Books by Mary Beaudry
The Historical Archaeology of Shadow and Intimate Economies, 2019
The Archaeology of Food offers more than 250 entries spanning geographic and temporal contexts an... more The Archaeology of Food offers more than 250 entries spanning geographic and temporal contexts and features recent discoveries alongside the results of decades of research. The contributors provide overviews of current knowledge and theoretical perspectives, raise key questions, and delve into myriad scientific, archaeological, and material analyses to add depth to our understanding of food. The encyclopedia serves as a reference for scholars and students in archaeology, food studies, and related disciplines, as well as fascinating reading for culinary historians, food writers, and food and archaeology enthusiasts.
While household archaeologists view the home as a social unit, few move their investigations “bey... more While household archaeologists view the home as a social unit, few move their investigations “beyond the walls” when contextualizing a household in its community. Even exterior aspects of a dwelling—its plant life, yard spaces, and trash heaps—uncover issues of domination and resistance, gender relations, and the effects of colonialism. This innovative volume examines historical homes and their wider landscapes to more fully address social issues of the past.
The contributors, leading archaeologists using various interpretive frameworks, analyze households across time periods and diverse cultures in North America. Including case studies of James Madison’s Montpelier, George Washington’s Ferry Farm, Chinese immigrants in a Nevada mining town and Southern plantations, Beyond the Walls offers a new avenue for archaeological study of domestic sites.
This collection of essays in Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement draws inspiration from curren... more This collection of essays in Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement draws inspiration from current archaeological interest in the movement of individuals, things, and ideas in the recent past. Movement is fundamentally concerned with the relationship(s) among time, object, person, and space. The volume argues that understanding movement in the past requires a shift away from traditional, fieldwork-based archaeological ontologies towards fluid, trajectory-based studies. Archaeology, by its very nature, locates objects frozen in space (literally in their three-dimensional matrices) at sites that are often stripped of people. An archaeology of movement must break away from this stasis and cut new pathways that trace the boundary-crossing contextuality inherent in object/person mobility.
Essays in this volume build on these new approaches, confronting issues of movement from a variety of perspectives. They are divided into four sections, based on how the act of moving is framed. The groups into which these chapters are placed are not meant to be unyielding or definitive. The first section, "Objects in Motion," includes case studies that follow the paths of material culture and its interactions with groups of people. The second section of this volume, "People in Motion," features chapters that explore the shifting material traces of human mobility. Chapters in the third section of this book, "Movement through Spaces," illustrate the effects that particular spaces have on the people and objects who pass through them. Finally, there is an afterward that cohesively addresses the issue of studying movement in the recent past. At the heart of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement is a concern with the hybridity of people and things, affordances of objects and spaces, contemporary heritage issues, and the effects of movement on archaeological subjects in the recent and contemporary past.
Although historical archaeologists often explore similar themes, the intellectual traditions in t... more Although historical archaeologists often explore similar themes, the intellectual traditions in the United States and the United Kingdom lead to differing interpretations of these themes. The contributions to this innovative volume provide a bridge between a US-based archaeologist and a UK-based archaeologist on the themes of landscape studies, urban archaeology, memory and memorialization, gender studies, the lives of industrial workers, and archaeological biographies. The chapters are not meant to stand in isolation, but rather provide a dialog between both groups. This work explores the strengths of interpretive historical archaeology in the US and the UK, as well as compare and contrast differing approaches. It aims to foster debate and productive collaborations between historical archaeologists from different geographic regions. It will of interest to UK and US-based archaeologists, as well as those performing interpretive historical archaeology in other regions who will benefit from the insights it provides.
An overview of global thinking in historical archaeology
Mary C. Beaudry mines archaeological findings of sewing and needlework to discover what these sma... more Mary C. Beaudry mines archaeological findings of sewing and needlework to discover what these small traces of female experience reveal about the societies and cultures in which they were used. Beaudry’s geographical and chronological scope is broad: she examines sites in the United States and Great Britain, as well as Australia and Canada, and she ranges from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution.
The author describes the social and cultural significance of “findings”: pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and other sewing accessories and tools. Through the fascinating stories that grow out of these findings, Beaudry shows the extent to which such “small things” were deeply entrenched in the construction of gender, personal identity, and social class.
The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology is essential reading for anyone concerned with the ... more The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology is essential reading for anyone concerned with the past. In it, archaeologists write of "revolutions of the imagination," and wrest secrets from old objects to recreate our multi-cultured heritage. Material culture is focal-large cities, small potsherds, big and little bones. The book is interdisciplinary and goes inside the process of artifact interpretation to reveal how artifacts "talk" about people. The emphasis is context, ethnography, ordinary and extraordinary men, women, and children. Here is local history in material form as well as stories of global expansion and culture contact.
The book draws on the seminal influence of James Deetz's work on American culture and merges history, folklore, anthropology, African-American, Native American, and gender studies. The essays illustrate the power and potency of folk beliefs and how myths of the past are constantly remade. The authors show how people use objects to converse about themselves, their worlds, and relationships with others. They examine messages writ on brick and stone, buried in earth and passed in legend. They then demonstrate how archaeologists, historians, museologists, and students of material culture can read these to bring the past to light.
Designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of archaeologists and historians, Documentary Archaeology ... more Designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of archaeologists and historians, Documentary Archaeology in the New World outlines a fresh approach to the archaeological study of the historic cultures of North America that places history alongside anthropology, cultural geography, and a whole range of cognate disciplines. The authors' common belief is that historical archaeologists must develop their own frameworks for interpretation through exhaustive documentary research rather than simply borrow models from colleagues working in the prehistoric past. Specific topics examined include urban archaeology, historical ecology, consumerism, smuggling, folk classifications, gender relations, ethnicity, seasonality and ideology. This volume will serve both as a guide to the available techniques of documentary analysis and as a source for the innovative interpretation of historical archaeological materials anywhere in the world.
Journal Articles by Mary Beaudry
Archaeological Dialogues, 2019
In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective m... more In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective middle-range heuristic tool that bridges deep theory and the data available to archaeologists. Our framework foregrounds vibrant things as opposed to static objects, and sympathetically articulates the current concepts of entanglement, correspondence and assemblage.To us an assemblage of practice is a dynamic gathering of corresponding things entangled through situated daily and eventful human practice. Once reassembled by comprehensively and critically marshalling all the evidentiary lines available to archaeologists today, the assemblage of practice becomes a powerful analytical tool that illuminates changes, continuities and transformations in human-thing entanglements, and not only their impacts on local and short-term sociocul-tural developments, but also their repercussions on phenomena of much larger spatiotemporal scale. Our goal is to present archaeologists with a pluralistic, integrative and evolving middle-range framework that pays close attention to terminological precision and theoretical clarity and is conceptually accessible and widely applicable.
Ridanäs was an important Viking Age trading port on the island of Gotland, Sweden, in use during ... more Ridanäs was an important Viking Age trading port on the island of Gotland, Sweden, in use during the 7–11th centuries, CE. Excavations at Ridanäs have revealed the presence of two cemeteries containing over 80 individuals. This study uses strontium isotope data derived from tooth enamel to determine the prevalence of non-locals buried at this site. Tooth enamel samples from a total of 60 adults from Ridanäs were analyzed for strontium isotope ratios. In addition, archaeological faunal samples were analyzed to define the local bioavailable strontium isotope baseline range. Individuals were considered local if they fell within two standard deviations of the mean baseline data value. The mean of the local faunal samples was 0.712419 ± 0.0016. Results indicated that 8 of the 60 individuals were non-local to the site of Ridanäs and the island of Gotland. The eight non-locals were likely from areas in northern Sweden or Norway. Although migration was a hallmark of the Viking Age, data from this study indicates that non-local individuals were not buried at this trading port. The lack of non-locals may be due to the fact that foreign traders did not make permanent residency on Gotland, or that the Vikings on Gotland did not allow non-locals to take advantage of their trade economy.
RESUMEN
En este artículo se delinea la historia de los enfoques arqueológicos sobre el movimiento... more RESUMEN
En este artículo se delinea la historia de los enfoques arqueológicos sobre el movimiento y la movilidad y se discute la reciente aparición de un “nuevo paradigma de movilidades” en muchas disciplinas, incluyendo la arqueología, en el que los temas más frecuentemente explorados se centran en torno a redes, flujos, tierra natal, globalización, migración, colonialismo y colonización, arqueología multi-local, transiciones y transformaciones, y affordances de lugar y espacio. Los autores respaldan un enfoque basado en la trayectoria del movimiento que se centra en las relaciones fluidas entre personas, objetos, tiempo y espacio y proporcionan una visión general de la literatura reciente sobre estudios de casos en arqueologías de la movilidad.
RESUMO
O artigo traça a historia dos enfoques arqueológicos sobre o movimento e a mobilidade e discute o surgimento recente de um “novo paradigma da mobilidade” em muitas disciplinas, incluindo a arqueologia, cujos temas mais frequentemente explorados estão centrados ao redor de redes, fluxos, terra natal, globalização, migração, colonialismo e colonização, arqueologia multivocal, transições e transformações e affordances de lugar e espaço. Os autores defendem um enfoque baseado na trajetória do movimento que foca nas relações fluidas entre pessoas, objetos, tempo, espaço e oferece uma visão geral da literatura recente sobre estudos de caso em arqueologias da mobilidade.
ABSTRACT
This article traces the history of archaeological approaches to movement and mobility and discusses the recent emergence of a “new mobilities paradigm” across many disciplines, including archaeology, in which the themes most often explored center around networks, flows, homelands, globalization, migration, colonialism and colonization, multi-sited archaeology, transitions and transformations, and affordances of place and space. The authors endorse a trajectory-based approach to movement that focuses on fluid relationships among people, objects, time, and space and provide an overview of recent literature about and case studies in archaeologies of mobility.
