mullins, archaeology of consumption (2011)

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The Archaeologyof ConsumptionPaul R. MullinsDepartment of Anthropology, Indiana UniversityPurdue University, Indianapolis,Indiana 46260; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011. 40:13344

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This articles doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145746

Copyright c 2011 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/11/1021-0133$20.00

Keywords

material culture, consumer culture, capitalism, colonization

Abstract

A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies ofconsumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeol-ogists have dened their scholarly focus as consumption. This reviewexamines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of con-sumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinaryconsumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evi-dence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documen-tary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionallypowerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In abroad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studiesreect theways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods-dominantmeanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.

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Review in Advance first posted online on June 29, 2011. (Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print.)

Changes may still occur before final publication online and in print

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ARCHAEOLOGIES OFCONSUMPTION

In 1995 Miller declared that consumptionscholarship represented a fundamental trans-formation of anthropology, pronouncing thedeath rites for anthropologys latent primi-tivism and arguing that consumption researchcould reasonably reach into every corner ofanthropology. Millers edited collection borewitness to the interdisciplinary literature thathad rapidly emerged since the 1970s, chartingthreads of longstanding interest in materialityand consumption while it stressed the genuineood of consumption research (Miller 1995c).The rich anthropological scholarship and in-terdisciplinary study of consumption that havefollowed Millers condent proclamation con-rm that anthropology is among a wide rangeof disciplines that has embraced consumptionas a conceptual framework.

Yet in the midst of this rich scholarshipthat has subsequently mushroomed in volumeand breadth, archaeology has been strangelysilent even as it has paradoxically producedrich material evidence of consumption patternsacross time and space. Millers thorough 1995collection included virtually no references toarchaeological research at all, which seemssurprising given that archaeology marshals ma-terial data that reect a breadth of consumptionpractices and impacts over millennia. It couldsimply reect that archaeologists may haveseen little that is novel in the turn toward con-sumption and material culture studies from the1970s onward because archaeologists have longexamined the concrete patterns left behind byconsumption. Nevertheless, consumption hasoften loomed in archaeological thought as a log-ical and predictable end point for goods or fora straightforward relationship between supplyand demand, rather than as the focus of analysisexamining how agents shape the meaning ofthings and the social world. Archaeology canproduce a distinctive picture of consumptionthat remains largely unaddressed in the richinterdisciplinary scholarship on consumption,yet much of the potential for an archaeological

perspective on consumption remains largelyuntapped.

A vast range of archaeological studies couldbe construed as studies of consumption, but ar-chaeologists have typically dened consump-tion rather narrowly. For many archaeologists,consumption is simply a moment in the ow ofgoods throughout the social world, a discreteinstance in a goods life that is isolable from itsmanufacture,marketing, and discard.The exactinsights that such consumption moments pro-vide vary among archaeologists, but they tendto revolve around two basic threads. On theone hand, some scholars focus on the structural,material, and ideological processes that delivergoods to consumers, such as marketing net-works, state trade mechanisms, dominant ide-ologies, or underlying cultural and ethnic iden-tities, all of which shape how certain things endupwith specicpeople and are dened inpartic-ular ways. This structural focus tends to embedconsumption in broader systemic inuencesand to examine how consumers get and de-ne things in relatively consistent forms withinparticular social, cultural, and historical con-texts. On the other hand, many other archaeo-logical denitions of consumption have focusedon consumers conscious symbolic agency, re-volving around how people actively dene themeaning of things, often in opposition to dom-inant ideology, the state, or broader economicinterests. This attention to how people denematerial things mirrors earlier anthropologicaltreatments of consumption that resisted eco-nomic determinism (e.g.,Douglas& Isherwood1979), and it remains a key thread in most in-terdisciplinary consumer scholarship.

