Abstract
Comparison of Australia with other postcolonial nations provides a means for analyzing the material culture of 19th-century British colonization. Developments in Australia paralleled those in Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. As a result of changes in politics, industry, knowledge, culture, and society, migrants at this time differed significantly from those of earlier periods of British colonization. Comparison between colonial outposts provides a means for better understanding this emerging culture of British imperialism. Rather than reflecting the adoption of archaic physical forms, this pattern drew on the many complex strands of class, industrialization, urbanization, and mass consumption that informed contemporary British society. A globally aware perspective on British culture raises new questions for archaeologists in the United States, Britain, and the countries of the former British Empire.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alfrey, Judith, and Catherine Clark 1993 The Landscape of Industry: Patterns of Change in the Ironbridge Gorge. Routledge, London, England.
Akenson, Donald 1993 The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. P. D. Meany, Streetsville, Ontario.
Bairstow, Damaris, and Graeme Wilson 1990 271–273 Pitt Street, Sydney: Historical Archaeological Excavation. Report to Crone and Associates, Architects and Planning Consultants, and Kumagai (NSW), Sydney, Australia.
Bell, Peter 1990 Continuity in Australian Timber Domestic Building: An Early Cottage at Burra. Australasian Historical Archaeology, 8:3–12.
Brooks, Alasdair 1997 Beyond the Fringe: Transfer-Printed Ceramics and the Internationalisation of Celtic Myth. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 1(1):39–56.
Brooks, Alasdair 1999 Building Jerusalem: Transfer-Printed Finewares and the Creation of British Identity. In The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain, edited by Sarah Tarlow and Susie West, editors, pp. 51–65. Routledge, London, England.
Brooks, Alasdair 2000 Of Celts and Gaels: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial-Era Pottery from Wales and the Outer Hebrides. Paper presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, Quebec City, Quebec.
Burley, David 1989 Function, Meaning, and Context: Ambiguities in Ceramic Use by the Hivernant Metis of the Northwestern Plains. Historical Archaeology, 23(1): 97–106.
Bushman, Richard 1992 The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. A. A. Knopf, New York, NY.
Butler, Guy (Editor) 1974 The 1820 Settlers: An Illustrated Commentary. Human and Rousseau, Cape Town, South Africa.
Caffyn, Lucy 1986 Housing in an Industrial Landscape: A Study of Workers’ Housing in West Yorkshire. World Archaeology, 15(2):173–183.
Cage, R. A. (Editor) 1985 The Scots Abroad: Labor, Capital, Enterprises, 1750–1914. Croom Helm, London, England.
Campion, Gary 1996 People, Process, and the Poverty-Pew: A Functional Analysis of Mundane Buildings in the Nottinghamshire Framework-Knitting Industry. Antiquity, 70:847–860.
Casey, Mary 1999 Local Pottery and Dairying at the DMR Site, Brickfield Hill, Sydney, New South Wales. Australasian Historical Archaeology, 17:3–37.
Clark, Manning 1963 A Short History of Australia. New American Library, New York, NY.
Colley, Linda 1996 Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. Vintage, London, England.
Connah, Graham 1986 Historical Reality: Archaeological Reality. Excavations at Regentville, Penrith, New South Wales, 1985. Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, 4: 29–42.
Connah, Graham 1998 The Archaeology of Frustration: An Australian Case Study. Historical Archaeology, 32(2):7–27.
Corbin, A. 1999 The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, New York, NY.
Cott, Nancy 1977 The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England 1780–1835. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
D’agostino, Mary Ellin, Elizabeth Prine, Eleanor Casella, and Margot Winer (Editors) 1995 The Written and the Wrought: Complementary Sources in Historical Archaeology. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers No. 79. Kroeber Anthropological Society, Berkeley, CA.
Daunton, M. J. 1983 House and Home in the Victorian City: Working Class Housing 1850–1914. Edward Arnold, London, England.
Davidoff, Lenore, and Catherine Hall 1987 Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1750–1850. Hutchison, London, England.
