Household Analysis: Assemblage Analysis

Abstract

This chapter illuminates how the inhabitants of the Knight & Shenton store site used material culture to negotiate power and status relationships from 1870 through to 1941. It is arranged as a set of examinations and answers to a series of questions about the expression of social relations at the household level raised by the research within previous chapters. The site assemblages are compared to each other and to both early American and Australian sites and American and Australian sites of comparable age to compare and contrast similarities and differences. Finally, the chapter is an analysis at the interregional, regional, town, and site levels, identifying the overwhelming role that transportation and control of the transportation network had in shaping the new land. Loss of this control has led to the extreme drainage patterns of unopposed industrial capital being carved in the landscape and society of Western Australia, particular in the northwest. At the site level, there is a limit on the questions that can be asked and conclusions drawn from one site. However, the Knight & Shenton store site supports an active participation of a marginal regional population in the consumption of British-based mass-produced goods. It does not, however, support the consumer having a strong degree of control over what was consumed despite the strong connection of the site to trade.