Over the last 40 years, material culture studies have gained traction with historians, cultural geographers, archaeologists, and scholars of architecture, art, and the decorative arts. All of them have been seeking to understand human behavior through the material objects with which humans fill their lives. Material goods—their acquisition, use, and meanings—are a vital component of the larger study of consumer behavior.
In Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity, editors Barbara J. Heath, Eleanor E. Breen, and Lori A. Lee have pulled together a robust team of contributors for their well-crafted volume on the archaeology of consumption. In it, “all authors share the goal of understanding the complex relationships between people and objects and the interdependence between consumerism and the rise of modernity” (p. 2). The contributors were chosen to represent a range of theoretical approaches to the study of consumer behavior, including both processual and postprocessual empirical approaches. Many of the authors take a microhistorical approach, studying the interactions of individuals and small groups as a window into cultural practices and actions. Going beyond more traditional approaches of studying consumer behavior, the volume's chapters situate material goods within the Atlantic World's complex cultural, political, and economic contexts.
A number of themes—identity, colonialism, and modernity—run through the book, with these intersecting themes serving to connect the chapters. Pieces by Lauren K. McMillan, Jack Gary, and Elizabeth J. Kellar all deal with the theme of identity. McMillan examines the trade in Dutch and English tobacco pipes in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland as a way to explore changing identities and their relationships to politics. Gary uses tableware with scenes of British universities found at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest to examine the president's identity as founder of the University of Virginia. Kellar explores how consumer choices in tobacco pipes, ceramics, and glass made by free and enslaved laborers in the Danish West Indies served as devices that not only grounded them in shared traditions but differentiated them from white enslavers. Many articles explore themes of colonialism, including how colonizers and the colonized shaped one another's actions with respect to consumerism.
Some authors interrogate one specific type of archaeological material culture: beads (Elliot H. Blair), tobacco pipes (McMillan), cowrie shells (Heath), straight pins (Breen), spindle whorls (Alan D. Armstrong and Mark W. Hauser), and ceramics (Lynsey A. Bates; Lindsay Bloch and Anna S. Agbe-Davies; Jillian E. Galle; Gary). Heath's careful and considered analysis looks at a much-studied artifact, cowrie shells, from a fresh perspective, examining their little-known role as currency in the Atlantic World. Several authors—such as Lee, who examines artifacts used by enslaved Virginians in health-care practices—query groups of related artifacts. Others—such as Paul R. Mullins, who uses documents and the extant landscape as his data—take a less explicitly archaeological approach.
Chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning with Blair’s study of how beads found in seventeenth-century graves at Mission Santa Catalina in Georgia can be used to determine social networks, and ending with Mullins’s examination of how twentieth-century ornamental gardens in Indianapolis were shaped by conceptions of ideal materiality. Four of the 12 research chapters focus specifically on sites located in the mid-Atlantic region, whereas other chapters explore sites in the Caribbean and in the U.S. Southeast and Midwest. Several authors (Bates; Bloch and Agbe-Davies; Galle; Heath; Kellar; Lee; McMillan) take broader geographic perspectives, exploring multiple sites and using comparative approaches to track change through time and regional variability across geographic space. Other contributors (Armstrong and Hauser; Breen; Gary) use data from single archaeological sites, placing those data within the broader contexts of consumer practices and agricultural economies—tobacco, cotton, sugar—specific to the regions under study.
Although some articles focus on Native Americans and middling to wealthy English settlers, many of the articles examine consumer practices within the African diaspora community. Three of the chapters (Bates; Bloch and Agbe-Davies; Galle) use data from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS, https://www.daacs.org/), a web-based archaeological initiative and inventory of information about slavery in the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean, undertaken by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 2000. Bates and Galle both use ceramics to examine access to and participation in the market by the enslaved (Bates in Jamaica, Galle in the broader Atlantic World).
Thoughtful closing essays by Charles R. Cobb and Ann Smart Martin place the volume within overall contexts of consumerism, both as individual actions and as part of larger institutional systems. Material Worlds succeeds in the goals set by the editors, showing the varied relationships of the New World's inhabitants to consumerism and emerging modernity, as well as experimenting with new ways for archaeologists to conceptualize and study consumerism.
