<p> This thesis examines the ceramics, both full-scale and toy, and dolls recovered from the Industrial School for Girls (1859-1941) in Dorchester, MA, in order to assess the ways in which the Managers who ran the School used material culture to enculturate the girls, as well as how the girls used material culture to shape their own identities. This site provides a unique opportunity to study the archaeology of a single-gender, and predominately single-class and single-age. The Industrial School for Girls, as an institution whose aim was to better the lives of poor girls and give them economic opportunities, as well as to create a better class of domestic servants, embodies the complicated moralities of Victorian domesticity, gentility, and womanhood. Analysis of the function and style of adult and doll scale ceramic vessels indicates the control that the Managers had over the School&rsquo;s material culture and how it was used to expose the girls to the proper goods that would help shape them into successful and well-behaved domestic servants. The ceramic vessels represented some of the forms required by the etiquette of the time to set a proper dining table, and many of them exhibit Gothic and floral motifs, representing purity and morality in the home. These items suggest that the Managers were making an effort to include the material culture of a proper Victorian home in order to raise their girls to be comfortable in and enculturated to that environment. The porcelain dolls recovered from the site, in both their number and condition, hint at some amount of material self-fashioning among the girls, suggesting that perhaps not all of their experiences were pleasant ones. The fact that so many dolls were discarded in the privy suggests that there was some manner of discontent among the girls that was taken out on their own dolls or the dolls of others.</p><p>

<p> Historic tenant farmsteads are often thought to be redundant archaeological resources because of their limited temporal range and function which acts to limit the diversity of their archaeological assemblages. However, work has not been done that confirms this equivalence, and archaeologists often write off tenant farmsteads as being too modern or too disturbed to warrant investigation. This is a problematic approach as tenant farmsteads are quickly eroding from the American landscape and a representative sample of sites need to be investigated and preserved before they&rsquo;re gone. This thesis tests different sampling strategies and field methods that may allow for the efficient investigation of tenant farmsteads without jeopardizing historical knowledge. The results show that the sites studied in this thesis are in fact redundant and a number of different methods can be used to investigate them in a much more efficient manner.</p><p>