Davies, Peter 1999 Henry’s Mill: The Archaeology and History of an Otways Sawmill Settlement. In Australia’s Ever-Changing Forests IV: Proceedings of the Fourth National Conference on Australian Forest History, John Dargavel and Brenda Libbis, editors, pp. 247–259. Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, in association with Australian Forest History Society Inc., Canberra, ACT.
Deetz, James 1977 In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Anchor Press/Doubleday, New York, NY.
Deetz, James 1993 Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville.
DeVries-Evans, Susanna 1987 Pioneer Women, Pioneer Land: Yesterday’s Tall Poppies. Angus and Robertson, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Doroszenko, Dena 1992 “Death Stained the Walls and Lurked in the Floorboards”: Behavioural Inferences from the Inge-Va Privy Deposit. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Archaeological Association, London, Ontario.
Dyson, Stephen L. (Editor) 1985 Comparative Studies in the Archaeology of Colonialism. British Archaeological Reports International Series 233, Oxford, England.
Egan, Geoff, and Ronn Michael (Editors) 1999 Old and New Worlds: Historical/Post-Medieval Archaeology Papers from the Societies’ Joint Conferences at Williamsburg and London 1997 to Mark Thirty Years of Work and Achievement. Oxbow Books, in association with the Society for Historical Archaeology and Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology, London, England.
Elliott, Bruce 1988 Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston, Ontario.
Emery, Norman 1996 Excavations on Hirta 1986–90. HMSO for the National Trust of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Ennals, Peter, and Deryck W. Holdsworth 1998 Homeplace: The Making of the Canadian Dwelling over Three Centuries. University of Toronto Press, Ontario.
Ewins, Neil 1997 “Supplying the Present Wants of Our Yankee Cousins”: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market 1775–1880. Journal of Ceramic History Volume 15. City Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, England.
Falk, Lisa (Editor) 1991 Historical Archaeology in Global Perspective. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Fitts, Robert 1999 The Archaeology of Middle-Class Domesticity and Gentility in Victorian Brooklyn. Historical Archaeology, 33(1):39–62.
Forsman, Michael 1985 The Archaeology of Victoria Post 1864–1897. Archaeological Survey of Alberta Manuscript Series No. 6, Edmonton, Alberta.
Funari, Pedro Paulo, Martin Hall, and Sian Jones, (Editors) 1999 Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge. One World Archaeology Series No. 31, Routledge, London, England.
Griggs, Heather 1998 Go Gcuire Dia Rath Blath Ort (God Grant That You Prosper and Flourish): Social and Economic Mobility among the Irish in Nineteenth-Century New York. Historical Archaeology, 33(1):87–101.
Glassie, Henry 1975 Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
Glassie, Henry 1983 Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. Reprinted in 1995 by Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Glassie, Henry 1986 Eighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk Building. In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, editors, pp. 394–425. University of Georgia Press, Athens.
Hall, Martin 1992 Small Things and the Mobile: Conflictual Fusion of Power, Fear, and Desire. In The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, edited by Anne E. Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry, editors, pp. 373–100. CRC Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
Halley, Helen 1997 An Analysis of Selected Pottery Fragments from the Wreck of the Sydney Cove. Unpublished Graduate Diploma in Archaeology Thesis, Department of Archaeology, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia.
Hamilton, Jennifer 1982 Ceramics Destined for York Factory: An Examination of Hudson’s Bay Company Archival Sources. Material History Bulletin, 16:47–67.
Harris, R. Cole, and John Warkentin 1974 Canada before Confederation. Reprinted in 1983 by Oxford University Press, Toronto, Ontario.
Heitzmann, Roderick 1980 The Cochrane Ranche Site. Archaeological Survey of Alberat Occasional Paper No. 16, Edmonton, Saskatchewan.
Higginbotham, Edward 1987 The Excavation of Buildings in the Early Township of Parramatta, New South Wales, 1790–1820s. Australian Journal of Historical Archaeology, 5: 3–20.
