George,
Thanks for sharing the thoughts my article stimulated, and for the corrections and extra resources you have provided. Clearly you have a lot to add to a conversation and study which takes seriously 20th century material culture. That is exactly the kind of conversation and attention I wanted to instigate with my article and book. (Thanks for pointing that out Stacey!) It is an era which has been poorly addressed by archeologists (tipping my hat to some great articles that were on my mind in the field by Camp, Majewski, Wurst, Purser) in terms of the sort of reference sources we can depend upon by folks (like yourself) regarding 18th and 19th century ceramic and glass assemblages (and which I have used dependably for reference for years). That’s why I had to depend upon Nilsson’s shady website instead of waiting for Miller’s article from HA Fall of 2024 on mid-century Japanese porcelains to appear….
In regards to your disparaging of the theoretical portion of the article, I would always like to see a substantive counter argument rather than the usual grumpiness about theory. The theory, but more importantly, the historical context, is truly only a portion of the article, much of which provides as much context for material culture change across the first part of the 20th century as I could fit in a single article. But in truth, I would have been really “off my Marx” to provide a bunch of data and resources without venturing any context with which to interpret it. As it stands, in my article I have tentatively provided a hypothetical (if you have an allergy to the term “theoretical”) interpretive context into which we can plunk your pricelists and license agreements (no need to commit to it…). That’s the kind of tinkering I am hoping for. In the article and commentary response I implore our colleagues to do the kind of hard work with 20th century material culture as we have done with the 17th through 19th centuries. I clearly point out in my article that there are serious qualitative differences in 20th century material culture that make conducting the same sorts of analysis we have done for the distant past a challenge. Those aspects are in fact not really theoretical (if you really want to see theory…. I can show you theory!) but really quite material (media, infrastructure, mass production, movement of capital and labor, machinery, etc.) They are also the sorts of challenges that I think have dissuaded previous generations of scholars from attempting such analysis. As you show in your comments (and hopefully I show in my article) the data exists and meaningful interpretation is possible.
In short, you can take the theory as a kind of working hypothesis if you prefer, or simply a bonus to the hard work of demonstrating the significance of the assemblage I excavated in Pennsylvania back in 2012, and then sought to explain using the variety of scholarship I found pertinent. That kind of broad cogitation is as much part of our job as archeologists (and our responsibilities as public scholars) as the hard work of nailing down the historical specifics of these new forms of data. I hope in the future when I write about this stuff I can cite many more archeologists to fill out my broader inferences.
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