Approaching the archaeology of value: a view from the modern world

SUMMARY: The abundance of goods in the modern world has a tendency to prejudice interpretation of their value, but the way people value their goods is complex, relative and changeable — scarcity is just one factor. There is a long history of value theorization across the social sciences, but archaeological considerations of value remain uncommon and focused on prestige goods. In this paper, I review alternative conceptions of value through the lens of the modern world, with an example of Spode creamware used by a governor in the early decades of colonial Sydney. I argue that the process of devaluation, through discard and waste, offers a unique archaeological understanding of the shifting values people of the modern world placed on commodities.     

The in situ preservation of archaeological remains: using lysimeters to assess the impacts of saturation and seasonality

Recent research has studied the effects of seasonal variability on waterlogged burial environments. In a new approach to the study of archaeological contexts, the use of controlled laboratory conditions via lysimeters has enabled new insights into the nature of short term fluctuations in saturation, and the impact that these can have on burial contexts. In addition, the protocols used have facilitated interesting insights into burial environments and the way in which fluctuations in saturation and seasonality can impact on the contained organic components within them.     

Alexander the Great, the dahlia, and the tortoise

Some of the problems of establishing the cause of the death of Alexander the Great are like the attempts to find causes other than hysteria for Anna O.'s symptoms. The more general problem of using plausibility as a criterion of the truth of such reconstructions are illustrated by the arguments embedded in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.     

‘Schools for the moral training of the people’: Public Baths,Liberalism and the Promotion of Cleanliness in Victorian Britain1

This article examines Victorian public baths as institutions of active, embodied liberalism: as political spaces where subjects went to practise and enhance their powers of self-government, and in so doing embody and perform a clean and respectable lifestyle. To some extent, public baths can be understood as disciplinary institutions. According to its promoters, personal cleanliness went hand in hand with sober, industrious habits and a conscientious sense of domestic and social responsibility. At the same time, they also formed significant ethical sites, for bathing was a privilege that had to be paid for and as such actively adopted as a lifestyle choice; and, to this extent, they were about facilitating, rather than coercing, a certain civilised freedom. Public baths also allow for an exploration of the material facets of Victorian liberalism, of its spatial and corporeal dimensions. Washing was a practice that not only took place within a privatising architecture but one that also entailed an intensified awareness of the materiality of the self, and especially its covering, the skin. As an art of the self, as a form of subjective individualisation, washing was at once an ethical and a sensory, a moral and a physical, enactment of power.

résumé ?Cet article se penche sur les bains publics comme un exemple pratique et physique du libéralisme, comme un espace ou les possibilités de la connaissance de soi et de la gouvernementalité pouvaient s'exprimer. Dans un certain sens les bains publics avaient une fonction disciplinaire dans le sens d'un parallèle entre la propreté et la sobriété, la responsabilité et la domesticité. En un autre sens les bains représentaient un site éthique dans la mesure où ils restaient un privilège payant et un choix de vie qui facilitait plutôt qu'il ne forçait une entrée dans le domaine de la liberté et de la civilité. Les bains publics permettent aussi une exploration de l'espace physique et matériel du libéralisme et des rapports entre une entreprise de type privé et les soins du corps et plus particulièrement de la peau. Dans ce sens les soins corporels et les bains représentaient un ensemble d'exercices du pouvoir de soi sur soi: éthique, sensorial, moral et physique.