Hill, Valerie 1998 The Welsh Village, near Castlemaine, Victoria: A Study of People in the Landscape. Australasian Historical Archaeology, 16:60–69.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terrence Ranger 1983 The Invention of Tradition. Reprinted in 1996 by Canto Editions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Johnson, Matthew 1996 An Archaeology of Capitalism. Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, England.
Johnson, Matthew 1999 Rethinking Historical Archaeology. In Historical Archaeology: Backfrom the Edge, Pedro Paulo Funari, Martin Hall, and Sian Jones, editors, pp. 23–35. One World Archaeology Series No. 31, Routledge Press, London, England.
Karami, Helen 2000 Archaeology 2AMW Laboratory Report: Ceramics from Short’s National Hotel. Manuscript, Archaeology Department, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Austalia.
Kennedy, Margaret 1997 The Whiskey Trade of the Northwestern Plains: A Multidisciplinary Study. American University Studies Series IX History No. 171. Peter Lang, New York, NY.
Kenyon, Ian n.d. A History of Ceramic Tableware in Ontario: 1780–1890. Manuscript, Ontario Heritage Foundation, Toronto.
Klose, Jane, and Antonia Malan 2000 The Ceramic Signature of the Cape in the Nineteenth Century, with Particular Reference to the Tennant Street Site, Cape Town. South African Archaeological Bulletin, 55:49–59.
Kolodny, Annette 1984 The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers 1630–1860. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Lake, Marilyn 1987 The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–1938. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Lawrence, Susan 2000a Dolly’s Creek: The Archaeology of a Victorian Gold Rush Community. Melbourne University Press, VIC, Australia.
Lawrence, Susan 2000b Two Little Girls in School: The Boer War and a Family Farm in the North of South Australia. In 1901 Australians at Federation, Aedeen Cremin, editor, pp. 20–22. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, Australia.
Majewski, Teresita, and Michael O’Brien 1987 The Use and Misuse of Nineteenth-Century English and American Ceramics in Archaeological Analysis. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Michael Schiffer, editor, pp. 97–209. Academic Press, New York, NY.
McCrae, Hugh (Editor) 1934 Georgiana’s Journal: Melbourne 1841–1865. Reprinted in 1978 by William Brooks and Co., Sydney, NSW, Australia.
McGuire, Randall 1991 Building Power in the Cultural Landscape of Broome County, New York 1880–1940. In The Archaeology of Inequality, Randall McGuire and Robert Paynter, editors, pp. 102–124. Blackwell, Oxford, England.
Miller, George 1980 Classification and Economic Scaling of Nineteenth-Century Ceramics. Historical Archaeology, 13: 1–40.
Miller, George 1991 A Revised Set of CC Index Values for Classification and Economic Scaling of English Ceramics from 1787 to 1880. Historical Archaeology, 25(1):1–25.
Moodie, Susannah 1852 Roughing It in the Bush. Reprinted in 1986 by McLelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario.
Mrozowski, Stephen, Grace Ziesing, and Mary Beaudry 1996 Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.
Murray, Tim 1993 The Childhood of William Lanne: Contact Archaeology and Aboriginality in Northwest Tasmania. Antiquity, 67:504–519.
Oetelar, Gerald 1993 The 1991 Excavations at Fort Calgary (EgPm-5). Alberta Museums Review, 19:27–48.
O’Farrell, Patrick 1986 The Irish in Australia. New South Wales University Press, Kensington, Australia.
Orser, Charles 1996 An Historical Archaeology of the Modern World. Plenum Press, New York, NY.
Orser, Charles 1997 Introductory Statement. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 1(1):1–3.
Praetzellis, Mary, and Adrian Praetzellis 1990 “For a Good Boy”: Victorians on Sacramento’sJ Street. Cultural Resources Facility, Anthropological Studies Center, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA.
Russell, Penny 1994 A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity. Melbourne University Press, VIC, Australia.
Sabel, Ken, and Chris Jarrett n.d. The Post-Medieval Development of Four Sites at Butler’s Wharf, Butler’s Wharf Estate, London Borough of Southwark. Manuscript, PCA, London, England.