This paper argues for adopting consump-tion as a conceptual framework that couldencompass any archaeological scholarshipthat examines how people socialize materialgoods (compare Bourdieu 1984; Campbell1987; Cook et al. 1996; Dietler 2010; Miller1987, 1995b; Spencer-Wood 1987; Wurst &McGuire 1999). This conceptual frameworkembraces the agency of consumers and recog-nizes that goods assume meaning in a tensionbetween structural and localized processes that

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cannot be described as being either whollydeterministic or disconnected from consumersymbolism. Consumption dened this wayrevolves around the acquisitionof things to con-rm, display, accent,mask, and imaginewhoweare and who we wish to be, which breaks fromseeing consumption as a largely reective pro-cess that instrumentally displays social status,evokes ethnicity, exhibits gender, or conrmsother essential identities. Instead, consumptionis a continual albeit largely unexpressed processof self-denition and collective identication(Mullins 2004). Nevertheless, structural pro-cesses have a profound effect on consumption,and all consumer agency and symbolism aresignicantly inuenced by dominant structuralprocesses. That tension between widespreadstructural inuences and consumer agency isperhaps the central element uniting a vast rangeof archaeological studies that might reasonablybe called archaeologies of consumption.

Consumption scholarship typically focuseson commodity goods and documents increasingreliance on goods manufactured by others, butarchaeologies of consumption are not neces-sarily restricted simply to a slice of the world inthe last half millennium. Because consumptionscholarship revolves around the agency of con-sumers and the ways people socialize goods, thearchaeological implications inevitably reachoutside narrowly dened modern commodityexchange; therefore, a consumption frameworkoffers possible insights for scholars workingin almost any period. Mass consumption wasa staple of the classical Mediterranean world,for instance, and many complex societies havedeveloped sophisticated systems for deliveryof standardized goods across vast spaces. Yetfor all the similarities between contemporaryglobalization and symbolic consumer agencyacross millennia, there remain some radicaldistinctions between such contexts and thecontemporaryworld.The process of socializinggoods and dening them in a range of contex-tually specic ways is the heart of consumptionscholarship and may well be a pertinent fram-ing mechanism for archaeologists working inalmost any context, but archaeology provides a

critical mechanism to recognize the profoundcommonalities as well as the wide variation inhow goods have been consumed across time.

TRADE, ACCULTURATION, ANDCONSUMER AGENCY

Amassive volume of twentieth-century archae-ological scholarship examined trade patternsthroughout the world. However, that worktended to focus on the methodological insightsthat could be culled from trade goods or theinsight such goods provided into exchangerelationships between states or specic man-ufacturing locations, and little of this workexamined how such goods were used when ob-tained (e.g., Adams 1976, Baugher-Perlin 1982,Bell 1947). During the time of World WarII, for instance, American prehistorians beganexamining trade networks in regions such asthe American Southeast. In 1947, Robert E.Bell (1947) surveyed artifacts excavated fromthe SpiroMound site since 1916 and concludedthat widespread trade relationships existed(p. 181), but most of his analysis revolvedaround the sources of natural stone, shell, andcopper and had nothing to say about the useof such goods. In 1954, Kenneth Kidd (1954)turned attention to European artifacts foundon contact-period American sites, focusingon their methodological potential to datethose contexts, but much as Bell had done ina prehistoric context Kidd did not examineindigenous consumption of European goods.

Kidd was followed by many moreAmerican archaeologists who viewed Eu-ropean trade goods primarily as mechanismsto date contact-period contexts. The mostthorough of these studies was perhaps GeorgeIrving Quimbys (1966) study of Europeantrade goods in theGreat Lakes region. Quimbydevoted compulsively detailed attention to theevidence that could be used to date trade goodsand outline chronologies for the Great Lakesover a broad swath of the historic period, and heprovided exceptionally detailed descriptions ofthe range of objects in particular assemblagesas well as primary documentary evidence.

www.annualreviews.org The Archaeology of Consumption 135


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Quimby hoped to outline basic patterns intrade overmore than 200 years and link those tocultural transformations, though his attentionwas on changes in indigenous cultures and notamong Europeans. His analysis of the effect ofindigenous consumption of European goodslent them considerable power over nativeconsumers and tended not to contemplateindigenous peoples complicated symbolismfor such things. Quimby painted a picture ofindigenous consumers gradually discardingdistinctive craft goods for European trade com-modities, which rendered them a Pan-Indianculture by the late eighteenth century. ForQuimby andmany other scholars, consumptionwas not necessarily a research question becausemany fundamental dimensions of consumptionresearch remained unanswered, including arti-fact identication, cultural chronologies, tradenetworks, and sociopolitical relationships. Yetthey almost universally saw colonialism ashaving erased indigenous culture, so questionsof consumer agency or the possible indigenousimpact on Europeans vision of materialitywere never seriously contemplated.

