Stacey Camp's The Archaeology of Citizenship is firmly situated in an American historical archaeology tradition that focusses on everyday material life in the last half-millennium. Like much of this scholarship, Camp's study focusses on the lives of powerless and marginalized peoples who remain outside the attention of conventional scholarship. The book examines the relationship between material culture and citizenship, focussing on case studies drawn from the United States and the enigma of what it means to be “American” across lines of class, color, and inequality. Those definitions of American citizenship are intimately connected to material consumption, so Camp's book examines how material culture reflects efforts to disenfranchise Americans even as those marginalized citizens pursue the benefits of citizenship. Perhaps the underlying thesis of Camp's study is that disenfranchised groups constructed their own formulations of American citizenship that borrowed from, yet selectively embraced, dominant practices even as they attempted to preserve cultural distinctions.

Camp's study is in the book series The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, thematic volumes that introduce particular dimensions of American historical archaeological thought. Archaeologies of citizenship certainly reach well outside the US, and while Camp outlines broadly relevant theoretical questions on cultural and legal citizenship the book follows the series' focus on US case studies. Camp's study surveys a range of archaeological studies on citizenship, focussing most on her fieldwork on Mexican immigrant laborers at Mount Lowe Resort in southern California. However, the book surveys a host of studies that examine how various people experienced American citizenship, ranging from Japanese American wartime internment camps to working-class immigrants to boarding schools.

Citizenship is often reduced to a legal status that states impose on citizens, but Camp invokes a rich anthropological literature on citizenship that defines it as a social and cultural experience linked to but never determined by dominant ideological notions of citizenry. Camp champions archaeological questions that examine material consumption as a process of consciously or implicitly negotiating citizenship's codes of exclusion and inclusion. This frames material things as mechanisms with which disenfranchised consumers imagine citizenship, acquiring and using mass-produced things in ways that variously stake claims to American citizen privileges, reinterpret those implied privileges, or simply ignore citizenship. Much of this tension in American citizenship in particular, and as is reflected in the book's focus more generally, is in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, a period that witnessed Emancipation, European and Asian immigration, consumer culture's expansion, and racist legal codes restricting citizen rights.

The most sustained case study in the volume is focussed on the experience of Mexican immigrants in the tourism industry in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. After the Mount Lowe Resort and Railway was opened near Los Angeles in the 1890s, Mexican laborers served the tourists who trooped up to the Mount Lowe summit, and those laborers were subjected to “Americanization” efforts on the part of their employers even as state segregation ensured that those Mexicans could never expect to secure the same privileges as the resort's tourists. The archaeological narrative of that experience is told in prosaic things like the matching white-bodied plates and glassware that dominated the Mexican tables in keeping with genteel consumption expectations. The presence of glass preserving jars suggests that the Mexican families were consuming and preserving locally acquired foods, rather than consuming professionally canned foods, and this may reflect the influence of domestic reformers who attempted to mold the laborers' material conditions. The spaces around the modest workers' homes appeared to have been systematically cleaned, but the sanitary conditions provided by the resort grossly violated state standards and certainly contributed to a 1918 typhus outbreak and persistent health problems among the laborers' families.

Framing such archaeological studies in terms of citizenship pushes beyond local material descriptions and instead asks how such patterns collectively ensure persistent inequality. Camp sees archaeological artifacts as a negotiation of citizen rights denied to many Americans, so citizenship looms as a metaphor that underscores the inequalities Americans have routinely tolerated. Consumption codes were equated with citizenship by genteel ideologues, but families like the Mexicans living on Mount Lowe were always assumed to be excluded from such citizenship by virtue of their station along class and color lines. Camp argues that the everyday material lives of disenfranchised Americans are dotted with similar experiences of people who sought modest footholds in American society despite its racism, classism, and exclusionary legal codes. In those experiences, Camp argues, disenfranchised peoples may provide evidence of persistent patterns of exclusion that are the norm in American history, rather than its exception.