Generally individuals in history are known for a particular reason - they somehow influenced history. Very little is known about the ordinary person who lived in the past. But historical archaeologists - through their interpretation of the material culture and historic record - can study the past on an individual level. This brings archaeological interpretation from a micro to a macro level - as opposed to the traditional level of society to community to individual interpretation.
The cases presented in this volume engage material culture that is owned or used by a single person and is thus associated with an individual at some point in its uselife. The volume takes bodkins, shoes, beads, cloth, religious items, grave goods, as well as subassemblages from well-defined contexts from New England, the Chesapeake, New Orleans, Hawaii, Spanish colonial America, and London in the pursuit of the individual and the textured interpretation this analytical scale provides.
This volume promises to present innovative approaches to a host of archaeological materials, drawing widely on the range of archaeological research for the historical period today. Capitalizing on several topics and research threads with great currency, such as the examination of material culture and interest in various and intersecting lines of identity construction, as well as presenting an international and multiregional approach to these topics, this volume will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material culture scholars, and social historians interested in a wide variety of time periods and subfields.
The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lived
Edited by Carolyn L. White, University of Nevada - Reno The Materiality of Individuality explores the complex interactions between people and objects in the past, offering a fresh approach to the intricate relationships between material culture and individual lives. Gathering together the most recent thinking of both established and emerging scholars, it is one of the first volumes to inspect individuality and materiality from an archaeological perspective. The case studies demonstrate the importance of the approach, linking materiality to the diverse realms of identity, embodiment and corporeality, daily practices, episodic events, and social networks; at the same time, they consider the articulation of the individual with broader cultural patterns and structures.
The volume is organized into three themes: the examination of individuality in collective spaces; the analysis of individual people through the lens of personal objects; and the impact of individuality on site-level analyses. The contributions deliver a combination of theoretical sophistication and rootedness in materials analysis; and their geographical scope ranges broadly, encompassing materials from North America, Europe, and the Pacific. Beads, trench art, toothpicks, shoes, cilices, brooches, stoneware ginger beer bottles, ceramics, and lime plaster open up new avenues in the exploration of individual lives. The analyses tendered in this volume will not only inspire scholars and students of archaeology, but will also appeal to anthropologists, social historians, material culture specialists, museum curators, and art historians.
