11 - Material culture studies and historical archaeology

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Material culture is ubiquitous in our everyday lives; we are surrounded by it and arguably can do little without it. The proliferation of new material forms is troubling to some, often forming the basis of debates over globalisation, modernity and the contemporary production of locality. But while it is true that people are regularly confronted with new objects and technologies, without question many understand and embrace them and consciously use them in the creation of multiple and often intersecting identities.

As historical archaeology has emerged as a field of study, understanding and interpreting material culture has become more important than simply identifying and classifying excavated objects (cf. Barker and Majewski this volume). In the United Kingdom, historical archaeologists have followed conventions established by archaeologists of earlier periods, typically grouping and describing their finds according to material (e.g. pottery, iron, bone). In North America, where historical archaeology emerged at approximately the same time as archaeologists' redefinition of their field through the introduction of the scientific method and the search for laws of cultural behaviour, the overwhelming emphasis has been upon classification of finds according to functional categories (e.g. ‘personal’, ‘military’, ‘architectural’: see South 1977a). Until the 1990s, many American historical archaeologists were anxious to develop universal, standardised schemes for artefact classification so that artefacts and assemblages could be readily compared among historical sites. As a result, historical archaeologists were slow to accept alternative approaches to studying artefacts, approaches arising from the field of material culture studies (for a review, see Yentsch and Beaudry 2001). Our goal in this chapter is not to review typological and generalising approaches to artefact analysis; rather, we explore recent developments in transdisciplinary, interpretive material culture studies, and the opportunities they offer for material culture analysis in contemporary historical archaeology.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have long recognised the significance of material culture as a means of studying people, and anthropology and archaeology as disciplines both have long traditions of material-culture study. Archaeology has always used material remains to interpret human behaviour, but the interests of sociocultural anthropology during the latter half of the twentieth century shifted away from the focus on material culture that characterised its formative years.