Folks,
I am looking for some comparative data from late-19th century and 20th 
century sites and hoping that folks on the list might self-promote or 
suggest some work by colleagues.  I'm interested in bric-a-brac, an 
ambiguous category of things that in archaeological sites most often 
takes the form of mass-produced figurines that most of us bury in our 
artifact catalogs, partly because we do not find all that many of these 
things and partly because we are not always sure what to make of them.  
Household decorative manuals often included a vast range of things in 
the category of bric-a-brac (sometimes they will call these things 
knick knacks), but I am primarily interested for now in mass-produced 
figurines, some of which were a little expensive (e.g., Parian) but 
most of which were commonplace and not especially pricey.  We find lots 
of these things and often pass them around the site and in the lab, but 
they also tend to end up making us scratch our heads when we analyze 
them, and I'm interested in how we deal with such idiosyncratic and 
somewhat anomalous things.
I'm trying to find some accessible site reports with such figurines; I 
have a handful of these things excavated on my sites, but I'd like to 
expand the comparative data beyond a couple places.  All I need is an 
accessible report (online is best, or an electronic version) with basic 
site context and ideally some description of objects beyond simply a 
count of figurines (and images would be absolutely spectacular).  If 
you have dug a site or sites with a handful of figurines or just one or 
two that struck you as interesting, please do drop me an email off 
list.  Thanks in advance for thinking about it.

Paul

Paul R. Mullins
President-Elect, Society for Historical Archaeology
Chair, Dept. Anthropology
413B Cavanaugh Hall
Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-9847
http://www.iupui.edu/~anthpm/home.html