The implication that indigenous peopleswere more or less monolithically acculturatedthrough the consumption of European goodswas the explicit or implicit focus of most ofthis scholarship into the 1970s. In 1967, for in-stance, John Witthoft (1967) recognized thatglass beads were especially sensitive datingmechanisms for fur tradeera sites in the east-ern United States because the technologies andstyles of beads changed relatively rapidly. Herealized that many local contexts revealed dis-tinctive consumptionpatterns that shed light onthe complexities of the fur trade era throughoutthe American colonies. For example, aroundJamestown,Virginia, he noted that local indige-nous sites contained dense quantities of beads,yet nearly none were found in the Europeancontexts in Jamestown itself, and he acknowl-edged that the ceramics and clay pipes that lit-tered Jamestown were almost never found onlocal indigenous sites. YetWitthoft painted thecontact between Europeans and natives largelyin terms of European expansion and conquest

and indigenous disintegration and material de-pendency, failing to see indigenous agency orcomplicating colonial domination.

Archaeologies of colonial encounter con-tinue to examine the ways in which indigenousand European materialities reect the dramaticsocial, economic, and political transformationsaccompanying cultural contact. Increasingly,however, these studies of colonial contact pressfor a clear focus on indigenous agency, and thatmission is often addressed through analyzingthe ways local consumers actively negotiatethe material and social transformations cham-pioned by colonizers. For instance, Dietlers(2005) study of the early Iron Age WesternMediterranean examines consumption as amechanism to illuminate how structures ofcolonial dependency and domination weregradually created, focusing on the role ofmaterial objects in this process (pp. 6162).European commodities have long been viewedas mechanisms of colonial domination, butDietler joins a host of scholars who acknowl-edge the indigenous inuence on colonizersand stress the socially, historically, and cultur-ally specic contexts that shape consumption.Dietler (2005) advocates abandoning teleo-logical assumptions of inevitability that haveunderlain previous approaches to coloniza-tion, hoping to stress that colonization wasan active process of creative appropriation,manipulation, and transformation played outby individuals and social groups with a varietyof competing interests and strategies of actionembedded in local political relations, culturalperceptions, and cosmologies (pp. 6263).Dietler argues that scholars examining colo-nialisms social and cultural entanglementsshould focus on the concrete processes throughwhich some material goods and practices wereaccepted by indigenous peoples and othermaterial goods and practices turned into pointsof contestation. For Early Iron Age westernEurope, Dietler argues that local communitieswere discriminating against consumers whoembraced some goods of Greek colonizers,typically consuming massive quantities of wineand drinkingmaterial goods but rejectingmany

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other goods. Dietler (2005, p. 57) indicatesthat the indigenous demand for importedMediterranean trade goods was quite region-ally distinctive, a conclusion that underscoresthe shortcomings of mechanistic models ofcolonization that distinguish between cores andperipheries and hazard ignoring all the culturaland historical contingencies of colonization.Increasingly more archaeological studies areexamining colonization and the concrete pro-cesses of transformation across a wide rangeof colonial contacts, and Dietler advocates afocus on four fundamental elements: context ofconsumption (i.e., where objects are found, thecontexts in which they are recovered); patternsof association (i.e., goods associated with eachother); relative quantitative representationwithin sites and across regions; and spatialdistribution of specic goods (i.e., examiningtheir distribution patterns across space).

