Eleanor Conlin Casella

To watch or restrain: female convict prisons in 19th-century Tasmania.

As institutions established to manage exiled British felons, the Tasmanian female factories consisted of four womens prisons located throughout the island colony. The material world of these institutions mediated internal power relations. Superintendents, Convict Department Officials, and the female prisoners themselves manipulated site landscapes. Today, one of these institutions remains as a managed historic site. Tourists experience a tidy and unthreatening landscape of Australias heroic convict heritage. By juxtaposing excavated archaeological remains with public presentations of convict sites, I explore the position of female convicts from the original penal landscape to the shadows of Australian history.

Prisoner of His Majesty: postcoloniality and the archaeology of British penal transportation

Abstract As institutions established to administer the penal exile of British imperial subjects, the historic gaols of Australia and Ireland are linked by a painful legacy of involuntary transportation. Today, outstanding examples of these prisons are conserved and publicly presented as monuments of national significance. This paper considers material meanings associated with these unusual heritage places. Given their explicit historic association with British imperial power, what role do heritage prisons play in the formation of a postcolonial affiliation or consciousness? This paper will consider how heritage prisons have come to embody the emotive links of longing and belonging forged between the modern nations of Ireland and Australia.

Legacy of the 'fatal shore': The heritage and archaeology of confinement in post-colonial Australia

Why does the theme of ‘confinement’ link historic-period heritage places across the continent of Australia? This article explores incarceration as not only a dominant theme in heritage-listed and archaeological sites from post-contact Australia, but also as a central underlying element in both Anglo-Australians’ sense of ambiguous difference from their European origins, and indigenous Australians’ painful experiences of engagement with the state. It considers the shared experiences of ‘confinement’ through a wide variety of registered convict, post-convict and indigenous heritage places in order to question how and why this theme has come to hold such a special resonance for different communities within modern Australia. Expanding upon Bruce Trigger’s classic definitions of ‘alternative archaeologies’, the authors suggest this resonance has resulted in the emergence of a post-colonial form of heritage practice within this settler nation.

Pieces of Many Puzzles: Network Approaches to Materiality in the Global Era

To explore themes of globalization, immigration, and transformation requires a complex multiscalar perspective on material culture. But how can this daunting task be meaningfully undertaken? As a discussion of papers delivered at the Leicester 2013 SHA conference, this contribution considers the possibilities offered by network-based approaches to social analysis. It explores the potentials of both actor network theory (ANT) and more recent science and technology studies (STS) as two theoretical approaches explicitly focused on the conjunctures and disjunctions that both enable and constrain flows of knowledge, migration, and commodity trade. What would be the archaeological implications of this focus on material “relationality?” p][T]here are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:46).

Lockdown: On the Materiality of Confinement

Any meaningful exploration of internment immediately raises an unsettling cluster of underlying questions. Why does confinement exist? Why would a modern state expend tremendous resources (both financial and political) to maintain groups of people within an institutional compound? Who becomes subjected to confinement, and under what sort of circumstances? When we turn towards our unique archaeological exploration of these stark environments, further paths of exploration emerge. How do people experience confinement? How do the built and natural landscapes of these places reinforce the process of internment? What mechanism do the various types of occupants use to sustain a sense of social being? And ultimately, what material conditions characterise daily life within these institutions?

Enmeshed inscriptions: Reading the graffiti of Australia's convict past

Abstract Prison graffiti has been traditionally defined as markings created by inmates on the architectural fabric of the institutional site. However, if we instead define the phenomena as an inscription created by a convict upon an element of their material world, a new range of meaningful ‘hidden transcripts’ may be explored through objects ranging from cotton fabric and copper coins to the more familiar limewash, paint, stone, wood and brick. This paper considers themes that commonly appear in graffiti left by those transported from the British Isles to the Australian penal colonies during the nineteenth century. It further argues that the act of inscription (itself both a mental and physical process) intimately links humans to objects, creating an enmeshed relationship that ultimately reshapes both.

Mrs. Perrin's 'Tracklements': Community Life and Class Distinction in (Post)Industrial Era Cheshire

Archaeological studies have greatly enhanced our appreciation of the complex materiality that supports everyday expressions of social identity. Traditionally, this work has interpreted artefacts and architecture as physical markers of group affiliation, class aspiration, or ethnic solidarity. This chapter questions such direct material “readings” by considering the intricate family ties, kinship networks, and community relationships that choreograph daily practices of social identity. Juxtaposing images created through three very different sources (artefactual, oral historical, and documentary), the study explores the complicated intricacies of class distinction within a rural English community over the early decades of the twentieth century.

Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action

The first chapter introduces the historic and regional development of straw hat making, which developed in and around Luton due to a combination of historical, social and agricultural circumstances that encouraged the expansion of a cottage industry into a global trade. The following chapters introduce aspects of hat manufacturing and the impact these had on the built environment. One deals with straw plaiting, the process of manufacturing long plaits of multiple fine strands of straw to be coiled and sewn together to make straw hats. The hat industry of Luton depended upon the success of straw — a simple material that was a by-product of the region’s cereal crop. Straw was plaited by hand, by women in the home, and by child labour until the end of the nineteenth century, by which time it was displaced as a major source of work by cheaper imports of straw plaits from China and Japan. The mechanized processes of manufacture are also introduced, as are related industries such as bleaching and mould-making. The buildings of the hat industry are discussed, including the small-scale industry carried out in the home, which might have been constructed with a rear workshop and cart entrance, to large-scale industry in factories and warehouses. The chapter includes an extract from an oral history interview carried out with a hat sewer who worked in Luton in the 1960s, and more of this kind of personal account would have been welcomed. The volume also briefly considers buildings in London that related to the hat trade, namely shops, offices and warehouses for global export. The volume concludes with a consideration of the conservation of the present-day built environment, and the management of change in Luton’s built environment. As much of the industry has moved to other parts of the globe, the buildings of the hat manufacturing trade in Luton and the surrounding region have been redeveloped or have been given new uses, with an element of protection through the designation of conservation areas and the listing of a small number of buildings. A map of the centre of Luton showing historic buildings related to hat manufacturing, include the few that continue to accommodate the trade today. Both Bowled Over: the Bowling Greens of Britain and The Hat Industry of Luton and its Buildings examine ordinary buildings and places that are at risk due to redevelopment or changing use. A bowling green or factory building forms the centre of a community, holding local significance and a sense of place, which these books and others in the Played in Britain and Informed Conservation series play an important role in promoting.

From Knowing into Telling: A Dialogue in Five Parts

The issues raised by different kinds of oral-historical research are explored here through a dialogue between two projects. In one case, the Alderley Sandhills Project, this work has been completed; in the other, the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, the oral-historical research is in its early stages. Through a series of interactions, this article raises a number of different questions that oral-historical research posed at Alderley Sandhills, and it considers the ramifications of and the possible differences in these questions in the case of Ardnamurchan. Adoption of a nonlinear structure echoes one of the many fascinating aspects of oral-historical research itself.

Beyond human: The materiality of personhood

Archaeological research has been influenced by feminist thought and critique for decades. In the early 1990s, new narratives began to be written about the past. Starting with a search for women and gendered identities in our prehistories, these have developed into a new way of understanding the relationships between people, objects and animals, both in the past and in the present. Archaeological research has been concerned with the relationships between the ‘human’ and the ‘other’ for a number of decades, whether they involve nonhuman animals, objects we use and create, or attitudes to the landscape and environment. The nonhuman, in other words, is central to our work. We hope in this piece to demonstrate the contribution archaeological insights could make to feminist theorising about the nonhuman.