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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Material Consumption Of An 18th-Century Middling Urban Craftsman In Boston, Massachusetts, Lauryn E. Sharp
Material Consumption Of An 18th-Century Middling Urban Craftsman In Boston, Massachusetts, Lauryn E. Sharp
Graduate Masters Theses
This thesis studies how Caleb Parker, a blacksmith and craftsman who lived in the early- to mid-18th century, viewed and utilized refinement and genteel behaviors using the glass and ceramic artifacts recovered from a privy at his home at 23 Unity Street in Boston’s North End. Background research explores the concept of “partible refinement,” which speaks to the notion that the “middling sorts'' at this time, including craftspeople like Caleb Parker, had the agency to selectively use different components of refined gentility according to their personal consumer choice and tastes. This resulted in middling sorts incorporating both traditional and modern …
“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson
“The True Spirit Of Service": Ceramics And Toys As Tools Of Ideology At The Dorchester Industrial School For Girls, Sarah N. Johnson
Graduate Masters Theses
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 …
Ceramic Consumption In A Boston Immigrant Tenement, Andrew J. Webster
Ceramic Consumption In A Boston Immigrant Tenement, Andrew J. Webster
Graduate Masters Theses
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Boston’s North End became home to thousands of European immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Italy. The majority of these immigrant families lived in crowded tenement apartments and earned their wages from low-paying jobs such as manual laborers or store clerks. The Ebenezer Clough House at 21 Unity Street was originally built as a single-family colonial home in the early eighteenth century but was later repurposed as a tenement in the nineteenth century. In 2013, the City of Boston Archaeology Program excavated the rear lot of the Clough House, recovering 36,465 artifacts, including …
Bones In The Landfill: A Zooarchaeological Study From Faneuil Hall, Linda M. Santoro
Bones In The Landfill: A Zooarchaeological Study From Faneuil Hall, Linda M. Santoro
Graduate Masters Theses
Using data from recent archaeological excavations at Faneuil Hall in Boston, this thesis examines how an 18th-century urban landfill context can be used towards understanding the broader foodways of a city community. Much of today's urban landscape has been artificially created over time, often through the efforts of communities to fill land and dispose of their garbage, and it is important for archaeologists to utilize these contexts in meaningful ways. The Town Dock was gradually filled in with the daily trash of the merchants, shop-keepers, and other residents of the nearby community, and the faunal assemblage gives us a glimpse …
Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen
Urban Consumption In Late 19th-Century Dorchester, Jennifer Poulsen
Anthropology, Historical Archaeology Masters Theses Collection
This thesis examines the bottles recovered from an 1895 fill deposit at the Blake House site in Dorchester, MA, to determine what inconspicuous consumption reveals about the anonymous consumers of Dorchester in the late 19th century. The assemblage is composed of 1,892 pieces of bottle glass, representing food, alcohol, medicine, and household products, 73 with original paper labels. The analysis presented here demonstrates the consumers were from several households and included men, women and children from immigrant populations. Despite evidence for intensive recycling of bottles, indicating that these individuals were under economic stress, they had some amount of discretionary money …