Schucany (2005) examines such a contactmoment in Late Iron Age Switzerland, assess-ing the changes in foodways material goodsand practices introduced by the Romans. In thepost-Roman period, the regional ceramics as-semblages included a range ofRoman forms notfound in earlier assemblages, but earlier formsdid not disappear. The process of Romaniza-tion occurred in different degrees depending onthe particular vessel form, and Schucany indi-cates that some indigenous vessel forms actu-ally increased in quantities after a period of ini-tial consumption of comparable Roman forms.She concludes that the selective integration ofRoman forms reveals that Romans made an ef-fort to set local tables with a ceramic assem-blage much like that found in contemporaryItaly, but some local foodways were retained orpersisted using Roman vessels. Much as Dietlerargues, documenting the specic ways in whichsuch colonial material and social practices wereadopted is one of the key contributions of anarchaeology of colonization and consumption.

Scaramelli & Scaramelli (2005) examinesimilar processes of indigenous appropria-tion of Western material goods in colo-nial Venezuela, probing how the introductionof commodities into existing social practices

created signicant transformations in thosepractices. Scaramelli & Scaramelli focus onhow indigenous peoples used European goods,painting a picture that is incorporative evenas such consumption simultaneously repro-duced and perhaps accentuated existing cul-tural practices. They examine the ways gift-giving worked in the Middle Orinoco regionof Venezuela, where missionaries hoped to se-cure indigenous alliances by providing goodsfor which they perceived a native demand. Oneclass of goods missionaries provided was alco-hol, which was used commonly in feasts andritual contexts, but interjecting externally pro-duced alcohol unseated existing production andconsumption systems. Prior to colonization,drink had been produced by indigenous do-mestic units to enhance a familys prestige,but the introduction of imported spirits com-pelled hosts to obtain them through exchange,which forced increasing reliance on the produc-tion of cash crops and increased debt amongindigenous consumers. This shift rendereddrink a commoditya product that had to bebought, rather than produced, so even thoughEuropean alcohol was consumed within exist-ing consumer contexts it led to dependencyand exploitation (Scaramelli&Scaramelli 2005,p. 150). However, they argue that the con-sumption of European beads and bodily adorn-ment did not lead to similar consequences.Much as with drink, missionaries rapidly in-troduced beads and dress to indigenous peo-ples as colonizing mechanisms, but Scaramelli& Scaramelli argue that European dress in-stead built on existing systems of adornmentand at least initially enhanced those traditionalvalues. Archaeological evidence reveals thatindigenous consumers rapidly incorporatedEuropean beads into native social life, addingto as well as replacing precontact bead formsand appearing in greater quantities than anyotherEuropean goods. Scaramelli&Scaramelli(2005, p. 157) suggest that beads were one classof goods that continued and embellished in-digenous value systems that stressed the powersembedded in shiny objects such as quartz crys-tals, and the European use of beads in items



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such as rosaries may have reinforced their pow-ers in the eyes of indigenous people. Scaramelli& Scaramelli (2005, p. 157) argue that colo-nization was a period of interaction in whichindigenous values dictated the adoption of for-eign goods, which were incorporated alongsidemore traditional means of expressing value(p. 157).

Many recent consumption studies paintcomplex pictures of cultural transformation andthe ways local peoples dene mass-producedthings in opposition to colonizers. For instance,Harrisons (2007) study of culture contact innorthwest Australia acknowledges that manyAboriginal people quite widely embracedEuropean material culture after the regionsrelatively late contact in the nal quarterof the nineteenth century. Harrison arguesthat on the one hand Aboriginal laborers andWhite pastoralists living alongside them on theAustralian frontier did share very similarmaterial assemblages; on the other hand,such apparent similarities were accented bysporadic White racist violence, and Aboriginalassemblages often contained goods that Har-rison argues reected rebellion against Whitedomination. For instance, Harrison notes thatporcelain insulators were sometimes intk-napped in open deance of laws against usingthe telegraph line insulators for such purposes.Harrison argues that intknapping the insula-tors and depositing debitage in public view wasone modest but meaningful indication that ap-parent material similarities concealed complextensions. Harrison suggests that assemblagesare generally quite similar, but the idiosyn-cratic artifacts such as the insulators revealambiguities within a complicated relationship.

