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Personal Adornment and Interlaced Identities at the Sherburne Site, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

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Abstract

Items of personal adornment are an important class of material culture with great potential for understanding constructions of identity in the historical period. Archaeologically recoverable remains of dress—clothing and clothing fasteners, jewelry, hair accessories, and miscellaneous accessories—are included in this category of material culture. Performative aspects of identity construction, the presentation of a person as an individual and as a member of a socially defined group, and the centrality of the body in perception and self-perception are a means for examining the construction of identity along gender, class, age, and ethnicity lines. Personal adornment artifacts are the physical remains of the ways people inscribed the body as reflective of their alignment with individual and group identities and the performances of identity that were enacted through mundane daily acts and gestures in the past. Artifacts recovered at the Sherburne site in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, manifest these identities.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Reno, Mail Stop 096, Reno, NY, 89557, USA

    Carolyn L. White

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White, C.L. Personal Adornment and Interlaced Identities at the Sherburne Site, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Hist Arch 42, 17–37 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03377072

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