Scott, Patricia E., and James Deetz 1990 Buildings, Furnishings, and Social Change in Early-Victorian Grahamstown. Social Dynamics, 16(1): 76–89.
Shackel, Paul 1993 Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1696–1870. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville.
Shammas, Carole 1990 The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America. Clarendon Press, Oxford, England.
Spencer-Wood, Suzanne 1987 Miller’s Indices and Consumer-Choice Profiles: Status-Related Behaviors and White Ceramics. In Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology, Suzanne Spencer-Wood, editor, pp. 321–358. Plenum Press, New York, NY.
Staniforth, Mark 1996 Tracing Artifact Trajectories: Following Chinese Export Porcelain. The Bulletin of the Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology, 20(1):13–18.
Staniforth, Mark, and Mike Nash 1998 Chinese Export Porcelain from the Wreck of the Sydney Cove (1797). Special Publication No. 12, Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology, Canberra, ACT.
Sussman, Lynne 1979 Spode/Copeland Transfer-Printed Patterns Found at 20 Hudson’s Bay Company Sites. Parks Canada, Ottawa.
Sussman, Lynne 1997 Mocha, Banded, Cat’s Eye, and Other Factory-Made Slipware. Studies in Northeast Historical Archaeology, No. 1. Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology.
Symonds, James 1999 Diaspora and Identity: “Becoming Worlds” and Nineteenth-Century Emigration from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland to Nova Scotia. Paper presented at the World Archaeological Congress, Cape Town, South Africa.
Tarlow, Sarah, and Susie West (Editors) 1999 The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain. Routledge, London, England.
Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. Reprinted in 1980 by Penguin, Harmondsworth, England. 1967 Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past and Present, 38:56-97.
Traill, Catherine Parr 1836 The Backwoods of Canada. Reprinted in 1966 by McLelland and Stewart, Toronto, Ontario.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh 1983 The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland. In The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, editors, pp. 15–42. Reprinted in 1996 by Canto Editions, Cambridge University Press, England.
Trollope, Joanna 1983 Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire. Century Hutchinson, London, England.
Van Kirk, Sylvia 1980 “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870. Watson and Dwyer, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Watson, Don 1984 Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia. Collins, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Wall, Diana di Zerega 1991 Sacred Dinners and Secular Teas: Constructing Domesticity in Mid-19th-Century New York. Historical Archaeology, 25(4): 69–81.
Wall, Diana di Zerega 1994 The Archaeology of Gender: Separating the Spheres in America. Plenum Press, New York, NY.
Webber, Michael 1991 Excavations on the Site of Norfolk House, Lambeth Road, SE1. London Archaeologist, 6(13):343–350.
Wilson, Andrew 1988 A Failed Colonial Squire: Sir John Jamison at Regentville. In The Archaeology of Colonization: Australia in the World Context, Judy Birmingham, Damaris Bairstow, and Andrew Wilson, editors, pp. 123–138. Australian Society for Historical Archaeology, Sydney, NSW.
Wilson, Graham 1996 Cumberland/Gloucester Streets Site Archaeological Investigation: Specialist Report, Ceramics. Report for Godden Mackay Heritage Consultants and the Sydney Cove Authority, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Winer, Margot 1995 The Painted, Poetic Landscape: Reading Power in Nineteenth-Century Textual and Visual Representations of the Eastern Cape Frontier. In The Written and The Wrought: Complementary Sources in Historical Archaeology. Mary Ellin D’Agostino, Elizabeth Prine, Eleanor Casella, and Margot Winer, editors, pp. 74–109. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers No. 79, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
Winer, Margot, and James Deetz 1990 The Transformation of British Culture in the Eastern Cape, 1820–1860. Social Dynamics, 16(1):55–75.
Young, Linda 1997 The Struggle for Class: The Transmission of Genteel Culture to Early-Colonial Australia. Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Social Sciences, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lawrence, S. Exporting Culture: Archaeology and the Nineteenth-Century British Empire. Hist Arch 37, 20–33 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376590
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376590