Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology

Historical archaeology has made great strides during the last two decades. Early archaeological reports were dominated by descriptions of features and artifacts, while research on artifacts was concentrated on studies of topology, technology, and chronology. Site reports from the 1960s and 1970s commonly expressed faith in the potential artifacts had for aiding in the identifying socioeconomic status differences and for understanding the relationships be­ tween the social classes in terms of their material culture. An emphasis was placed on the presence or absence of porcelain or teaware as an indication of social status. These were typical features in site reports written just a few years ago. During this same period, advances were being made in the study of food bone as archaeologists moved away from bone counts to minimal animal counts and then on to the costs of various cuts of meat. Within the last five years our ability to address questions of the rela­ tionship between material culture and socioeconomic status has greatly ex­ panded. The essays in this volume present efforts toward measuring expendi­ ture and consumption patterns represented by commonly recovered artifacts and food bone. These patterns of consumption are examined in conjunction with evidence from documentary sources that provide information on occupa­ tions, wealth levels, and ethnic affiliations of those that did the consuming. One of the refreshing aspects of these papers is that the authors are not afraid of documents, and their use of them is not limited to a role of confirmation.

1: Introduction. - I: Eighteenth- through Early Nineteenth-Century Commercial Agricultural Economy. - 2: Ceramics as Indicators of Status and Class in Eighteenth-Century New York. - 3: Consumer Choices in White Ceramics: A Comparison of Eleven Early Nineteenth-Century Sites. - 4: Threshold of Affordability: Assessing Fish Remains for Socioeconomics. - 5: Vertebrate Fauna and Socioeconomic Status. - 6: Plantation Status and Consumer Choice: A Materialist Framework for Historical Archaeology. - II: Mid-Nineteenth Century Commerce and Industrialization. - 7: Socioeconomic Variation in a Late Antebellum Southern Town: The View from Archaeological and Documentary Sources. - 8: Status Variation in Antebellum Alexandria: An Archaeological Study of Ceramic Tableware. - 9: Status Indicators: Another Strategy for Interpretation of Settlement Pattern in a Nineteenth-Century Industrial Village. - 10: The Use of Converging Lines of Evidence for Determining Socioeconomic Status. - 11: Nineteenth-Century Households and Consumer Behavior in Wilmington, Delaware. - 12: Adapting to Factory and City: Illustrations from the Industrialization and Urbanization of Paterson, New Jersey. - III: Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Urban Sites. - 13: Working-Class Detroit: Late Victorian Consumer Choices and Status. - 14: Miller s Indices and Consumer-Choice Profiles: Status-Related Behaviors and White Ceramics. - 15: Factors Influencing Consumer Behavior in Turn-of-the-Century Phoenix, Arizona. - 16: Gravestones: Reflectors of Ethnicity or Class? . - IV: Epilogue: Middle-Range Theory in Historical Archaeology.