James Symonds

Toiling in the Vale of Tears: Everyday Life and Resistance in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1760-1860

Following the 1745 rebellion, agrarian capitalism rapidly transformed subsistence practices in the Outer Hebrides. Landowners increased rents, enclosed common lands, and replaced crofters and cattle with sheep-ranges. Population growth, the demise of the kelp industry, and crop failures compounded the problems of the peasantry. Widespread emigration commenced in the 1770s and peaked in the 1850s, when entire communities were exiled to British North America—the so-called Highland Clearances. This article traces the development of agrarian capitalism on the Isle of South Uist, explores the agricultural “improvements” undertaken by successive landlords, and considers modes of resistance adopted by the islands population.

Historical Archaeology and the Recent Urban Past

This paper examines the ways in which international historical archaeologists have explored the recent past, in an effort to inform and contribute to contemporary debates about social identity and social inclusion. It is argued that the archaeology of the mundane and everyday can contribute to contemporary culture by creating a sense of community and developing social cohesion. Emphasis is placed upon the archaeology of the recent urban past and case studies are presented from New York, Sydney and Cape Town. The paper concludes that the study of the materiality of urban social life offers a powerful research tool for social scientists, and that archaeologists and heritage interpreters should make greater use of this form of evidence within the context of early 21st‐century urban regeneration schemes in the UK.

MEMORY OF BARRACKS: World War II German ‘Little Berlins’ and post-war urbanization in Northern Finnish towns

Some 220,000 German soldiers were stationed and fought in northern Finland during World War II. These troops required huge amounts of supplies that were provided by supply encampments in several locations, including the towns of Oulu and Tornio. In this paper the authors consider how the memory of these German-built sites has shaped post-war urban heritage. They review and challenge the authorized history of the post-war urbanization of the northern towns.

Time, Seasonality, and Trade: Swedish/Finnish-Sámi Interactions in Early Modern Lapland

Recent theoretical debates have identified time as a key area for research by historical archaeologists. In this paper we present evidence from Tornio, in northern Finland, and suggest that the early-17th-century colonists who founded this town developed a multidimensional conception of time that varied according to context and allowed deeply held folk beliefs to coexist alongside Lutheran doctrines and also facilitated seasonal trade with the indigenous Sami people in the upper reaches of Lapland.

Poverty and Progress in the Age of Improvement: Evidence from the Isle of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides

In 1851, the landlord of the Hebridean islands of South Uist and Barra evicted almost 3,000 people from their homes and transported them by means of assisted passage to Canada. This episode of clearance was prompted by a failure of the potato crop and a four-year-long famine, and exposed the dire state of poverty in which the inhabitants of the islands had been forced to live. This paper draws upon six seasons of fieldwork at Milton and Airigh Mhuillin, in the middle district of South Uist, and argues that historical archaeologists should do more to expose the causes and long-term consequences of poverty. The paper explores the imposition of agrarian capitalism in the Isle of South Uist from the late 18th century, and makes the case that a system of landholding and land use that privileged profit for landowners over the subsistence needs of the mass of the population created a fragile economy that was prone to shortages and completely unable to respond to the challenge of a prolonged famine.

Stooping to Pick Up Stones: A Reflection on Urban Archaeology

The Construction Manager was in an uncompromising mood. “I suppose your lot enjoy all that scratching about in the dirt,” he quipped. “But as far as I’m concerned, if I want to find out about the Victorians I can just look in a history book.” With a piling rig booked to arrive in 10 days time, and a tight schedule to keep to, I could understand his frustration. In an effort to hold my ground, I point out that my team is doing valuable work that will clear the way for his development. In the 1970s opportunistic “rescue digs” with a workforce of students and local volunteers often stopped construction projects in their tracks, but these days archaeology is a material consideration in the planning process. So as long as appropriate care is taken to explore the archaeological potential of a site at an early stage, there should be no surprises or unexpected hold-ups.

Street mirrors, surveillance, and urban communities in early modern Finland

This article discusses street mirrors or ‘gossip mirrors’, in terms of urban social relations and surveillance. Street mirrors were introduced to coastal towns in Sweden and Finland in the 18th and early 19th centuries and may still be found in well-preserved towns with historic wooden centres. The authors argue that the introduction of monitoring and spying devices, such as street mirrors, occurred in the 18th century due to increased urban populations and feelings of insecurity caused by greater regional and transnational mobility. Mirrors, in this sense, were one material mechanism in the process of modernization and the development of individuality.

Colonial Encounters of the Nordic Kind

This end chapter reviews the contributions to the volume. The historical archaeology of Danish and Swedish colonialism is examined in relation to wider debates about the archaeology of colonialism and recent trends in postcolonial studies.

Engaging with money in a northern periphery of early modern Europe

While contextual and interpretive approaches to money have recently emerged in archaeology, coins have attracted little serious attention in the post-medieval archaeology of the western world. The relative neglect of coins as archaeological finds probably derives from an (implicit) assumption that the function and meaning of coins is readily apparent. A close study of coin finds, however, combined with various sources of contextual data, can provide new views on how people understood and engaged with coinage even in the comparatively recent past, as this article seeks to illustrate by considering money and coin finds from a northern periphery of early modern Sweden. Economic factors are important for appreciating the significance of coinage and the patterning of the studied coin finds, but this article proposes that non-monetary uses of coins were more important to the local understanding of money than has previously been recognized.

List of Figures and Tables

This collection of essays draws inspiration from the late James Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten (1977). Deetz’s seminal work broke new ground by using structuralist theory to show how artefacts reflected the ‘worldviews’ or idealogies of their makers and users, and claimed that the American colonial world had been structured according to a British intellectual blueprint, the so-called ‘Georgian Order’. His central premise, that the systematic study of mundane material objects such as tombstones, architecture, and furniture, can render palpable the intangible aspects of human cognition and belief systems, has become a fundamental tenet of modern historical archaeology. Drawing on James Deetz’s insight that everyday objects from the recent past are ‘freighted with social significance’ and that material culture operates alongside language as a system of communication, this book unravels specific cultural moments in well-documented historical periods across the modern world. These studies range from the early 17th century to the late 20th century and employ theory from archaeology and anthropology to elucidate the complex links between human thought and action. The authors, drawn from North America, Europe, and Australia, make a significant contribution to archaeological knowledge, moving beyond simple materialities to create human stories that transcend purely descriptive show-and-tell accounts of archaeological sites and allow taken-for-granted constructions of race, class and gender to be probed and challenged.