The first comprehensive guide to identifying and interpreting items such as buttons, clasps, buckles, combs, and other items of personal adornment in early American museum collections and archaeological sites.

This volume documents the analysis of excavated historical archaeological collections at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. The corpus provides a rich picture of life and times at this distant outpost of an immense Dutch seaborne empire during the contact period. Representing over three decades of excavation, conservation, and analysis, the book examines ceramics, glass, metal, and other categories of artifacts in their archaeological contexts. An enclosed CD includes a video reconstruction plus a comprehensive catalog and color illustrations of the artifacts in the corpus. The parallels and contrasts this volume reveals will help scholars studying the European expansion period to build a richer comparative picture of colonial material culture.

What people wore in the distant past is often challenging to determine, owing to the disintegration of natural textiles and materials over time. Yet when new findings from archaeological excavations are compared with documentation about early Acadia, a fascinating picture of the society’s early fashions is revealed. Fashioning Acadians is a history of clothesmaking and dress in Acadia from 1650 to 1750. Through the analysis of four Acadian settlements in what is now Nova Scotia, Hilary Doda uncovers the regional fashions and trends that had begun to emerge prior to the violence of the deportations of 1755. Men’s and women’s wardrobes are described from head to toe, from headdresses and hairstyles down to stockings and shoes, along with accessories such as buttons, buckles, and jewellery. While Acadians retained many aspects of the fashion systems of France, New France, and New England, a distinctive Acadian identity can be seen to take shape as their dress evolved and was influenced by other regional styles. Exploring the possibilities of a new methodology for identifying lost or decayed garments, Doda argues that surviving notions, sewing tools, and accessories – the small finds of archaeological sites – are important sources of information not only about domestic life, but about manufacturing processes, dress and textile cultures, and the influence of intersecting fashion systems in colonial spaces. Fashioning Acadians expands our understanding of Acadian lives and their connections to both the Atlantic world of goods and the landscapes of Nova Scotia.

Mary C. Beaudry mines archaeological findings of sewing and needlework to discover what these small traces of female experience reveal about the societies and cultures in which they were used. Beaudry's geographical and chronological scope is broad: she examines sites in the United States and Great Britain, as well as Australia and Canada, and she ranges from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution.The author describes the social and cultural significance of "findings": pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and other sewing accessories and tools. Through the fascinating stories that grow out of these findings, Beaudry shows the extent to which such "small things" were deeply entrenched in the construction of gender, personal identity, and social class.

Throughout the Revolutionary War, Fort Boonesborough was one of the most important and defensively crucial sites on the western frontier. It served not only as a stronghold against the British but also as a sanctuary, land office, and a potential seat of government. Originally meant to be the capital of a new American colony, Fort Boonesborough was thrust into a defensive role by the onset of the Revolutionary War. Post-Revolutionary attempts to develop a town failed and the site was abandoned. Yet Fort Boonesborough lived on in local memory. Boonesborough Unearthed: Frontier Archaeology at a Revolutionary Fort is the result of more than thirty years of research by archaeologist Nancy O'Malley. This groundbreaking book presents new information and fresh insights about Fort Boonesborough and life in frontier Kentucky. O'Malley examines the story of this historical landmark from its founding during a time of war into the nineteenth century. O'Malley also delves into the lives of the settlers who lived there, and explores the Transylvania Company's dashed hopes of forming a fourteenth colony at the fort. This insightful and informative work is a fascinating exploration into Kentucky's frontier past.

Generally individuals in history are known for a particular reason - they somehow influenced history. Very little is known about the ordinary person who lived in the past. But historical archaeologists - through their interpretation of the material culture and historic record - can study the past on an individual level. This brings archaeological interpretation from a micro to a macro level - as opposed to the traditional level of society to community to individual interpretation. The cases presented in this volume engage material culture that is owned or used by a single person and is thus associated with an individual at some point in its uselife. The volume takes bodkins, shoes, beads, cloth, religious items, grave goods, as well as subassemblages from well-defined contexts from New England, the Chesapeake, New Orleans, Hawaii, Spanish colonial America, and London in the pursuit of the individual and the textured interpretation this analytical scale provides. This volume promises to present innovative approaches to a host of archaeological materials, drawing widely on the range of archaeological research for the historical period today. Capitalizing on several topics and research threads with great currency, such as the examination of material culture and interest in various and intersecting lines of identity construction, as well as presenting an international and multiregional approach to these topics, this volume will be of interest to archaeologists, anthropologists, material culture scholars, and social historians interested in a wide variety of time periods and subfields.

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry covers the period 1760 to 1900, a time of dramatic change in the material world as objects shifted from the handmade to the machine made. The revolution in making, and in consuming the things which were made, impacted on lives at every scale –from body to home to workplace to city to nation. Beyond the explosion in technology, scientific knowledge, manufacturing, trade, and museums, changes in class structure, politics, ideology, and morality all acted to transform the world of objects. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Carolyn White is Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte