Abstract
Few can deny the impact that European-manufactured material had in the history of colonization of the Southeastern United States. Objects produced in Europe for trade with the New World, such as iron knives, copper kettles, wool cloth, yarn and blankets, glass beads, and silver jewelry, made their way into Native hands and transformed the lives and economies for many people living in the New World (Bradley, 2007; Calloway, 1997:42–45; Waselkov, 2004). Archaeological focus in recent decades on the production of commodities for the growth of mercantile economies in North American colonies has given rise to more textured interpretations of the social lives of objects in colonial contexts, not only in the Southeastern United States, but throughout colonial North America (Appadurai, 1986; Wolf, 1982; see also Given, 2005; Gosden, 2004; Lightfoot, 2004; Nassaney and Brandão, this volume; MacLean, this volume; Silliman, 2005; Thomas, 1991). In the French colony of Louisiana, which is the context for this discussion, Native and French individuals integrated newly acquired items into daily practices, putting them into use in households and communities, animating them and infusing them with meaning.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks are extended to Carolyn White for her invitation to join this thoughtful group of papers, originally formulated as a conference paper at the Society for Historical Archaeology. Comments by Rebecca Yamin on the presented version of this paper have been quite helpful in my revisions and conceptualizations of the materiality of colonial individuals. My thoughts on these topics have also benefited from discussions with Mary Beaudry, Stephen Silliman, Christina Hodge, Viva Fisher, Rob Mann, and Giovanna Vitelli. I also had the great fortune to explore theoretical approaches to objects and materiality with an amazing group of students while teaching an archaeology graduate seminar at University of Massachusetts, Boston. Many thanks to the students who participated in the seminar and especially Stephen Silliman and Steve Mrozowski. As always, I am grateful for the support I receive at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. This paper would not be possible without its world-class collections and staff.
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Loren, D.D. (2009). Material Manipulations: Beads and Cloth in the French Colonies. In: White, C. (eds) The Materiality of Individuality. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0498-0_7
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