Historical Archaeology and the Study of American Culture

This volume, a compilation of papers from a 1991 conference of the same name, consists of fifteen essays exploring means of constructing new understandings of American culture through an integration of documentary and material culture. The material cultures discussed in each of these essays have been generated through historical archaeological investigation. The goal of the conference was to demonstrate the mutual relationship between material culture studies and historical archaeology. The volume is much more, however, presenting a range of essays that demonstrate that the relatively young field of historical archaeology has finally achieved intellectual and methodological maturity as a field distinct from prehistoric archaeology.

Unlike other types of historical material culture studies, archaeological assemblages can be tied to specific people and times. This attribute of archaeological research is used to great advantage by a number of the contributors. In addition, all emphasize the importance of social and cultural context. As Mary Beaudry recounts in her essay, “in the 1970s some United States historical archaeologists were content to let the New Archaeology bandwagon roll on without them; they began working in an experimental, interpretive mode and drew from areas of anthropology and other fields that stress context and meaning and the communicative aspects of culture” (p. 474). These essays indicate how sophisticated interpretive approaches have become. An outstanding example is John Worrell, Myron Stachiv, and David M. Simmons’s elegant discussion of the transformation of New England’s economy and its impacts on nineteenth-century families; the authors easily move between family, community, and regional scales of documentary and material analysis.

While covering topics ranging in scope and scale from the creation of urban landscapes to the social uses of Rockingham ceramics, these essays are united by the authors’ belief that archaeologically derived material culture can be used as a means to interpret the past in a way that is innovative and reflexive. Within this broad framework, the authors emanate from feminist, critical, structuralist, and cognitive theoretical backgrounds. The volume is divided into three main sections, one containing essays related to consumerism, one related to the creation of landscapes, and a third containing essays regarding future directions for the discipline.

Despite the diversity of approaches and theoretical orientations, the volume maintains a sense of unity. Each essay is carefully situated in existing scholarship but each also maintains the importance of situating archaeological interpretations in the social-historical contexts from which they were derived. The meticulous attention to detailed contextual constructions serves as an important unifying characteristic of the book, as exemplified in Paul Mullins’s essay on the impacts of industrialism on regional potters and Ann Smart Martin’s chapter on eighteenth-century consumerism.

The volume will be of greatest interest to scholars grappling with how to integrate diverse sources of historical data—be they documents, materials, oral histories, or ethnographies—into coherent narratives. A number of the chapters deal explicitly with the creation, distribution, and manufacture of materials, while others explore the impacts of industrialization and technological innovation on daily life. It is clear, however, that the “call to action” essays in the volume were written specifically with an archaeological audience in mind. That said, the authors seem to have taken great care to be inclusive in their writing, explaining methodologies and analytical techniques in a clear and concise way. This is particularly evident in chapters by Gerald Kelso on pollen analysis and by Linda Welters, Margaret Ordonez, Kathryn Tarleton, and Joyce Smith on European textiles. Overall, the volume is remarkably even in the style and quality of writing. The essays are finely illustrated with line drawings and black-and-white photographs.