All:

I am interested in revisiting a topic at this year's SHA in Quebec City-a session on the interpretive power of a single artifact in a specific context...

At the SHA 2011 in Austin, Texas I chaired a similar session entitled "The Revelatory Power of an Artifact in Context"... I put it together after noticing that many of my colleagues and I have been finding single artifacts that (because of their contexts) were touchstones for larger, deeply cultural stories about the artifacts, the sites where they were found, and the people that used them.  Now I am not a huge proponent of focusing analysis on single artifacts at the expense of the 99% of the material culture that we recover from excavations, but many of us have come to accept that archeology is a balancing act between creating generalized understanding of what is going on at our sites using quantitative summaries of artifact classes and their distributions on our sites and the qualitative interpretations of individual artifacts.  However, on rare occasions, a single artifact (or a relatively small number of a particular class of artifacts) can hold incredible explanatory power because of their particular context.  This session explores some examples of this phenomenon-single artifacts which, because of what they are and where, when, and how they were found, unlock powerful interpretive information about the site, past actors and their relationships.

I thought the 2011 session was useful...with great papers: Fred Smith's "Music and Sound at a Marketplace for Enslaved Peoples in Bridgetown, Barbados"; Rebecca Graff's "Remnants of the White City: The Potential of Plaster at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition"; James Davidson's "The National Industrial Council and the National Liberty Party: A History of Early 20th Century Slave Reparations Movements from the Grave"; Carl Carlson-Drexler's "Small Finds on a Bloodied Landscape Placing Landis's Battery on Pea Ridge Battlefield, Arkansas"; Clete Rooney's "Madness and Death: Status and Identity at the Alabama Insane Hospital;" my own paper on a fragment of bear grease pomade found in Arkansas that demonstrated the global links and the colonial nature of the 19th century Arkansas economy and the importance of consumption in class identity on the Arkansas frontier...and several others.

So...Contact me if you have an artifact in context that tells a large, deep cultural story...or reveals much about the archeological deposits that you would not understand without it...I'd love to have you in the session.

Thanks,

Jamie

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I am [log in to unmask]<http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SWAR_ARCH/post?postID=M3IeOghzvZgB-7h0jYc62JccUPBBS4KNLi0T19ok-Cu2ckCaIlI1wYcXzKA495cCEDeYI7TkMtY> or [log in to unmask]<http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SWAR_ARCH/post?postID=IIb3mRxM0if1caC0qaijIRuxN_ZNmvh-cripC_FRFxMDGizayUQT10vTzrVEFw8idKd8zjoEBFIT8EE>
Dr. Jamie C. Brandon
Arkansas Archeological Survey
Southern Arkansas University Research Station &
Research Assistant Professor
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
http://projectpast.org/jcbrandon/
http://web.saumag.edu/aas/
Twitter: @jcbrandon<http://twitter.com/#%21/jcbrandon>

GO MULERIDERS!