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.