Abstract
If one of the goals of historical archaeology is to describe and explain human behavior, and if the analysis of ceramics is to be a mechanism to achieve this goal, it is critical that researchers understand the historic context—i.e., the social and economic milieu—in which ceramics were produced, used, and discarded. In historical archaeology, these historic contexts, which can be summarized as testable models, are generally developed through historical research. This article examines a number of contexts on the purchase and use of 19th-century ceramics. Each context is summarized as a model, and is then evaluated in terms of its applicability to ceramic assemblages typically recovered from archaeological sites in the eastern United States.
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Klein, T.H. Nineteenth-century ceramics and models of consumer behavior. Hist Arch 25, 77–91 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03373516
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03373516