Much of the archaeological study of con-sumption has focused on the relationshipbetween broader systemic inuences and localindigenous consumption, probing globaliza-tion in the classical and prehistoric worldsand illuminating the tension between localand systemic materialities. Vives-Fernandez(2008), for instance, examines the relationshipbetween Phoenicians and indigenous Iberiansbetween the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. to

outline the hybridization of cultural practicebetween local communities and colonial so-cieties. Vives-Fernandez argues that materialculture reveals local systems of signicance,focusing on how local consumers selected andexchanged Phoenician import goods on thebasis of local social, political, and materialconditions. In northern Iberia, for instance,Vives-Fernandez argues that imported itemssuch as wine were highly desired because ofthe social advantages that their possession,exchange, and consumption provided to cer-tain indigenous groups. The Phoenician winewas consumed in hand-modeled indigenousvessels, so in many ways the imported winewas, in Vives-Fernandezs view, no longerPhoenician (p. 256). He concludes thatpeoples world visions are rarely unseated bythe mere presence of colonial goods and thatdifferent imported and indigenous goods alikewere dened in particular ways that reect theunique circumstances of the local context.

Much of the recent archaeological analysisof consumption has focused on foodways,which are culturally distinctive performancesof status and social relations, and food isclosely linked to consumers agency over thesymbolism of their own bodies. Miracle &Milners (2002) collection ambitiously tacklesthe sociality of food, which they dene asfocusing on the social contexts and processesand food preparation, storage, eating, and dis-posal (p. 4). The case studies in their collectionspan a vast range of temporal and culturalcontexts and consciously aim to reach outsidecomplex societies alone. One central threadof their picture of food consumption revolvesaround the relationship between status, power,social hierarchies, and food. Grant (2002), forinstance, examines the relationship betweenmeat consumption and status hierarchies inthe absence of written records. Using zooar-chaeological data from Britain, Grant arguesthat pork consumption is related to high statusacross a wide span of time from prehistorythrough the medieval period on the basis ofthe correlation of pork remains with importedluxury goods and large structures. In the

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medieval period, deer consumption was moreclosely associated with status because access todeer hunting was regulated by the aristocracy.

McCormick (2002) raises the question ofhow early societies dealt with the distributionand consumption of large animals, which pro-duced signicant amounts of perishable meatthat would need to be rapidly consumed orpreserved. Retail markets can distribute vastamounts of meat from freshly slaughtered ani-mals, but in the absence of such markets largeranimals require quite distinctive distributiontechniques. McCormick argues that in me-dieval Ireland early cattle likely producednearly400 pounds of edible meat, but the cost ofsalt curing such a large amount of meat wouldhave been prohibitively expensive, and thereare no references to smoking meats in pe-riod documentary sources. Consequently, Mc-Cormick argues that the medieval Irish wouldhave eaten most meat fresh and required somesystematic social mechanisms for distribut-ing large amounts of meat for consumption.Formal communal feasting was one mecha-nism through which a community of vassalsentertained their lord and neighbors in sea-sonal feasts that fell when excess livestockwere slaughtered. McCormick argues that cutsof meat were distributed hierarchically, withchoice cuts being formally distributed to peopleof highest status. Archaeological assemblagesmake it very difcult to identify feasting out-side of unusual pit features. McCormick exam-ined an island noble site reaching back to theeighth century, hypothesizing that this isolatedelite context should contain only higher statuscuts because lower-status neighbors would nothave been on the island. However, because hefound a full rangeof elements represented in thearchaeological assemblage, McCormick con-cludes that the site indicates people of differentstatuses came to the island, probably to con-sume food in cross-status feasts. McCormickargues that in a hierarchical society communi-ties establish structuralmechanisms to consumesuch foods, with the medieval Irish creating asystem of enforced hospitality feasting acrossstatus lines.