We discuss results of a content analysis of material culture articles in Post-Medieval
Archaeolog... more We discuss results of a content analysis of material culture articles in Post-Medieval
Archaeology in the context of the development of historical archaeology as a discipline. We conclude
that the journal remains an important outlet for detailed field reports, but in recent years, influenced
by social and anthropological theories, the discipline has matured and articles have changed from
antiquarian artefact presentations to contextualized material culture studies. Expansion of the journal’s
temporal frame to include the recent past has so far had little effect, but the journal has benefited from the
Northeast Historical Archaeology 42: 184–200., 2014
American Antiquity 79(1), Jan 2014
This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology's most i... more This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology's most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 "grand challenges" focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest payoff will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28(1): 283–295., Apr 2013
International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2011
This reflective piece draws together the themes and issues presented within the volume, exploring... more This reflective piece draws together the themes and issues presented within the volume, exploring historic and contemporary definitions and attitudes towards poverty and their implications of the archaeological study of "slum" neighborhoods. It compares and contrasts the individual case studies from York and Manchester with investigations in America and Australia, drawing attention to the differences between them. Suggestions are made for future investigations, particularly in the potential for further comparative work at an international level.
Note: original illustrations in color did not turn out well in this pdf.
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Books by Mary Beaudry
The contributors, leading archaeologists using various interpretive frameworks, analyze households across time periods and diverse cultures in North America. Including case studies of James Madison’s Montpelier, George Washington’s Ferry Farm, Chinese immigrants in a Nevada mining town and Southern plantations, Beyond the Walls offers a new avenue for archaeological study of domestic sites.
Essays in this volume build on these new approaches, confronting issues of movement from a variety of perspectives. They are divided into four sections, based on how the act of moving is framed. The groups into which these chapters are placed are not meant to be unyielding or definitive. The first section, "Objects in Motion," includes case studies that follow the paths of material culture and its interactions with groups of people. The second section of this volume, "People in Motion," features chapters that explore the shifting material traces of human mobility. Chapters in the third section of this book, "Movement through Spaces," illustrate the effects that particular spaces have on the people and objects who pass through them. Finally, there is an afterward that cohesively addresses the issue of studying movement in the recent past. At the heart of Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement is a concern with the hybridity of people and things, affordances of objects and spaces, contemporary heritage issues, and the effects of movement on archaeological subjects in the recent and contemporary past.
The author describes the social and cultural significance of “findings”: pins, needles, thimbles, scissors, and other sewing accessories and tools. Through the fascinating stories that grow out of these findings, Beaudry shows the extent to which such “small things” were deeply entrenched in the construction of gender, personal identity, and social class.
The book draws on the seminal influence of James Deetz's work on American culture and merges history, folklore, anthropology, African-American, Native American, and gender studies. The essays illustrate the power and potency of folk beliefs and how myths of the past are constantly remade. The authors show how people use objects to converse about themselves, their worlds, and relationships with others. They examine messages writ on brick and stone, buried in earth and passed in legend. They then demonstrate how archaeologists, historians, museologists, and students of material culture can read these to bring the past to light.
Journal Articles by Mary Beaudry
En este artículo se delinea la historia de los enfoques arqueológicos sobre el movimiento y la movilidad y se discute la reciente aparición de un “nuevo paradigma de movilidades” en muchas disciplinas, incluyendo la arqueología, en el que los temas más frecuentemente explorados se centran en torno a redes, flujos, tierra natal, globalización, migración, colonialismo y colonización, arqueología multi-local, transiciones y transformaciones, y affordances de lugar y espacio. Los autores respaldan un enfoque basado en la trayectoria del movimiento que se centra en las relaciones fluidas entre personas, objetos, tiempo y espacio y proporcionan una visión general de la literatura reciente sobre estudios de casos en arqueologías de la movilidad.
RESUMO
O artigo traça a historia dos enfoques arqueológicos sobre o movimento e a mobilidade e discute o surgimento recente de um “novo paradigma da mobilidade” em muitas disciplinas, incluindo a arqueologia, cujos temas mais frequentemente explorados estão centrados ao redor de redes, fluxos, terra natal, globalização, migração, colonialismo e colonização, arqueologia multivocal, transições e transformações e affordances de lugar e espaço. Os autores defendem um enfoque baseado na trajetória do movimento que foca nas relações fluidas entre pessoas, objetos, tempo, espaço e oferece uma visão geral da literatura recente sobre estudos de caso em arqueologias da mobilidade.
ABSTRACT
This article traces the history of archaeological approaches to movement and mobility and discusses the recent emergence of a “new mobilities paradigm” across many disciplines, including archaeology, in which the themes most often explored center around networks, flows, homelands, globalization, migration, colonialism and colonization, multi-sited archaeology, transitions and transformations, and affordances of place and space. The authors endorse a trajectory-based approach to movement that focuses on fluid relationships among people, objects, time, and space and provide an overview of recent literature about and case studies in archaeologies of mobility.
Archaeology in the context of the development of historical archaeology as a discipline. We conclude
that the journal remains an important outlet for detailed field reports, but in recent years, influenced
by social and anthropological theories, the discipline has matured and articles have changed from
antiquarian artefact presentations to contextualized material culture studies. Expansion of the journal’s
temporal frame to include the recent past has so far had little effect, but the journal has benefited from the