The Archaeology Of Home

A deep dive into the entanglements between humans and their things. It explores the notion that things themselves "remember" when left by "their" people.

Archaeologists are increasingly interested in studying the experiences of Chinese immigrants, yet this area of research is mired in long-standing interpretive models that essentialize race and identity. Showcasing the enormous amount of data available on the lives of Chinese people who migrated to North America in the nineteenth century, this volume charts new directions by providing fresh approaches to interpreting immigrant life. In this volume, leading scholars first tackle broad questions of how best to position and understand these populations. They then delve into a variety of site-based and topical case studies, providing new approaches to themes like Chinese immigrant foodways and highlighting understudied topics including entrepreneurialism, cross-cultural interactions, and conditions in the Jim Crow South. Pushing back against old colonial-based tropes, contributors call for an awareness of the transnational relationships created through migration, engagement with broader archaeological and anthropological debates, and the expansion of research into new contexts and topics. Contributors: Linda Bentz | Todd J. Braje | Kelly N. Fong | D. Ryan Gray | J. Ryan Kennedy | Christopher Merritt | Laura W. | Virginia S. Popper | Adrian Praetzellis | Mary Praetzellis | Chelsea Rose | Douglas E. Ross | Charlotte K. Sunseri | Barbara L. Voss | Priscilla Wegars | Henry Yu

The first comprehensive discussion of the historical archaeology of homelessness In a time when the idea of home has become central to living the American dream, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed brings to the forefront the concept of homelessness. The book points out that homelessness remains underexplored in historical archaeology, a fact which may reflect societal biases and marginalization, and it provides the field’s first comprehensive discussion of the subject. Daniel Sayers argues that the unhomed and the home have been inherently interconnected in the real world across the past several centuries. Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on this dynamic and uses it to generate new insights into pre‒Civil War communities of Maroons and Indigenous Americans, Great Depression‒era hobo communities, and Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities, ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness is created, reproduced, and disparaged by the dominant culture. The book also emphasizes the importance of applied archaeology. Through these studies, Sayers contends that activist archaeologists have a role—and responsibility—to share their knowledge to help policy makers and stakeholders understand the unhomed, homelessness, and the American experience in this area. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney and Krysta Ryzewski

When Katharine Greider was told to leave her house or risk it falling down on top of her and her family, it spurred an investigation that began with contractors' diagnoses and lawsuits, then veered into archaeology and urban history, before settling into the saltwater grasses of the marsh that fatefully once sat beneath the site of Number 239 East 7th Street. During the journey, Greider examines how people balance the need for permanence with the urge to migrate, and how the home is the resting place for ancestral ghosts. The land on which Number 239 was built has a history as long as America's own. It provisioned the earliest European settlers who needed fodder for their cattle; it became a spoil of war handed from the king's servant to the revolutionary victor; it was at the heart of nineteenth-century Kleinedeutschland and of the revolutionary Jewish Lower East Side. America's immigrant waves have all passed through 7th Street. In one small house is written the history of a young country and the much longer story of humankind and the places they came to call home.

"The Prehistory of Home addresses a topic of widely shared interest, and provides easy-to-understand evidence and well-argued interpretations. Jerry Moore is deft with words, phrasing, and building arguments, shifting effortlessly between antiquity and today while keeping the themes of home and prehistory clear. Alongside the rigorous archaeological and scientific research, Moore's wit and personality shine throughout."—Wendy Ashmore, coauthor of Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past

"Archaeology at Home takes a deep dive into the entanglements between humans and their things, exploring the notion that things themselves "remember" when left by "their" people and illustrating how the integration of humans and things things involves connections running all the way from the present into deep time. The author presents three case studies of homes all intimately known to him - the home of his father after his abrupt passing, the home of his uncle that was lost in a fire, and a Stone Age home he excavated many years ago. This evocative approach to archaeologies of memory will be appreciated by professional archaeologists as well as members of the general public who are drawn to the study of the past and things that connect us with it"--

This book had its genesis in a series of 6 popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections: Architecture as Archive of Social Space; The Active Household; and Ritual Space at Home.

This book explores how people encounter the pasts of their homes, offering insights into the affective, emotional and embodied geographies of domestic heritage. For many people, the intimacy of dwelling is tempered by levels of awareness that their home has been previously occupied by other people whose traces remain in the objects, décor, spaces, stories, memories and atmospheres they leave behind. This book frames home as a site of historical encounter, knowledge and imagination, exploring how different forms of domestic ‘inheritance’ – material, felt, imagined, known – inform or challenge people’s homemaking practices and feelings of belonging, and how the meanings and experiences of domestic space and dwelling are shaped by residents’ awareness of their home’s history. The domestic home becomes an important site for heritage work, an intimate space of memories and histories – both our own but also not our own – a place of real and imagined encounters with a range of selves and others. This book will be of interest to academics, students and professionals in the fields of heritage studies, cultural geography, contemporary archaeology, public history, museum studies, sociology and anthropology.