This is a study of martial material culture in the context of the Viking Age warrior of Birka, Sweden. The aim is to establish the role, function and affiliation of the Birka warrior and thereby place Birka on the power-political map of the 10th century. The study is based on the excavations of the fortified structures, particularly the Garrison, at the trading post of Birka as well as the extensive remains of material culture deriving from these investigations. A starting hypothesis is that an analysis of material culture constitutes a way of mapping social structures and that style and iconography reflect cultural groups, contacts and loyalties. Based on the case studies of six papers, the synthesis deals with questions of the work and world view of the warriors, as too their relation to their contemporary counterparts in eastern and western Europe. Questions are raised concerning the value and function of symbols in a martial context where material culture reflects rank, status and office. In defining the Birka warrior’s particular stylistic expression, a tool is created and used in the search for contacts and affiliations reflected through the distribution patterns. The results show close contacts with the eastern trading posts located on the rivers Volga and Dnjepr in Ancient Russia. It is stated that these Rus’ trading posts, essentially inhabited by Northmen, shared a common cultural expression that was maintained throughout a vast area by exceptionally close contacts. It is suggested that a particular stylistic expression developed in these Rus’ trading places containing elements of mainly Scandinavian, Steppe nomadic and Byzantine origin. In conclusion, the results of this thesis show that the warriors from Birka’s Garrison had a share in the martial development of contemporary Europe but with their own particular traits. Close relations with the eastern trade route and contact with the powerful Byzantine Empire were enjoyed. As a pointer for future research, it is wondered what organisational form the close-knit structure of the Rus’ trading posts actually took, keeping the subsequent guilds of medieval Europe in mind. The fall of the Garrison, as of Birka, corresponds with the establishment of Christianity in the region. Such changes were not limited to Central Sweden but part of a greater process where a new political structure was developing, better anchored in local concerns.

The Turkish trousseau, çeyiz in Turkish, connects contemporary brides to the traditions and responsibilities of women from previous generations while demonstrating how greater access to education shapes young women's choices as consumers, spouses, and daughters. An emotionally laden collection, the çeyiz entails intergenerational negotiations between mothers and daughters who collaborate to organize the bride's future furnishings, crystallizing their respective desires and differences. A variable collection of bedding, tablecloths, curtains, and embellishments, the çeyiz serves as the bride's contribution of domestic furnishings for the new couple's house An analysis of the trousseau engages with the past and the present revealing how young women's lives are being transformed over time. By comparing mothers with daughters, I demonstrate that, within one generation, young women have greater agency over their futures At the same time, however, they are expected to comply with the traditional roles of marriage, suggesting that their gains are not permanent. The trousseau's material and affective contents reveal the shifts--and continuities--in family relationships, marriage, and consumption engendered by Turkish modernity. Drawing on the analytical works of Annette Weiner, who researched Samoans, Trobrianders, and the Maoris, I approach the çeyiz as an "inalienable possession," connecting generations of women, mothers and daughters, who reproduce through it their expectations for marriage (Weiner 1992). This dissertation also considers the subjective implications of the çeyiz; it serves as a technology of self, honing women's skills and tastes in preparation for their future. The urban Turkish çeyiz reveals that young Turkish women desire new subjectivities, which they display through consumption and acquire through education. This research demonstrates that increased education influences how Istanbul brides select the contents of their çeyiz and envision their futures as wives. More than a symbol for marriage, the rapidly changing bridal çeyiz envelops Turkey's participation within the global economy, national identity, and investment in equalizing gender relations.

