Dan Hicks

Material culture studies and historical archaeology

Material culture is ubiquitous in our everyday lives; we are surrounded by it and arguably can do little without it. The proliferation of new material forms is troubling to some, often forming the basis of debates over globalisation, modernity and the contemporary production of locality. But while it is true that people are regularly confronted with new objects and technologies, without question many understand and embrace them and consciously use them in the creation of multiple and often intersecting identities. As historical archaeology has emerged as a field of study, understanding and interpreting material culture has become more important than simply identifying and classifying excavated objects (cf. Barker and Majewski this volume). In the United Kingdom, historical archaeologists have followed conventions established by archaeologists of earlier periods, typically grouping and describing their finds according to material (e.g. pottery, iron, bone). In North America, where historical archaeology emerged at approximately the same time as archaeologists’ redefinition of their field through the introduction of the scientific method and the search for laws of cultural behaviour, the overwhelming emphasis has been upon classification of finds according to functional categories (e.g. ‘personal’, ‘military’, ‘architectural’: see South 1977a). Until the 1990s, many American historical archaeologists were anxious to develop universal, standardised schemes for artefact classification so that artefacts and assemblages could be readily compared among historical sites. As a result, historical archaeologists were slow to accept alternative approaches to studying artefacts, approaches arising from the field of material culture studies (for a review, see Yentsch and Beaudry 2001). Our goal in this chapter is not to review typological and generalising approaches to artefact analysis; rather, we explore recent developments in transdisciplinary, interpretive material culture studies, and the opportunities they offer for material culture analysis in contemporary historical archaeology.

Ceramic studies in historical archaeology

WHY CERAMICS? Ceramic studies have played a central role in the development of archaeology – a fact that is equally true for historical archaeology as for studies of earlier periods. Ceramics represent by far the largest class of artefacts recovered during excavations of historical sites. As in other periods, ceramic materials survive in the ground when objects made from other materials do not, and their archaeological value is very high even though they generally only survive in a fragmentary state. As ubiquitous products prone to stylistic change in response to new fashions and consumer preference, ceramics are readily datable, and often prove the most important diagnostic materials recovered when an archaeologically excavated sequence is being interpreted. In addition to their value as sensitive temporal markers, ceramics have the potential to provide insights into a wide range of other topics: cultural change and colonisation; the identities of groups and individuals; the social and economic status of consumers; the emergence of changing practices relating to the consumption of food and drink; patterns of trade and of local and regional variations in trade; and technological change and industrialisation. The past five hundred years have witnessed massive increases in the production, exchange and consumption of ceramics in Asia, Europe, North America and around the world. In Europe, an intensification of international trade in commodities was a central part of nascent colonialism and the transition from medieval to modern societies, as the Old World was opened up to new commodities from the East and as new markets for new commodities developed in the New World and beyond. A chapter on ceramics could be written from many geographical perspectives. The main focus of the present chapter is European-made ceramics, but discussion of non-European ceramics is interwoven throughout. The development of historical ceramic studies has been primarily a British And North American phenomenon, and the parallel and separate trajectories on either side of the Atlantic are traced in the first section of this paper. The second section provides an overview of ceramic production and technology, primarily told from an archaeological vantage point.

‘Places for thinking’ from Annapolis to Bristol: situations and symmetries in ‘world historical archaeologies’

The past decade has seen many calls for the development of unified ‘world historical archaeologies’ of the past 500 years. While the field benefits from growing international exchanges and collaborations, retaining the diversity of regional traditions is a major and emerging challenge. As the field increasingly tests the temporal, geographical and interdisciplinary limits of archaeological perspectives, engaging with the diversity of modern material, these complexities remain little discussed, and the situations and contingencies of disciplinary narratives, priorities and interactions remain unproblematized. Exploring these matters, this paper considers transatlantic interactions between British and North American traditions of historical archaeology over the past two decades, journeying between two garden landscapes – in Annapolis and Bristol. After considering Mark Leones 1984 study of the William Paca garden in Annapolis, Maryland, and its subsequent reinterpretations, the paper discusses an eighteenth-century ‘eclectic’ garden at Goldney in Bristol. The paper argues that situational and ‘symmetrical’, rather than interpretative, approaches to archaeological material would aid the development of multi-vocal and inclusive ‘world historical archaeologies’, acknowledging and celebrating the archaeological complexities that are encountered in the past and the disciplinary present.

