This unique study looks at the role material goods played in shaping our culture. Using archaeological data, probate inventories, and etiquette books, Paul A. Shackel has collected valuable information on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material items which, when analyzed in historical context, reveals how these items have shaped the development of western culture. Specific examples from the Chesapeake area of Maryland show how individuals and groups responded to social and economic crises by using material goods to define power relations, create social hierarchies, and preserve the social order. Shackel argues that, during the pre-industrial era, society's elite introduced hard-to-find material items, like the fork, with rules of etiquette to maintain social distance and stratification. As the Industrial Revolution made material items cheaper and easier to obtain, the non-elite began to adopt regular usage of particular items as part of standardized behavior while the elite sought to maintain their status with newer and different material goods. Focusing on how the spread of capitalism affected various social groups, Shackel pays specific attention to culture and consumption and symbolic qualities of material culture. His analysis incorporates a review of etiquette literature from the late medieval era to provide a global context for regional behavior and material culture.

"In his interdisciplinary review of material culture, Ian Woodward goes beyond synthesis to offer a theoretically innovative reconstruction of the field. It is filled with gems of conceptual insight and empirical discovery. A wonderful book." - Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University "A well-grounded and accessible survey of the burgeoning field of material culture studies for students in sociology and consumption studies. While situating the field within the history of intellectual thought in the broader social sciences, it offers detailed and accessible case studies. These are supplemented by very useful directions for further in-depth reading, making it an excellent undergraduate course companion." - Victor Buchli, University College London Why are i-pods and mobile phones fashion accessories? Why do people spend thousands remodelling their perfectly functional kitchen? Why do people crave shoes or handbags? Is our desire for objects unhealthy, or irrational? Objects have an inescapable hold over us, not just in consumer culture but increasingly in the disciplines that study social relations too. This book offers a systematic overview of the diverse ways of studying the material as culture. Surveying the field of material culture studies through an examination and synthesis of classical and contemporary scholarship on objects, commodities, consumption, and symbolization, this book: introduces the key concepts and approaches in the study of objects and their meanings presents the full sweep of core theory - from Marxist and critical approaches to structuralism and semiotics shows how and why people use objects to perform identity, achieve social status, and narrativize life experiences analyzes everyday domains in which objects are important shows why studying material culture is necessary for understanding the social. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, consumer behaviour studies, design and fashion studies.

The Archaeology in Annapolis project has been one of the most important undertaken by historical archaeologists. Notable for its emphasis on public education and its use of citywide research, it has carried out an innovative analysis of material culture to show how a wide range of social and economic classes residing in Maryland's capital responded over time to a changing world.Annapolis Pasts offers a close look at the trend-setting project. Drawing on more than a decade of study, it provides a cross-section of the substantive and theoretical issues that Archaeology in Annapolis has explored. The volume gathers the work of some of the most innovative authorities in historical archaeology along with that of younger scholars who participated in the project, all of whom demonstrate the cutting-edge approaches that have won it wide respect. And despite differences in theoretical orientations, all the contributors have used Annapolis's archaeological data to interpret the emergence of capitalism as both a dynamic market force and an equally dynamic body of social rules. In studies of sites ranging from eighteenth-century formal gardens to nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American neighborhoods, the book explores the development of modern society as reflected in such examples of material culture as food, printer's type, tableware, and landscape architecture, showing how these features of everyday life were used to reproduce, modify, and resist capitalist society over three centuries. It also investigates subordinated groups in Annapolis -- African Americans, women, the working class -- to provide insight into racism, class structure, and consumer society in the early years of theindustrial revolution.Annapolis Pasts clearly demonstrates that traditional objects of study like Georgian mansions and colonial crafts cannot be understood without considering their complete social and economic milieu. It presents a fascinating mosaic of human activity that shows how archaeologists can interpret the different social, temporal, and theoretical pieces of a city's history, and it provides anthropologists, economists, and historians with an example of the multifaceted effects of capitalism and industrialization in one corner of America.

James Delle has solved a number of problems in Caribbean archaeology with An Archaeology of Social Space. He deals with most of the problems by using historical archaeology, and clearly implicates Ameri canist prehistorians. Although this book is about coffee plantations in the Blue Mountains area of Jamaica, it is actually about the whole Caribbean. Just as it is about all archaeology, not only historical archaeology, it is also a book about colonialism and national inde pendence and how these two enormous events happened in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism. The first issue raised appears to be an academic topic that has come to be known as landscape archaeology. Landscape archaeology considers the planned spaces around living places. The topic is big, comprehensive, and new within historical archaeology. Its fundamen tal insight is that in the early modern and modern worlds everything within view could be made into money. Seeing occurs in space and from 1450, or a little before, everything that could be seen could, potentially, be measured. The measuring-and the accompanying culture of record ing called a scriptural economy-became a way of controlling people in space, for a profit. Dr. Delle thus explores maps, local philosophies of settlement, town dwelling, housing, and the actual condition of plantations and their buildings now, so as to describe coffee-Jamaica from 1790-1860.

"A groundbreaking study in which an engaged archaeology produces nuanced understandings of the past and shapes new understandings of the present. New Philadelphia promotes a rethinking of race relations between African and European Americans."—Claire Smith, President, World Archaeological Congress "Shackel shows in explicit detail how one community archaeology project—dealing with the delicate subject of race—is being put into practice in the American Midwest. This is required reading for archaeologists and historic preservation activists who confront bondage and freedom, and who wrestle with remembrance and representation in real time."—Charles Orser, author of Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation "New Philadelphia examines an historic struggle for social justice and the role for archaeology in anti-racist projects. Shackel's engaging narrative shifts among artifacts, landscapes, and documents to illuminate the lives of African Americans and European Americans in a 19th- and early 20th-century community. This is an important book for archaeologists, historians, and cultural heritage practitioners interested in recovering the past to address pressing issues of the present."—Robert Paynter, co-editor of Lines that Divide and co-director of archaeological research at the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite

In this volume, experts from around the world investigate childhood in the past, showing why it is important to understand childhood, why different cultures construct different ideas of how to rear children, what part children play in the community, and when and why childhood ends.

In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future.