Carolyn L. White

Artifacts and Personal Identity

Although historical archaeologists have generally neglected to apprehend the potent meanings of personal possessions, the field is stirring. All too often, personal artifacts have been subsumed into broader categories of artifacts, their meanings blurred or diminished. Personal artifacts have been assessed as subgroups classified by material, resulting in a muting of the individual significance of particular artifacts and a preference on the part of analysts to deal with objects recovered in large quantities. Personal artifacts have occasioned individual assessment sporadically, and interest in these artifacts has begun to shift from limited interpretation to more interpretive contextual approaches. In this chapter, we trace the shifts in approach to personal artifacts and explore the ways that archaeologists scrutinize these small finds to understand identity construction. Three interrelated lines of inquiry and influence in archaeology have merged to bring about a shift to exploration of personal items and identity construction. First, the examination of the lives of enslaved African Americans sparked intensive interest among historical archaeologists in examining race and ethnicity. Concurrently, archaeologists sought more effective and complex ways of examining gender in the archaeological record. These trends, as well as emerging interest in considering class, were part of a larger movement within the field—parallel to developments across other disciplines—in the examination of identity. A second important influence was a renewed interest in less commonly examined classes of artifacts, stimulated, in part, by a frustration with traditional modes of material culture analysis to engage with race, gender, and class. Third, historical archaeologists joined with cultural anthropologists in a dedicated interest in the examination of the body and the manifold ways in which embodiment can be examined through material culture. These three influential threads surface in current work in the exploration of identity through personal possessions.

Personal Adornment and Interlaced Identities at the Sherburne Site, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Items of personal adornment are an important class of material culture with great potential for understanding constructions of identity in the historical period. Archaeologically recoverable remains of dress—clothing and clothing fasteners, jewelry, hair accessories, and miscellaneous accessories—are included in this category of material culture. Performative aspects of identity construction, the presentation of a person as an individual and as a member of a socially defined group, and the centrality of the body in perception and self-perception are a means for examining the construction of identity along gender, class, age, and ethnicity lines. Personal adornment artifacts are the physical remains of the ways people inscribed the body as reflective of their alignment with individual and group identities and the performances of identity that were enacted through mundane daily acts and gestures in the past. Artifacts recovered at the Sherburne site in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, manifest these identities.

Introduction: Perspectives on Trade and Exchange

Today, in America, we are surrounded by objects from distant places: toys from China, cars from Japan, shoes from Mexico, wine from Argentina, and myriad goods from around the world. Workers in Naivasha, Kenya, harvest roses in the afternoon, and by the next morning they are for sale in the flower shops of London. High-speed, economical transportation links producers and consumers in an international marketplace; the average home in the western world contains goods transported by trains, container ships, and cargo jets. In the prehistoric and historic past, when transport was slower and costlier, the exchange networks that linked distant peoples were complex and productive. Nonlocal goods were transported, traded, and exchanged through a variety of means, over short and long distances, and it was often the case that the social dynamics that were part of this process were as meaningful as the objects themselves. Archaeological tools for identifying foreign objects, such as provenance studies, stylistic analyses, and economic documentary sources reveal nonlocal materials in prehistoric and historic assemblages. Yet trade and exchange encompass more than mere production and consumption. Exchange was a mechanism for introducing the exotic into daily life. Foreign objects were integrated into everyday practice long before the advent of a global economy.

Introduction: Objects, Scale, and Identity Entangled

Three elements – objects, scale, and identity – are entangled in the chapters in this collection. The authors have been tasked to center both material culture and the scale of the individual in their interpretations of the archaeological record. Archaeologists have always prioritized material things in the study of the past; the artifact is central to the archaeological endeavor. Nonetheless, as a number of scholars have recently pointed out (Meskell, 2005; Cochran and Beaudry, 2006; Loren and Beaudry, 2006), interpretive approaches to materiality – those that take an interdisciplinary perspective on material culture and also employ an approach developed in anthropological material studies – have been slow to percolate into the collective archaeological perspective. There are now a number of encouraging developments in this regard that indicate a new intensity of interest in material culture studies with a distinctly archaeological approach (Beaudry, 2006; White, 2005; Meskell, 2005), including a new series of guides published by Left Coast Press (White and Scarlett, 2009). One of the major aims of this volume is to demonstrate the potential of an approach to the archaeological record that takes materiality as its focus and uses substantive case studies to explore a common theme: individuality.