Urban historical archaeology

Studies of the historical geographies of the towns and cities of the recent past through their material remains have developed within a broad multidisciplinary context. Ethnographers, cultural geographers, sociologists and others have examined the historical built environment within a spectrum of behavioural, spatial and historical sciences, while archaeologists have studied the development and abandonment of urban places across five millennia and around the world from a great range of perspectives. Many key themes in the contemporary social sciences, including capitalism, colonialism and the politics of identity, are implicated in the development of modern urban places. Over the past forty years historical archaeologists have aimed to contribute to the cross-disciplinary exchange, both by developing distinctive perspectives on towns and cities and by engaging with contemporary urban communities as they negotiate their urban heritages, whether standing buildings and landscapes or buried remains. This chapter aims to explore the practical and intellectual contributions of the diverse traditions of urban historical archaeology. It places the historiography of urban historical archaeology within its wider cross-disciplinary context and provides a detailed case study, drawn from New York and Philadelphia, that explores how historical archaeologists have researched streetscapes, buildings and backyards. The chapter concludes with reflections on how archaeological practice and archaeological knowledge shape contemporary living within urban environments. CHANGES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORICAL TOWNS The archaeological analysis of urban space is complex. There are two principal practical challenges. First, cities are vast archaeological sites. Urban landscapes extend across hundreds, and often thousands, of square miles. ‘Historic cores’, as conventionally defined, tend to be relatively small, but they are still among the most complex of all archaeological sites in their histories of development, and significantly larger in area and stratigraphic depth. Moreover, the extensive settled areas that stretch out beyond such ‘historic cores’ are also of interest, and these have complex histories in their own right.

The Temporality of the Landscape Revisited

This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. It revisits Tim Ingold’s 1993 paper ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, considering its relationship with the phenomenological and interpretive archaeologies of the 1990s and what we learn from it today. Engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return, the essay compares Ingold’s discussion of Bruegel’s painting The Harvesters (1565) with an archaeological photograph from 1993. A discussion of the after-effects of performance follows, and four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting are put forward: 1) The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; 2) Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; 3) An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; 4) Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. The essay concludes that archaeology is best understood not as the study of the temporality of the landscape, as Ingold had argued, but as the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited.

Reply to Comments: Meshwork Fatigue

Over the past two decades Olivier has set a new agenda for archaeological conceptions of time, re-imagining concepts of multitemporality, duration, contemporaneity and memory. He has shown us how ‘archaeological finds and the people who find them are inextricably entwined’, understanding archaeology as ‘an investigation into archives of memory, which is what remains are’, an examination of ‘what has happened to things from the past’ (Olivier 2011, p. xv, 2013, p. 124). Olivier and I are in firm agreement when he suggests that ‘since The Temporality of the Landscape appeared, we have been lingering on the threshold of a major, conceptual revolution that...involves a wholly new way in which to conceive our relation to the past and to the world’. For me the metaphor of an uncrossed threshold is helpful not as a prediction of a paradigm shift, but as a suggestion of the provisional boundaries that archaeology marks out between indoors and outdoors. We have spent those 23 years imagining archaeological time to be grasped only in the open air, rather than forged through constant trafficking between archive and field. What archaeology leaves behind is not passive detritus but the very fragments of life through which our knowledge of the human past is constituted. Alongside Olivier’s account of memory and duration my essay contributes the idea of archaeology as a method for recollection: for gathering together again, for reuniting, for something akin to what Bjørnar Olsen calls ‘re-membering’ (Olsen 2012). Archaeological recording protracts time, producing secondary, mimetic topographies of fact and imagination: notebook, drawing, photograph, museum, archive. Recollection requires a reciprocity with the human past. The double morphology of archaeological time brings a double obligation: to receive landscape into archive as object, to reconnect archive with landscape as subject. For archaeologists ‘time is the outcome of our own work, among other things’ (Witmore 2013, p. 131). What is archaeology the study of? To a Francophone ear ‘recollection’ might suggest that stagnant Anglicized term ‘souvenir’. But the archaeological archive is no mere keepsake but a productive ‘antiquarian device’ with its own ‘theory of history’ that ‘contracts the world in order to expand the personal’. Archaeology comes in for a time from the rain. Glass cases and filing cabinets can hold shut no longer. It is as if the silent archaeological photograph extends some cartographic component of the older technology of the pressed flower (Stewart 1993, pp. xii, 138). Which is to say: An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through

THE RETURN OF ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY: HAU AND WHEN

The author reviews the events surrounding the launch of HAUs expanded edition of The gift, and reflects on their implications for history and theory in anthropology.