Personal Adornment and Interlaced Identities at the Sherburne Site, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Items of personal adornment are an important class of material culture with great potential for understanding constructions of identity in the historical period. Archaeologically recoverable remains of dress—clothing and clothing fasteners, jewelry, hair accessories, and miscellaneous accessories—ar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Historical archaeology 2008-01, Vol.42 (2), p.17-37
Main Author: White, Carolyn L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Archaeological sites
Archaeology
Brooches
Buckles
Buttons
Class
Clothes
Ethnicity
Gender identity
Group identity
Historical archaeology
Houses
Identity
Jewellery
Material culture
New Hampshire
Social Sciences
U.S.A
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Summary:Items of personal adornment are an important class of material culture with great potential for understanding constructions of identity in the historical period. Archaeologically recoverable remains of dress—clothing and clothing fasteners, jewelry, hair accessories, and miscellaneous accessories—are included in this category of material culture. Performative aspects of identity construction, the presentation of a person as an individual and as a member of a socially defined group, and the centrality of the body in perception and self-perception are a means for examining the construction of identity along gender, class, age, and ethnicity lines. Personal adornment artifacts are the physical remains of the ways people inscribed the body as reflective of their alignment with individual and group identities and the performances of identity that were enacted through mundane daily acts and gestures in the past. Artifacts recovered at the Sherburne site in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, manifest these identities.
ISSN:0440-9213
2328-1103
DOI:10.1007/BF03377072