Abstract
In early 17th-century Virginia, three people constructed houses unlike anything built in the Chesapeake before or since. These earthfast structures, owned by men of the “better sort” and framed at the bottom of cellar holes, have thus far defied explanation because of interpretive constraints inherent in the positivist underpinnings of archaeological analysis. This article challenges these constraints by engaging the rich contexts highlighted in recent work by “storytelling” archaeologists through poststructural semiotics. Rather than search for a single driving factor that explains these houses, it is argued that it is only when one grapples with the complexity of the context that one can understand how these houses were constituted by/constitutive of their context.
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Carr, E.R. Meaning (and) materiality: Rethinking contextual analysis through cellar-set houses. Hist Arch 34, 32–45 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374326
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374326