Christa M. Beranek

Founding narratives: Revolutionary stories at historic houses

Two American Revolutionary War era homes, now historic houses and sites for archaeological research, in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, serve as starting points for a consideration of memory, narrative and history. These are both sites where early nineteenth‐century women made history, mapping the political and military history of the American Revolution onto the domestic fabric of their homes by telling the stories of their recent ancestors, naming rooms and preserving furnishings. In their preservation efforts, these women may not have been primarily focused on telling their own stories, but they made an important statement on the role of domestic spaces in national history and for their own power as history makers. Through material and textual instruments of memory, these women transformed their individual memories into shared narratives, illuminating the process by which a ‘social memory’ of the Revolution was created.

Dwelling: transforming narratives at historic house museums

Dwellings have been hailed as ‘arguably the single most important artefact for reconstructing past societies’ (Samson 1990, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our own professional experiences, we use this outlet to reflect on the intersection of public and civic agendas, heritage management and social theory at historic homes and house museums. There are moments – opportunities – during which established heritage narratives both transform and are transformed by expert and stakeholder practices. As experience and memory intersect, heritage professionals are implicated in the politics of the past. But to whom and how are we accountable as we engage in history-making? What mediates the essential interplay of stakeholder and professional values? Most of the papers collected here were first assembled at the Theoretical Archaeology Group annual meeting in Palo Alto, California, in 2009. All the papers attend to dwellings as compelling sites of collective and individual memory-making that afford a powerful, organising presence. We explore intersections of progressive agendas and the sometimes conservative realities of historic home sites through on-the-ground, in progress and personal case studies of heritage as practice.

Beyond Consumption: Social Relationships, Material Culture, and Identity

Research on the relationship between the merchant elite, material culture, and identity has focused on consumption and purchase of goods, especially of newly available luxury goods. Some archaeological work attaches the very nature of modern individuality to consumption of the mass-produced items available after the 1760s. This chapter explores the identity of the patriarch of a rural merchant family in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Eleazer Tyng, employing an approach that deemphasizes consumption and begins to consider historically contingent notions of individuality as part of a holistic study of identity encompassing status, ethnicity, and gender. Material culture was integral to the ways in which Tyng enacted and reshaped his identity and his affiliation with social groups and cultural ideals, but he made very selective use of new consumer goods. By examining incongruities or disjunctures in the material record, Tyng’s personal choices that position him in relationship to the debates and ideals of his day become evident. Tyng was aware of the revolution in consumer goods for the social rituals of drinking and dining that took place during his lifetime, but seems to have chosen not to participate in them at his own home, despite his construction of a fashionable Georgian mansion. Rather, both the construction of his grand house and his self-presentation through clothing and portraiture point to continual reshaping of himself in his later years. Concepts of gentility, pre-Revolutionary debates over manliness and politics, culturally specific notions of old age and retirement, and his rural residence all influenced Tyng. The uneven or “scrappy” (Buchli, 1999) archaeological and documentary records do not detract from understanding Tyng as an individual; instead, they force us to acknowledge the multiple influences to which individuals in the past were subject and to grapple with this complexity.

Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Lineage: The Cultural Biography of a Colonial Massachusetts Parcel of Land

This cultural biography traces the multiple meanings of a large parcel of land in colonial Dunstable, Massachusetts, for members of the Tyng family between the late 17th and the end of the 18th centuries by examining the representation of the land in the documentary record of deeds and probate documents. The land and the deeds employed to transform new territory into a bounded and saleable item were artifacts used in the definition of the Tyngs’ ethnicity (Anglo-American), particularly in the context of 17th-century interactions with the Native Americans. The land was also tied to the expression of independent masculinity and the ability to provide a competence for sons. The role that the land played in the construction of their identities, however, could never be reduced to simply one of these factors since both land ownership and the idea of Englishness and masculinity were tied to concepts of status, family hierarchy, and profession. Finally, an analysis Sarah Tyng’s land transactions at the end of the 18th century demonstrates the ways in which women could also use land to make statements of power and about lineage.