Living above the shop: home, business, and family in the English "Industrial Revolution"

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the "household family" into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, "nuclear" variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of "the family" differed according to one's place in the domestic hierarchy.     

Economic geography under postcolonial scrutiny

Because the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things, in order for it to be 'seen' by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping. This is doubling, but with a difference; the map shifts the point of view so that viewers can see the whole as if from the outside, in a way that allows them, from a specific position inside, to find their bearings. ( Buck-Morss 1995 , 440)     

Towards the application of desorption electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (DESI-MS) to the analysis of ancient proteins from artefacts

The detection and identification of protein residues from archaeological artefacts has been the subject of considerable controversy over the past two decades, this controversy spurring the application of a range of different analytical methods. Part of the debate surrounds the ability of the methods to uniquely identify original proteins. Another is the apparent contradiction between the ease of extraction in the laboratory of residues that have managed to survive in sediment over millennia; some studies use simple solvents including water, whilst others claim that efficient extraction requires the destruction of the artefact.Desorption electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (DESI-MS) offers the potential to directly analyse proteins bound to the surface of artefacts. The method permits desorption of analytes under ambient conditions directly from a wide range of surfaces with little or no sample preparation. This has already led to its application in a range of areas, including forensic analysis of trace levels of narcotic drugs. It does not require destruction of the artefact (e.g. by drilling or dissolution) and can work in concert with other methods (for instance it could be used as a screening tool prior to lipid extraction).Here we report the construction of a DESI-MS interface and consider the potential of the method to contribute to the debate surrounding the preservation of proteins on artefacts. The DESI-MS interface was fitted to a conventional ion trap mass spectrometer and tested using peptides and proteins artificially applied to the surface of flint flakes and potsherd samples. A range of intact proteins was analysed; the DESI interface identified test proteins up to a maximum molecular weight of approximately 20 kDa. Peptides generated from these and larger proteins could be detected using DESI-MS following tryptic digestion in situ. The collected data allowed identification of the originating proteins. The potential applications to archaeological science of this new analytical tool are discussed.     

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise,as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle‐Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910

In the middle‐class home in late nineteenth‐century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.