Worlds is an important examination of consumption which will appeal to scholars with interests in colonialism, gender and race, as well as those engaged with the material culture of the emergent modern world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• Notes on contributors
• 1 An historical archaeology of consumerism: Re-centering objects, re-engaging with data
• 2 Modeling consumption: A social network analysis of mission Santa Catalina de Guale
• 3 “The blood and life of a Commonwealth”: Illicit trade, identity formation, and imported clay tobacco pipes in the 17th-century Potomac River Valley
• 4 Commoditization, consumption, and interpretive complexity: The contingent role of cowries in the early modern world
• 5 Underpinning a plantation: A material culture approach to consumerism at George Washington’s Mount Vernon
• 6 Acquiring transfer-printed ceramics for the Jefferson household at Poplar Forest
• 7 “With sundry other sorts of small ware too tedious to mention”: Petty consumerism on U.S. plantations
• 8 Health consumerism among enslaved Virginians
• 9 The Abundance Index: Measuring variation in consumer behavior in the early modern Atlantic World
• 10 Exploring enslaved laborers’ ceramic investment and market access in Jamaica
• 11 Cotton estates and cotton craft production in the colonial-era Caribbean
• 12 Identity, choice, and the meaning of material culture: Two distinct villages on one Danish West Indies sugar estate
• 13 “Ambitious to be conventional”: African American expressive culture and consumer imagination
• 14 All-consuming modernity
• 15 “Open the mind and close the sale”: Consumerism and the archaeological record
• Index