The archaeological evidence for feast con-sumption has been the focus of scholars inother regions as well. For example, a moundat the Mississippian center Cahokia is inter-preted as evidence of public ritual and feast-ing by Kelly (2001, p. 351) on the basis of lowtaxonomic diversity, high-yield meat species,bulk cuts and preparation, and the absence ofbutchering discards. Such feasts moved trib-ute goods including food to a center such asCahokia, where chiefs hosted subjects and re-distributed the tribute goods. Prominent lin-eages likely consolidated their statuses throughthe repetition of such feasts over time, and trib-ute groups shared in the redistributionof goods,serving a socially integrative function.

CONSUMPTION AND THEGEORGIAN REVOLUTION

Historical archaeologists have closely studiedthe dramatic shifts in Anglo-American materialconsumption that occurred in the eighteenthcentury, a transformation that Deetz (1996)referred to as the Georgian Revolution. Thefocus on the degree to which mass-producedgoods were effectively incorporative is debatedin historical archaeology in terms similarto those found in classical and prehistoricconsumption studies that probe the agencyof indigenous consumers. Some historicalarchaeologists have painted newly emergentcommodities as ideological mechanisms distin-guishing elite from the masses. For instance,in his study of consumption in Annapolis,Maryland, Shackel (1992) argues that duringeconomic crisesin particular the 1720s,1760s, and 1770sthe elite in Annapolisaltered their consumption patterns and beganto acquire new and different types of goods tosymbolically differentiate themselves from thelower groups (p. 73). Shackel (1993) arguesthat when elite were threatened in some waythey used novelmaterial culture to demonstratetheir power publicly in new forms that wouldreestablish gentry dominance (compare Good-win 1999). This perspective views Georgianmaterialism as an instrumental mechanism that



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the gentry wielded to solidify and rationalizetheir position because it distanced them fromtheir middling neighbors. Shackel (1992)focused on material goods that segment andcreate a disciplined behavior (p. 78), includingcutlery sets, matching ceramics, formal diningitems (e.g., tureens), and bodily maintenancegoods (e.g., hair brushes). These materialforms were part of what Shackel characterizesas a new modern discipline, sets of rules thatstandardized behaviors. Shackel found thatsuch goods appeared in the probate inventoriesof modest and afuent Annapolitan householdsalike, but the wealthiest Annapolitans hadsignicantly higher percentages of these goods(compare Martin 1989). In Shackels (1992)analysis, Georgianmaterial culture was amech-anism the gentry used to eradicate medievalcommunity social values and to foster a newform of social discipline and material culturethat would create social differences betweenthemselves and the lower classes (p. 81).

Martins (1996) analysis of the transitiontoward eighteenth-century mass consumptionexamines behavioral disciplines linked to newcommodities, especially teawares. Martin sug-gests that practices such as tea drinking or tabledisciplines involved behavioral knowledge aswell as the economic ability to acquire specicmaterial forms, so they distinguished gentryconsumers who knew such rules. Nevertheless,those dominant practices were negotiatedin distinctive ways in specic contexts, andtea drinking rapidly became a cross-classphenomenon in rural and urban settingsalike. Martin (1994) argues for a basic dividebetween rural and urban ceramic marketingand consumption, indicating that the ur-ban life-stylegreat dinners, teas, and cardpartiesplaced a greater emphasis on enter-taining and social display (p. 180). In the caseof rural Virginians, Martin found some favorfor durable goods such as pewter over break-ables such as ceramic vessels, even among ruralgentry. Urban elite, in contrast, devoted moreexpense to ceramic purchases, which probablyreects the consumption of matching sets.However, by the 1770s, teaware was available

in an extensive range of prices, so the formerlyexclusive tea ceremony did not capture themany settings in which tea was being consumedacross a wide range of class and regional divides.Cups and saucers were themost common vesselforms sold by Americanmarketers, whichmadeit possible for consumers to purchase individualvessels and assemble sets of various sizes.

