Evolutionary approaches to agency offer some of the most promising frameworks for identifying individual agents and their archaeological correlates. Agency theory calls attention to the individual as the fundamental feature of human relations, and evolutionary theory provides historically situated models that allow archaeologists to precisely investigate the complex behavioral strategies that underlie artifact patterns. The following paper offers one such model. Using data from 41 slave-site occupations from eighteenth-century Virginia, I explore how and why enslaved African Americans actively participated in the burgeoning "consumer revolution" that swept across the early modern Atlantic World. Artifact patterning suggests that the acquisition and display of costly imported goods functioned as a form of communication for slaves in both public and private venues. The data show that enslaved women and men used several different consumption strategies to solidify social and economic relationships within precarious and rapidly changing environments. Signaling theory, derived from evolutionary theory, illuminates the contextual factors that structured slaves’ consumer choices and provides a model for understanding their choices as the result of dynamic and mutually beneficial behaviors.
