James Deetz

Death's Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gravestones in Massachusetts are decorated with a traditional set of designs which have distinctive spatial and temporal limits. By treating them as archaeological phenomena, one can demonstrate and test methods of inferring diffusion, design evolution, and relationships between a folk-art tradition and the culture which produced it. Early popularity of deaths-head designs reflects Puritan attitudes toward death, while the later cherub, willow tree, and urn motifs indicate the breakdown of these values. Although cherubs appear earliest among an innovating urban class in Cambridge, they remain a relatively minor type in this central area but are rapidly adopted in outlying districts further removed from the center of influence. Imperfect reproduction of certain designs gives rise to distinctive local styles of other areas. The distribution of these local styles in time and space provides further insights regarding religious change in the Colonial period, including a clear indication of how this change proceeded in different geographical areas at different times. Future analysis of this material promises to be quite productive in the areas of experimental archaeology, kinship analysis, demographic studies, style change, and religious change in Colonial America.

The Doppler Effect and Archaeology: A Consideration of the Spatial Aspects of Seriation

It is the purpose of this paper to make explicit two additional assumptions and to suggest that their inclusion with those already stated might lend some small measure of sophistication to the seriation method. The suggestions here offered should not be taken as an adverse critique of seriation methods in general; the writers subscribe tothe validity of this approach to chronological ordering. Our intent rather is to attempt a modest degree of methodological refinement. The first of our additional assumptions is that any type used in seriation originated at a single locus and subsequently spread outward from that point. An artifact type used in seriation, in order to have utility, must occur at two or more sites. This occurrence at more than one locus can either be interpreted as evidence of the movement ofthe mental template which was responsible for its production, either through migration or through less dramatic, secondary diffusion processes, or as evidence of the independent formulation of this template at each site of its occurrence. The latter is extremely unlikely, and Phillips,

American historical archeology: methods and results.

For historical archeology to be effective, research methods must be employed that ensure that both archeological and historical data be synthesized in a constructive manner. An example from Flowerdew Hundred, a Virginia plantation, illustrates such an approach. Collections from eighteen sites(1619 to 1720) were studied and dated by the inside bore diameters of pipestem fragments from clay smoking pipes. The sites grouped into three distinct categories, each with a different date. The latest group of sites (1680 to 1720) contained Colono ware, a slave produced pottery; none of the earlier sites did, although there were blacks at Flowerdew Hundred as early as 1619. On the basis of studies of probate data and other primary historical sources, it is suggested that this pattern of Colono ware occurrence is due to a change in the social and residential status of blacks during the century and that only when they lived separately from the masters did they make this type of pottery.

The transformation of British culture in the Eastern Cape, 1820–1860

The 1820 Settlers left behind them a rich legacy of material culture: a modelled landscape, houses, ceramics, gravestones and other categories of artefacts. By applying the theoretical principles of structuralism, this evidence reveals the way in which these families on an early nineteenth century frontier conceived of, and ordered, their world. In this paper, we argue that British culture was transformed in the Eastern Cape in this period. Rather than re‐creating the material culture of their mother country, settlers combined elements of the current Georgian order with the archaic forms of the earlier eighteenth century, producing a cultural world consistent with the re‐creation of an agrarian way of life.

The chronology of Oudepost I, Cape, as inferred from an analysis of clay pipes

Abstract The excavation of Oudepost I, a Dutch East India Company outpost on the southwest coast of South Africa (1669–1732), reveals evidence of colonial-indigenous interactions in this early period of European settlement. The site revealed very little stratigraphy and a complex taphonomic history. The chronological integrity of Oudepost I is assessed through a comprehensive analysis of its major artefactual component, namely, a large collection of white clay tobacco pipes. The data from this analysis are integrated with field observations of the building sequence, with findings relating to residues, and with information from documentary sources to infer an occupational history of the site. The results explicate the potential importance of pipes in historic sites, as key elements in decoding occupational sequences.

Building, furnishings and social change in early Victorian Grahamstown

Research in North America has plotted distinctive changes in house form and other aspects of material culture which, together, show how the world came to be viewed differently over time. A further study has shown how similar transformations took place in the rural areas of the eastern Cape Province after its settlement by English immigrants early in the nineteenth century. In this paper, the evidence for changes in the structural use of material culture in urban Grahamstown is examined. It is shown how house form and furnishings were an expression of social class, and how an urban eastern Cape form emerged in response to specific social and economic conditions.