Martins divide between country and cityconsumers is supported by a wealth of histor-ical archaeology that erodes facile distinctionsbetween backward rural consumers and stylishurbanites and complicates easy class divisions.For instance, Crass and colleagues (1999) arguethat colonial Carolina backcountry householdsrapidly embraced most of the materiality ofgentility and were not markedly different fromconsumers in Charleston, which was among themost stylish American cities. Chinese porcelainoccurred more commonly on the Charlestonsite examined by this study, but it was nev-ertheless present on backcountry sites datingto the early 1750s, indicating that farm fam-ilies invested in enough tea equipage to signaltheir knowledge to visitors of the rened ways(Crass et al. 1999, p. 23). Crass et al. suggestthat backcountry households acknowledged so-cial and material distinctions between them-selves and their urban peers, but they believethat backcountry consumers were still aware offashions in major American cities and Londonitself. They conclude that notions of rene-ment began almost immediately to affect Back-country material culture starting in the earlyto mid-eighteenth century as yeoman farm-ers and their families tried to create a familiarworld on the edge of an imperial system thatwasitself undergoing rapid and irreversible change(Crass et al. 1999, pp. 2728).

Numerous archaeological studies focus onconsumer agency that actively negotiates dom-inant material styles. For example, Hodges(2007) study of a circa 17201775 site inNewport, Rhode Island, complicates statusby examining how middling households se-lectively appropriated genteel material prac-tices. She avoids dening status boundariesbetween collectives, instead favoring a highly

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contextual notion of consumer tastes that arenot reliant on or reacting against dominant no-tions of material style. For instance, Hodgefound that her assemblage included no match-ing ceramics or vessels associated with en-tertaining, instead favoring colorfully deco-rated tin-glazed earthenwares alongside pewter(Hodge 2007, p. 438). This did not reproduceGeorgian dining styles, but the household em-braced other Georgian forms, including punchand tea drinking. Hodge argues that this nd-ing reects a taste for fashionable drinkingover formal dining, suggesting that this piece-meal adoption of dominant practices illustratesconsumer agency that did not simply reproducegentry materialism.

CONSUMPTION ALONGTHE COLOR LINE

Recent archaeological scholarship focused ongroups such as the overseasChinese andAfricanAmericans has acknowledged the complicatedeffects of commodity consumption across linesof difference and probed the ways variousgroups embraced as well as resisted consumerculture. Overseas Chinese archaeologists havefocused on the material distinctions of Chineseimmigrant assemblages, which often includemany Chinese material goods, so the materialrecord appears to paint Chinese immigrants asexcluding themselves from consumer culture.In 1980, for instance, Langenwalter examineda circa 18601885 Chinese store assemblagefrom California and found that it was com-posed almost entirely of Chinese ceramics anddominated by foods prepared using traditionalChinese butchery and cooking techniques.Sounding a note on acculturation found inmany other pre-1980s studies of consumption,Langenwalter (1980) concluded that relativelylittle assimilation of culture traits can be seen inthe subsistence and table ware refuse (p. 109).Greenwood (1980) likewise found that aboutthree-quarters of the artifacts from a Californiasite were of Chinese origin, and the presenceof Chinese rice bowls and brown stonewarevessels indicated that the residents were

maintaining their Chinese foodways. She con-cluded that most artifacts support the propo-sition that. . .adults maintained the traditional,homeland patterns in the choice, preparation,and service of food, use of opium and herbalmedicinals, and native games (p. 115).

Subsequent studies have focused more onthe complex negotiations in consumer pat-terns. Praetzellis & Praetzellis (2001, p. 649)examine the life of overseas immigrant YeeAh Tye to illustrate how overseas Chinese ne-gotiated mainstream social codes, reproducedcultural traditions, and actively manipulatedboth. Yee arrived in California in 1852 andbecame a Sacramento entrepreneur beforemoving to gold-mining country in the SierraNevada in the 1890s. The goods he sold toChinese miners were almost universally ofAsian manufacture, but Yee himself consumedtypical genteel commodities. From the minersperspective, the Asian goods may have main-tained cultural traditions; for Yee, the minersdistinctions would have accented his suitabilityto be admitted to genteel circles that normallyexcluded the Chinese.