The paradox of the Paniolo: an archaeological perspective of Hawaiian ranching

Commercial ranches are part of Hawai‘i’s colonial landscape and form an expansive archaeological horizon in rural parts of the islands. Ranching facilitated the evolution of folk societies of cowboys (paniolo) who incorporated Hawaiian language and values in daily working activities despite the multiethnic origins and nontraditional occupations of the workers. The archaeology of these communities in upland pastures of the Humu‘ula district on the eastern slopes of Hawai‘i Island is presented herein. The study provides an enhanced understanding of the evolution of colonial identities through multiple scales of analysis, including social, economic, and environmental responses of the rise of industrial capitalism, trends in vernacular architecture, engendered analyses of living floors, and microhistories embedded in individual artifacts.

At Home During the Depression in Rabbithole Springs, Nevada, USA

ABSTRACT This article discusses the housing used by residents of a small mining community called Rabbithole Springs in Nevada, USA, during the era of the Depression (1929 through the early 1940s). The interiors of the homes provide insights into how people lived during this trying economic period—and about how they lived on marginal land on the edges of society. In a study that considers the organization and elaboration of interior space, the “lifespace” of the residents is examined through the archaeological study of standing structures and subsurface remains of four buildings.

“Beholden to Foreign Countries”: Trade and Clothing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Clothing is a commodity like any other. It is an object that is produced in numerous levels of quality and expense, with associated attributes of style, fashion, and meanings traded and exchanged through local and long-distance networks. Eighteenth-century New Englanders, like people everywhere, communicated ideas about themselves as individuals and as members of various groups through the clothing they wore and the physical appearances they created (White 2005, 2008, n.d.). The objects they used to construct these appearances were imported from England, almost exclusively, through trans-Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. In the pages that follow I explore the close trading practices between New England and England in the eighteenth century in particular, as it was embedded in the trade in clothing and personal adornment suggested by archaeological evidence from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Single Shoes and Individual Lives: The Mill Creek Shoe Project

Shoes are compelling symbols of individual lives and act metaphorically to suggest an intimacy with the person who wore them. In our modern world, celebrity affiliation with specific shoe designers – e.g., Sarah Jessica Parker and Manolo Blahnik – underscores the intimacy of this kind of artifact. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote, “Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them.” The fit of a shoe is intimate information, and possessing knowledge of it suggests extraordinary familiarity. Maxims regarding the intimacy of shoes abound in modern parlance: “If the shoe fits, wear it,” “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” As artifacts, shoes carry the marks of the individual who wore them in many different ways, physically as well as symbolically.

INDIVIDUAL, ARCHAEOLOGY OF IN PREHISTORY

Archaeologists by necessity move between the general and specific in excavating individual sites and relating those sites to broader interpretations and generalizing observations of the past over vast spaces and time periods. The archaeological record consists of materials made, used, lost, broken, and abandoned by individuals, and the role of the individual as a component of causality is widely recognized as a key factor in the creation of archaeological sites. The individual scale has been taken up by some, but larger scales of analysis are often preferred by archaeologists on account of many difficulties and restrictions that exist on the individual scale. Preservation conditions are often incompatible with the individual scale, making differentiation between occupation episodes elusive and the fine-grained analysis that the individual scale demands evasive. In a different sense, the individual scale has been rejected by other archaeologists who prefer to strive for broader, more general (and more widely applicable) interpretations about the past.