This dissertation examines patterns of secondhand exchange in the Victorian novel as a critical counterpoint to the more frequently discussed literary representations of industrial production and consumption. Analyzing representations and transfers of well-used, secondhand, and even discarded objects as they change hands in the work of writers including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry Mayhew together with archival material, I argue that the secondhand economy reveals a cultural ambivalence toward the devaluation of material objects accompanying new modes of production, strongly tinged with a nostalgia for supposed precapitalist affective ties between persons and things. The significance of my exploration of the secondhand economy in literature is not limited to representations of material objects, however; it also facilitates a more nuanced understanding of Victorian class and especially class mobility as it relates to moments of exchange in the novel. While redirecting our attention to economically marginalized characters and the often neglected patterns of circulation that govern their social roles, it also problematizes rigid notions of class by tracing the mobility of both objects and persons as sellers and purchasers of all classes negotiate social position with the exchange of objects. Following an introduction that situates my project at the nexus of economic criticism and material culture studies, I argue that Victorian writers including Carlyle, Dickens, and Mayhew used the circulation of secondhand clothing to signify a rupture from the past and from sartorial social ties. The second chapter examines literary representations of the pawnshop in the work of Dickens and George Eliot; while the pawned object symbolizes the uncertain fate of fallen or endangered women, the site of the pawnshop itself stores forgotten history and facilitates the redemption of both persons and pledges. The third chapter examines auction narratives in the work of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot, identifying in these texts the narrators' efforts to guide readers toward a more acute perception of irony and proper feelings of sympathy in response to these spectacles of dispossession. The concluding chapter revisits Mayhew, Carlyle, and Dickens to examine profitable second lives of persons and things.

This dissertation excavates the political economy and cultural politics of the "Vanishing Indian." While much of the scholarship situates this ubiquitous American trope as a rhetorical representation, I consider the ways in which the "Vanishing Indian" was necessarily rooted in the emerging capitalist and cultural economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By combining cultural history, Native studies, material culture, and public history, my project addresses a predicament peculiar to settler societies. Specifically, I address the dilemma faced by an immigrant people who attempted to make the transition from colonial to national without being indigenous. My investigation into the complex historical processes of a symbolic, material, and oftentimes-ambivalent reconfiguration of self seeks to broaden our understanding of a national identity not only rooted, but also deeply invested, in settler-colonialism. The ancient mummified remains of an early Woodland aboriginal woman disinterred in Kentucky in 1811, are the axis around which this dissertation revolves. The history of her disinterment links American national identity formation with capitalist imperatives for natural resource extraction, the exploitation of slave labor, settler expansion, and the development of another form of "Indian Removal" – practiced below ground, as it were. The plunder of ancient ruins, disinterment of Indian graves, and the correlated development of early American archaeology became part of a larger national project. While Native remains were not in and of themselves economic resources, increasingly, speculators in science and antiquities came to regard them as both natural and national resources. Their disinterment was certainly as much a byproduct of scientific speculation as of speculation in lands "opened up" by western expansion. The appropriation of Native remains became a locus of power through which Americans sought to add the length and breadth of an historic past to the promise of a national future. Ultimately, I seek to interrogate one of the many aims of colonization through settlement—the appropriation of indigenous status—and situate a history of science, curiosity, and the appropriation of American Indian land and bodies at the center of this development.

Skokloster castle, Sweden, houses a group of more than fifty objects in serpentine stone, acquired during the 17th century. The group is generally called Wrangels fältservis [Wrangel’s field service], referring to field marshall Carl Gustaf Wrangel (1613-1676). The, in many aspects, unresearched material is here approached through the field of material culture studies. The thesis is based on a three-partite approach towards the material, in which the first is the result of actual handling and examination of the objects, paired with a comparative analysis of similar objects regarding dating and influences. The second is a theoretical study of form and serpentine matter, and why the serpentine objects share so many form elements with metal artifacts. The third is based on inventory research and aspects of value, both monetary and cultural. The ascribed value of the group varied over time, from being used as kitchen utensils in the 17th and 18th century, to be regarded as private museum pieces in the 19th and 20th century. The various attitudes have left marks on the objects, both physical (as in level of attention given to repairs etc.) and in inventory matter (as in location and descriptive detail), which can be studied and reveal information otherwise unaccessible.

