are you including things like snow babies and frozen charlottes and half 
dolls?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul R. Mullins" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2010 5:39 AM
Subject: bric-a-brac


> 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


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