Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

<p> During the mid-to-late 19th century, Roxbury, Massachusetts experienced a dramatic change from a rural farming area to a vibrant, working-class, and predominantly-immigrant urban community. This new demographic bloomed during America&rsquo;s industrial age, a time in which hundreds of new mass-produced goods flooded consumer markets. This thesis explores the relationship between working-class consumption patterns and historic advertising in 19th-century Roxbury, Massachusetts. It assesses the significance of advertising within households and the community by comparing advertisements from the <i> Roxbury Gazette</i> and <i>South End Advertiser</i> with archaeological material from the Tremont Street and Elmwood Court Housing sites, excavated in the late 1970s, to determine the degree of correlation between the two sources. Separately, the archaeological and advertising materials highlight different facets of daily life for the residents of this neighborhood. When combined, however, these two distinct data sets provide a more holistic snapshot of household life and consumer choice. Specifically, I examine the relationship between advertisers and consumers and how tangible goods served as a medium of communication for values, social expectations, and individual and group identities. </p><p> Ultimately, this study found that there is little direct overlap between the material record from the Southwest Corridor excavations and the historic <i> Roxbury Gazette</i> advertisements. The most prevalent types of advertisements from an 1861-1898 <i>Roxbury Gazette</i> sample largely did not overlap with the highest artifact type concentrations from the Southwest Corridor excavations. This disconnect may be the result of internal factors, including lack of purchases or extended use lives for certain objects. External factors for disconnect include archaeological deposition patterns, as well as the ways in which the archaeological and advertising data is categorized for analysis. Most importantly, this study emphasizes that the lives of Tremont Street and Elmwood Court&rsquo;s residents cannot be neatly summed up by the materials they discarded. Only through the consideration of material culture, documentary resources, and other historic information can we begin to understand the experiences these individuals endured.</p>

<p> Abstract not available.</p>

<p> Historical investigations of the Social Hygiene Movement (1890s-1930s) tend to focus on the urban origins of the concerns that sparked much of the resulting reform efforts. Furthermore, archaeological investigations that address artifacts associated with the Social Hygiene Movement often focus on either an urban or a rural setting, and usually only examine a single aspect of the movement rather than considering the impact of the totality of the movement&rsquo;s ideology on American consumer behaviors. As a result, little is known about the materialization of the Social Hygiene Movement in the archaeological record and the differential appearance of associated artifacts at urban relative to rural sites. This project seeks to define Social Hygiene Movementassociated artifact types and undertake a comparative analysis of the occurrence of these artifacts at two urban and four rural sites in the state of Colorado in an effort to better understand the early material expressions of the movement in rural regions of the United States. This study was designed to 1) explore the assumption that artifacts related to health, hygiene, and cleanliness should appear at rural sites later than at urban sites, 2) determine if the Social Hygiene Movement manifested differently in rural regions relative to urban areas as evidenced in the archaeological record by types of consumer products purchased, and 3) if differences do exist, provide information about what other contextual and ideological factors may have caused the divergence. This project concludes that rural residents were likely aware of the emerging health, hygiene, and cleanliness ideals from nearly the beginning of the Social Hygiene Movement.</p><p> However, differences in the frequency and types of products purchased suggest that consumer choices were informed by a shared system of rural values developed in opposition to the hegemonic rhetoric of Progressive Era reformers. The evidence presented in this study indicates that rural residents did not alter their hygienic practices and consumer behaviors to be in-line with urban standards, but rather selected the ideological aspects of the SHM that reinforced their rural identities and incorporated the products and practices which complemented their daily realities and social norms. The results highlight the importance of utilizing material studies in conjunction with historical research to achieve more nuanced understandings of the origins of the Social Hygiene Movement and question commonly-held assumptions based on the dominant discourse often evidenced in documentary sources.</p>

<p> The Late Neolithic (defined here as the LN I of Sampson1993 and Coleman 1992) is both the culmination and the turning point of Greek Neolithic culture from the preceding phases. It lasts some 1,000 years, from approximately 5,300 to 4,300 B.C. The ceramic repertoire of the Late Neolithic period in Greece is a tremendously diverse body of material. Alongside this diversity, other aspects of the ceramic assemblage, such as Matt-painted and Black-burnished pottery, share broad similarities throughout regions, constituting a "<i> koine.</i>" The commanlities, however, are most apparent during the earlier part of the Late Neolithic (LN Ia); in the later phase (LN Ib) phase, more regional variations proliferate than before. </p><p> In the Late Neolithic, all categories of pottery&mdash;monochrome, decorated, and undecorated&mdash;are at their technological and stylistic acme in comparison with earlier periods. While some of the pottery types demonstrate unbroken continuity and development from the preceding Early and Middle Neolithic phases, new specialized shapes and painting techniques are embraced. </p><p> For the first time in the Neolithic, shapes appear that are typically thought of by archaeologists as being for food processing (strainers and "cheese-pots"), cooking (tripod cooking pots and baking pans), and storing (<i>pithoi </i>). More recent research, however, has demonstrated that these "utilitarian" vessels were more often than not used for purposes other than their hypothesized function. These new "utilitarian" vessels were to dominate the next and last phase of the Neolithic, the Final Neolithic (also called the Chalcolithic, Eneolithic, or LN II) when painted pottery disappears from most Greek assemblages just before the beginning of the Bronze Age. </p><p> During the past two decades, there has been much research into Late Neolithic Greece, particularly in Northern Greece (Macedonia). This dissertation incorporates the most up-to-date information from these recent excavations with the older material from sites in Thessaly, Central Greece, and Southern Greece. Since this study draws solely upon published material, both old and new, there are certain limitations to the type of analysis that can be performed. The approach, then, is more of an art-historical and historiographical overview than a rigorous archaeological analysis. It provides an overview of the major classes of pottery (decorated, monochrome, and undecorated) and their primary shapes, motifs, and technological aspects. While it emphasizes commonalities, regional and chronological variations are also highlighted. The technological means of production of vessels, their use, circulation, and deposition are also considered. </p><p> The structure of this paper is that each pottery chapter is devoted to a broad class (such as Matt-painted), which is broadly defined and then more closely examined at the regional level for chronological and stylistic variations. Likewise, a sub-section then discusses the technology of a particular class and its regional and or chronological similarities and differences. When necessary, outdated scholarship is addressed and rectified.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Maria Franklin. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

<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>

This dissertation explores the nineteenth century paternal relationship between industrialists and their predominantly skilled workers in a small northern community. As an archaeological analysis, artifacts such as houses and ceramics demonstrate the economic and consumption patterns observable throughout the United States during its industrialization. Discussion centers around the West Point Foundry, which operated in the Village of Cold Spring from 1818 to 1911 and originally owned half of the village’s property and employed half of its workers. Privately owned, it manufactured a variety of iron products including heavy ordnance for both the country’s Navy and Army. Methodological analysis paired documentary research, landscape and spatial analysis, and a reanalysis of several related archaeological collections from different social and economic classes of workers and owners. The Foundry and village is placed within a broader context of religious tolerance, paternalistic control, community planning and architecture, market accessibility, and worker turnover. It shows that the industrial paternalism of West Point Foundry owners was evident in Cold Spring’s development and generally decreased over the course of the nineteenth century. Among other signs, paternalism was visible in company housing built in half the area and the provision of land for a majority of local churches. Unlike other industrial communities where ceramic patterns can be explained by paternalism, consumption patterns better explain the ceramics archaeologically recovered from several Foundry related households. West Point Foundry worker ceramic assemblages display an abundance of tea wares and predominantly more bowls than plates, suggesting a diet that favored less expensive cuts of meat and investment in limited types of ceramics. An electronically attached Excel file details the original state of assemblages examined (WPFceramicsOriginal.xls ) and a second one details the final analysis of assemblages including vessel lists (WPFceramicsEN.xls). Economic indexes and capital consumption patterns in this industrial community as well as others explored were lower than their urban counterparts. Based on existing research by archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, architects, and urban designers, this research suggests different cultural practices within a single manufacturer industrial community from those in rural or urban contexts.

This dissertation examines the materiality of agricultural Improvement in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. Improvement was a social movement with a history in Europe, and which largely operated to rationalize agriculture when it appeared in New England in the early 19th century. Alongside this modernization, Improvement also served to re-shape rural landscapes in keeping with particular social and economic processes of capitalism. This was because Improvement emerged at a time of great social instability in rural Massachusetts, and served to ameliorate the growing tensions between urban and rural socio-economic life. Utilizing both archaeological and documentary data, I deploy a dialectical method that situates landscapes as materializations of larger social processes, properly analyzed through a process of abstraction. Using this method, I explore two landscapes. First, I examine the literature written by the Improvers, particularly the journal New England Farmer, published after 1822. I investigate keywords in the journal to reveal the symbolic landscape articulated by the Improvers, and show that they envisioned a homogeneous New England landscape that was populated by free, White laborers, contrary to the demographic and social history of the region. The second landscape is the built environment of the E.H. and Anna Williams house in Deerfield, Massachusetts. I explore the materiality of the Williams house and its relationship to Improvement in two ways. First, I examine how the Williamses' management of manure was integrated with practices of capitalist farming, and how proper manure management was seen to arrest rural New England's perceived economic and social decline. Secondly, I examine the trash scatters excavated from the Williams yard to reveal continuities and discontinuities with the Improvers' emphasis on clean, ordered spaces. The Williamses actively manipulated space by enhancing the size of the front yard, and moving work activities behind this visible area. This ameliorated the tensions inherent in Improvement between visibility and productivity, and is reflected in the changing distribution of trash at the site. I conclude by suggesting that archaeological studies of rural life take moments of landscape change like Improvement into account, as a way of countering historical narratives of rural timelessness.