Although historical archaeologists have generally neglected to apprehend the potent meanings of personal possessions, the field is stirring. All too often, personal artifacts have been subsumed into broader categories of artifacts, their meanings blurred or diminished. Personal artifacts have been assessed as subgroups classified by material, resulting in a muting of the individual significance of particular artifacts and a preference on the part of analysts to deal with objects recovered in large quantities. Personal artifacts have occasioned individual assessment sporadically, and interest in these artifacts has begun to shift from limited interpretation to more interpretive contextual approaches.
I shall never have a professional attitude or remember the exact dates of the Assyrian kings, but I do take an enormous interest in the personal aspects of what archaeology reveals.
—Agatha Christie
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Notes
- 1.
Pope (2004:273) notes there are “numerous initialed wine bottle seals, almost all of which can be identified with planters or shipmasters,” each of which asserted ownership as well as literacy and power (see also Wicks, 1998).
- 2.
Zierden found an eighteenth-century wine bottle with a seal marked “Mbrewton” near the home of wealthy Charleston, South Carolina, merchant Miles Brewton, in rubbish that originated in a locale used by Brewton’s slaves for informal gatherings; the context of the find forces a reading of the seal that links the final use and disposal of the bottle not with its owners but with enslaved African Americans (Zierden, 2001).
- 3.
Sullivan (2004:72) reproduces a painting by a follower of Ludoph de Jonge of a woman sewing by candlelight (1650–1655) with a bodkin tucked under her cap serving temporarily as a hair needle.
- 4.
These symbols were also meaningful to Orangemen. Therefore, in Northern Ireland, the market for such pipes could have been Masons or Orangemen, or both.
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White, C.L., Beaudry, M.C. (2009). Artifacts and Personal Identity. In: Gaimster, D., Majewski, T. (eds) International Handbook of Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-72071-5_12
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