This thesis seeks to identify the mosaic, rather than the monolithic, nature of culture contact by integrating historical and archaeological sources relating to the concept of gender roles, as they influence response within a contact situation. Specifically, I examine how the Inuit gender system structured artifact patterning in Inuit-European contact situations through the investigation of three Inuit sites in Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island. These date from the 16th, 19th and early 20th centuries and represent a variety of seasonal occupations and dwelling forms. / The ethnographic data suggest that Inuit gender relations were egalitarian and complementary. On this basis I hypothesize that European goods and materials were used equally by men and women. Within each gendered set of tasks, European goods and materials were differently used, according to empirically functional criteria such as the nature of the tasks. / Opportunities for and responses to European contact differed depending on the types of tasks in which Inuit women and men engaged and the social roles they played. Seasonality of occupation bears upon the archaeological visibility of gender activities. / Sixteenth-century Elizabethan contact did not alter Nugumiut gender roles, tasks, authority or status but served primarily as a source of raw material, namely wood and iron. Based on the analysis of slotted tools I suggest a refinement to take account of the overlap in blade thickness that occurs for metal and slate, and which depends on the function of the tool. I conclude that there was much more metal use by Thule Inuit than previously believed. However, during Elizabethan contact and shortly afterwards there was actually less metal use by the Nugumiut than in the prehistoric era. / Little archaeological evidence was recovered for 19th-century commercial whaling contact, (suggesting geographic marginality to European influence), or for 19th century Inuit occupation in the area. This is partly because of immigration to Cumberland Sound and because of subsequent structural remodelling of the dwellings by later occupants. / By the early 20th century, the archaeological record showed not only equal use of European material across gender but a near-ubiquitous distribution across most activity classes, even though commercial trapping never replaced traditional subsistence pursuits but only supplemented them.

This study maps a way of looking at design history in New Zealand through the investigation of a taxon of industrially manufactured ceramics. Understanding design as an enfolded process of production, distribution, mediation and consumption, three threshold moments are identified as occurring within the European settlement period: the internationalisation of commodity production and consumption; the emergence of import substitution; and the deregulation of the market. While production has formed an element in the design of ceramics in New Zealand, it is contended that greater significance lies in both the trade and the mediation of these commodities and in particular in the way these have influenced local consumer choice. Emerging from this study, a series of key binaries become apparent: between the metropolitan centre and the frontier; between state and business; and between the traditional and the progressive. Likewise, the positioning of design within the institutionalised sites of power-or its absence from them-has been a prime force both in the development of manufacturing industry and in determining the nature of the consumer market.

Thesis (PhD--Anthropology)--University of Auckland, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

No description available.

Using the Material Engagement Theory of Cognitive Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris as its framework, the thesis offers a unique synthesis of data from neuroscience, ethnography, linguistics, and archaeology to outline how number concepts are realized, manipulated, and elaborated. The process is described as an interactivity of psychological processes like numerosity, behaviors that manipulate objects into concept-generating stimuli, and material objects with semiotic qualities distinct from those of language and agency distinct from that of brains and bodies. The counting technologies of the Ancient Near East (ANE) are then analyzed through archaeological and textual evidence spanning the late Upper Paleolithic to the Bronze Age, from the first realization of number concepts in a pristine original condition to their elaboration into one of the ancient world's greatest mathematical traditions, a foundation for mathematical thinking today. Insights from the way numbers are realized through psychological-behavioral-material interactivity are used to challenge three dominant conceptualizations of ANE numbers: first, the idea that the ANE numerical lexicon would have counted only to very low numbers; second, that Neolithic tokens were the first counting technology; and third, that numbers were 'concrete' before they became 'abstract'. Considering archaeological evidence from the Epipaleolithic Levant and drawing on linguistic and ethnographic evidence to characterize the regional prehistory, the thesis suggests that the numerical lexicon would have included relatively high numbers prior to the Neolithic; that finger-counting (linguistically attested) and tallies (archaeologically attested) would have preceded tokens; and that numbers are 'abstract' concepts whose content changes in conjunction with the incorporation and use of different material forms. The evidence provided to support these alternatives implies that numbers may have originated in the late Upper Paleolithic and arithmetic early in the Neolithic, pushing the onset of these capabilities further back than is commonly held. In addition to tallies and tokens, the thesis explores fingers and numerical notations as material artifacts, enabling an analysis of how materiality might structure numerical concepts, influence a number system's capabilities, limitations, and elaboration potential, and affect brains and behavior over cultural spans of time. Insights generated by the case study are then applied to the role of materiality in cognition more generally, including how concepts become distributed across multiple material forms; the reasons why materiality might be transparent (or invisible) in cognition; and the differences between thinking through and thinking about materiality.