Views and Commentaries: What Difference Does Feminist Theory Make?

This discussion explores what difference a feminist perspective makes in our understandings of the past in two ways. The first section examines to what extent feminist research questions were asked in the preceding papers by Lu Ann De Cunzo, Eleanor Casella, and Susan Piddock. The second section shows what difference feminist theory has made in asking new questions that have produced new gendered understandings of the global historical context of these papers. As a whole, this discussion shows how feminist theoretical approaches change our understanding of the lives of historic women and men in nineteenth century reform institutions within their larger gendered cultural context. While the introduction to this volume presents the broader ungendered historical context, this discussion focusses on the gendered cultural context that was foundational to the gender relationships embodied in the arrangement of architectural spaces and material culture at the sites in the preceding three papers.     

Introduction and Historical Context to the Archaeology of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Almshouses

This introduction discusses both the western cultural context of, and research issues behind, the following three articles on institutions founded to house the poor in Holland, England, and their American colonies. It also discusses the connections between this volume on colonial-era institutions for the poor and the previous volume on nineteenth century asylums and prisons.     

A Context for Concealment: The Historical Archaeology of Folk Ritual and Superstition in Australia

Are there traditions of folk ritual practice in Australian historical contexts, and are they observable in the archaeological record? Studies from the US and UK have documented a range of practices suggesting the persistence of British and European traditions of folk magic well into the twentieth century and previous historical work has identified numerous examples of ritual concealments in Australian buildings. In examining over 4,500 Australian historical archaeological sources, however, we found very few examples of possible folk ritual practices. This raises the question of why such practices are not being captured by current archaeological recording methods. As counterpoint, a general model is constructed from US, UK and Australian work that raises intriguing possibilities for the situating of superstitious behavior in Australian historical archaeology, including the contexts in which people might be more prone to practise such behaviors and how they might be materially identifiable.     

For the Community: Scottish Historical Archaeology and the Politics of Land Reform

In Scotland, land reform is, historically and still today, a defining political issue and a subject of debate. Central to this debate are different ideological understandings of the rural past. In this paper, I discuss the nature of the Scottish land question and explore several of the main—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—ideologies concerning land, as put forward or supported by different constituencies: politicians; landowners; crofters; Scots more generally; and members of the Scottish diaspora. I consider the histories to which these ideologies relate and seek to locate the historical archaeology of rural Scotland in its political and social contexts.     

The Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Religion to the Archaeological Record: An Example from the Home of Ellen White, Prophetess of Seventh-Day Adventism

Religion is one of the least tangible aspects of the past, yet it was very real and very important in the lives of past people. Understanding the impact nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity had on the archaeological record will add substantially to studies of historic households in the United States and around the world. One of the most aggressive of these denominations was Seventh-day Adventism, which grew out of the Millerite movement under Ellen White. A brief case study based on a home occupied by her family is used as a way to explore some of these themes.     

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebrides from 1800 to the Present

On a number of levels, peripheral status has been imposed on the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series of interviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meanings of ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and displayed on wooden dressers. It is argued that in renegotiating their identity in the face of a series of externally generated economic changes, rural communities in the Hebrides have acted as thoughtful consumers, appropriating mainland material culture to their own ends. Throughout this process, imports have behaved ambiguously. This ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of the relationship—here characterized not as resistance but as resistant adaptation—between the Hebrides and the mainland.     

Selling civilization: toward a cultural analysis of America's economic empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

This essay builds on work that is exploring the convergence of economic and cultural approaches to understanding imperialism through an examination of the particular case of American commercial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on my archival research into the promotional and practical strategies of five of the largest American companies that were international in sales, I suggest some of the ways that an analysis of commercial imperial representations of, and knowledges about, race, gender and civilization adds to our understanding of the multiplicity of imperialisms. I argue that examining these multiplicities can help contribute to a critical postcolonial perspective.     

Context and Interpretation: An Archaeology of Cultural Production

This paper examines the construction of modern-world contexts in historical archaeology. To help draw out and understand the social and cultural contexts of capitalism, colonialism, and modernity, and how they may be materially understood, an explanation of the German history of everyday life school (Alltagsgeschichte) is presented. In this approach, the objects of historical study become the everyday cultural interpretations of past people and how these interpretations actively produced and reproduced cultures. This approach is illustrated by a landscape archaeology of the Bordley–Randall site in Annapolis, Maryland.     

Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands

The article considers the importance of frontier studies in historical archaeology and discusses applicability of some of the concepts deriving from postcolonial theories for a better understanding of human relationships in the frontier zones. The conditions of frontiers and borderlands are compared with the characteristics of the “Third Space” described by Homi Bhabha as a realm of negotiation, translation and remaking. It is argued that concepts developed in postcolonial theories, such as “Third Space,” “in-betweeness” or hybridity, are useful not only to address cultural and social processes in borderlands that were created by colonial empires. They are also an apt way to conceptualize relationships in frontiers that lacked colonial stigma. To illustrate this point, two different historical examples of borderlands are scrutinized in this paper: the medieval frontier region that emerged between Denmark and the Northwestern Slavic area and the creation of the colonial frontier in Northeastern America through the establishment of the Praying Indian Towns.     

Forests for cotton: Institutions and organizations in Brazil's mid-twentieth-century cotton boom

The western region of São Paulo state, Brazil, became one of several sites of global cotton production during the first half of the twentieth century in response to increased global demand and fears of cotton shortages. The cotton boom tapped a ‘forest rent’ that helped Brazil rise to become the largest producer in Latin America, providing both export revenue and critical raw material to a growing industrial economy that would become the largest in South America. This paper uses an organizational and institutional perspective to analyze causes and effects of the mid-century cotton boom that centered on São Paulo state. Organizations and institutions relating to cotton production are considered using oral histories, judicial documents, agronomic texts, and the sediment record in small catchments as empirical evidence. The state dramatically reformed some organizations to provide the key inputs to cotton production, while most contemporary observers ignored institutions, such as sharecropping and tenant farming, that supported cotton. São Paulo's institutions and organizations were characterized by the borrowing and adaptation of existing labor institutions, the creation of new state organizations that subsidized elite producers, and the weak development of institutions or organizations in response to soil fertility issues and labor supply.     

Historical Archaeology and the Post-Columbian World of North America

Historical archaeology, with its interest in material culture and its use of the broader perspectives of anthropology and anthropological archaeology, has contributed to a distinctive understanding of the North American experience. Historical archaeologists have, to varying degrees, investigated the material traces of class, race, gender, and state formation. These studies provide an understanding of the origin of many of the social practices that undergird modern culture, a necessary, though neglected, case in a unified anthropological archaeology's goal of writing innovative world histories.     

Model Boats in the Context of Maritime History and Archaeology

Funereal, votive or shipbuilders' model boats and ships have been quite well documented in the past, but little research has been undertaken into other wooden models from north-west Europe. There have been over 160 found during archaeological excavations, dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries. A study of these 'toys' is not just a study of objects among the minor arts, but reflects a far more important aspect—a source for interpreting remains of full-size vessels, the hypothetical reconstruction of hull-forms and exploration of new ways of defining unknown vessel-types.
© 2007 The Author     

Globalizing Flowscapes and the Historical Archaeology of the Mormon Domain

Historical archaeology within the Mormon Domain should focus upon the globalizing flowscapes defined by Arjun Appaduri: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. This perspective moves archaeological scholarship away from attempts to identify a single “Mormon Culture Pattern” and illustrate that pattern's collapse to processes of Americanization and Globalization after Utah achieved statehood. By shifting the focus to the relationships of exchange organized using the flowscapes, the Mormon Domain becomes an ideal venue to explore the roots of globalization's bifurcating tendency to deterritorialize nations and regions by connecting local places with transnational population movements. This intellectual perspective will further align historical archaeology in Utah and the Great Basin with general trends in historical archaeology, New Western History, and New Mormon History.     

Archaeology in the Context of War: Legal Frameworks for Protecting Cultural Heritage during Armed Conflict

International law provides for a framework for protecting cultural heritage during armed conflict and for punishing those who transgress these principles. If understood within its limitations of dependence on state ratification and enforcement, international law protects cultural heritage by providing guidelines to those who wish to conform and by punishing after the fact those who deliberately destroy cultural heritage. Recent movement toward ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its protocols by the major military powers should afford greater protection to cultural heritage in future conflicts.     

Reconceptualizing Resistance in the Historical Archaeology of the British Isles: An Editorial

The present resonates with the harmonics of past events. Our archaeologies, because they deal with the everyday materiality of life, should not neglect to concern themselves with the domination of past people, since many similar forms of oppression persist. Moreover, we should consider the resistance to such domination. Rather than seeing resistance as simply reactive a problem which has generated much criticism—we can reconceptualize it to encompass a more nuanced understanding of the volition and agency of people in inferior positions of power. This lends new strength to the role of archaeologists in representing historical narratives of resistance.