A variety of material goods and consump-tion patterns reproduced a rich range of ethnicidentities. For instance, Praetzellis (2004)documents a novel material good that blurredthe ideological boundary between Orientand Occident in ways that were attractive tomany non-Chinese consumers. A circa 1900assemblage from an Irish-American householdincluded a Rockingham-glazed teapot with aRebekah at the Well motif, a popular designthat invoked the biblical story of Rebekah toportray Victorians ideological notion of truewomanhood (p. 258). However, the Oaklandteapot featured a Chinese man in place of thebiblical Rebekah, breaking from conventionalgender and racial ideologies. The same as-semblage also included Asian ceramics thatsuggest it was intentionally invoking Orientalsymbolism. One 1890s White West Oaklandassemblage included ve Japanese porcelainvessels alongside a Chinese porcelain vesseland an Oriental motif ware that was likely froman art pottery, and the absence of wear on the



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Japanese vessels suggests they were being dis-played (Mullins 2001, p. 173). Such display ofexotic goods was common in Victorian homesin which these alien objects tapped into culturaldifference, symbolized American imperialism,and criticized mass production by displayingthe craft products of colonized peoples.

Many archaeological studies examine howconsumers negotiated broad inequality throughdistinctive material tactics. For example, a late-nineteenth-century Annapolis, Maryland, as-semblage reects that some African Americanhouseholds consumed brand goods to circum-vent such local racism (Mullins 1999a). Around1892, the household of Maria Maynard lleda small cellar with household refuse that in-cluded 79 bottles, and every embossed bottlewas from a nationally advertised brand and didnot include any localmarketers (Mullins 1999b,p. 25). The assemblage included multiple ves-sels of several brands, suggesting the householdfavored brands and had allegiance to particu-lar brands. This allegiance to goods sealed out-side the control of local White marketers andpriced by national producers evaded local mar-ketplace racism (compare Cohen 2003). SomeAfrican American brand allegiances reectedtheir commitment to securing genteel standingbecause much African American material cul-ture reproducedVictorianmaterial codes. AfterMarias husband John had died in 1875, a pro-bate inventory of their home included stylishdecorative furnishings such as mahogany chairsin a room decorated with chromolithographsand gurines (Mullins 1999b, p. 29).

ARCHAEOLOGIES OFCONSUMPTION

In the face of a vast range of scholars examiningconsumption and materiality, archaeologists

may wonder how to stake a distinctive contri-bution to consumption scholarship. Majewski& Schiffer (2009) champion a rigorouslyinterdisciplinary and ambitious archaeologyof consumption that recognizes archaeologysmethodological sophistication and well-established techniques for interpretingmaterialthings in specic social, cultural, and historicalcontexts. Majewski & Schiffer (2009, p. 192)advocate a modern material culture studies thatfocuses on consumerism and reaches beyondconsumption alone to all aspects of consumersocietiespolitical, religious, educational,legal, leisure, economic, aesthetic, and so on(p. 192). Although such a consumerist schol-arship would likely focus on the wide range ofways consumer societies have developed sincethe eighteenth century, Majewski & Schiffersuggest such a scholarship has no especiallyconcrete temporal or spatial boundaries. Theysee archaeologys essential insight to be itsattention to comparative evidence of consump-tion across space and time, and they recognizethat archaeology provides consumption schol-ars with methodological rigor to examine con-crete material objects, which are surprisinglyignored in consumer research. Indeed, that at-tention to concrete material things may be theodd lacuna in consumption scholarship, whichrevolves around materiality yet counterintu-itively ignores the rigorous and ne-grainedattention to material things that is archae-ologys focus. A rigorously interdisciplinaryand ambitious archaeology of consumptionprovides the intellectual and methodologicalinsight to document concrete consumer pat-terns, embed those in broader structural andcultural inuences, and underscore the richrange of ways consumers negotiate dominantinuences and socialize goods in distinctiveways.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author is not aware of any afliations, memberships, funding, or nancial holdings that mightbe perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

142 Mullins


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