The Archaeology of Magic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Riley Augé
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Early American ◽  
Salem Witch Trials ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Gendered Patterns

In The Archaeology of Magic, C. Riley Augé explores how early American colonists used magic to protect themselves from harm in their unfamiliar and challenging new world. Analyzing evidence from the different domestic spheres of women and men within Puritan society, Augé provides a trailblazing archaeological study of magical practice and its relationship to gender in the Anglo-American culture of colonial New England. Investigating homestead sites dating from 1620 to 1725 in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine, Augé explains how to recognize objects and architectural details that colonists intended as defenses and boundaries against evil supernatural forces. She supports this archaeological work by examining references to magic in letters, diaries, sermons, medical texts, and documentation of court proceedings including the Salem witch trials. She also draws on folklore from the era to reveal that colonists simultaneously practiced magic and maintained their Puritan convictions. Augé exposes the fears and anxieties that motivated individuals to try to manipulate the supernatural realm, and she identifies gendered patterns in the ways they employed magic. She argues that it is essential for archaeologists to incorporate historical records and oral traditions in order to accurately interpret the worldviews and material culture of people who lived in the past.

“‘to subscribe unto GODS BOOK’: The Bible as Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century New England Colonialism”

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Marie Plane
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
New England Indians ◽  
Religious Systems

AbstractReading scripture in the vernacular forged a unique discursive community in colonial New England, just as it had in post-Reformation England and elsewhere. But just as important were the many ways the bible functioned as a physical object imbued with special power, serving as talisman as much as text. In the colonial context, missionary activity among New England Indians introduced both aspects of scripture to indigenous communities, which in their turn, endowed it with meanings of their own. This essay first reviews the role of the Bible as physical object among the English colonists, before turning to its reception, rejection, and uses among New England’s Algonquian peoples. Examining bibles as items of material culture in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut reveals the creativity and creolization inherent in the introduction of the Bible to this colonial context. The intellectual, practical, and talismanic properties of the Bible so familiar to the English were cast into new relief in the colonial contest between Europeans and Indians, between literate and oral cultures, and between these vastly different religious systems.

Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England

2009 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen W. Silliman
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Eastern Pequot

The archaeological study of Native Americans during colonial periods in North America has centered largely on assessing the nature of cultural change and continuity through material culture. Although a valuable approach, it has been hindered by focusing too much on the dichotomies of change and continuity, rather than on their interrelationship, by relying on uncritical cultural categories of artifacts and by not recognizing the role of practice and memory in identity and cultural persistence. Ongoing archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation in Connecticut, which was created in 1683 and has been inhabited continuously since then by Eastern Pequot community members, permits a different view of the nature of change and continuity. Three reservation sites spanning the period between ca. 1740 and 1840 accentuate the scale and temporality of social memory and the relationships between practice and materiality. Although the reservation sites show change when compared to the "precontact baseline," they show remarkable continuity during the reservation period. The resulting interpretation provides not only more grounded and appropriately scaled renderings of past cultural practices but also critical engagements with analytical categories that carry significant political weight well outside of archaeological circles.

The Demographic History of Colonial New England

1972 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Scott Smith
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
High Fertility ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Early American ◽  
High Dependency ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
High Level

The central fact of the demographic history of early North America is rapid growth. Both Canada and the white population of the English colonies experienced increases of 2½ percent per year during the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century rates, beginning from a low base and more influenced by immigration, were even higher. In contrast, the expansion of population in early modern Europe rarely exceeded 1 percent per annum over an extended period. Since Franklin and Malthus, interpretations of early American demography have centered on the high fertility associated with near universal marriage for women at a low average age. The extremely youthful population, high dependency ratio, and one of the largest mean census family sizes ever recorded all follow from the high level of fertility.

Anglo-American Wage Differences in the 1820's

1967 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Arts ◽  
Wage Differences ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
Anglo American

In 1829 Zachariah Allen, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, published his book, The Science of Mechanics. Neither the title nor a casual glance at the contents of the book suggests that it contains material of major interest to economists or economic historians. Allen's book was intended as a manual for American mechanics and manufacturers. It summarized that portion of the industrial arts of its day which the author considered most useful and relevant for the edification of his American readers. The book contains elementary tables of conversion, arithmetic and geometric rules and formulas, a good deal of simple physics, and extensive descriptions of the workings of machinery—especially water wheels, steam engines, and millwork generally. In particular, Allen attempted to summarize much of what he had learned during a recent tour of the major manufacturing districts of England and France, so as to bring Americans up to date on the “latest improvements in mechanical invention in those countries.’ Unobtrusively placed in the back of this book, however, is a chapter, “Comparative View of the Relative Advantages Possessed by England, France and the United States of America as Manufacturing Nations,’ which records his more strictly economic impressions of his tour, taken in 1825. His observations in this short chapter, often trenchant and occasionally pungent, invite comparison with some of the better known European travelers to the United States. Anyone who can write, as Allen does (p. 355), that “An industrious New-England mechanic commonly appears to take pleasure in his business; but the French mechanic is rather inclined to make a business of his pleasures,’ is obviously entitled to a sympathetic hearing.

This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France

2016 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-586
Author(s):  
Carla Cevasco
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
New France ◽  
Colonial New England

Analyzing the material culture of English, French, and Native communion ceremonies, and debates over communion and cannibalism, this article argues that peoples in the borderlands between colonial New England and New France refused to recognize their cultural similarities, a cross-cultural failure of communication with violent consequences.

The Factory

1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Gordon ◽  
Patrick M. Malone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Capital Expenditure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Development ◽  
Textile Mill ◽  
Early American ◽  
Industrial Buildings

With Samuel Slater’s textile mill (1793, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island) and Eli Whitney’s armory (1798, in Whitneyville, Connecticut), American entrepreneurs began to make in factories products that had formerly been made in homes or craft shops. Another new concept in manufacturing, the principle of uniformity (sometimes described as “interchangeability”), was also winning converts in America. Factories making uniform products increasingly used power-driven machinery in the production process. However, it is a mistake to conflate mechanization, factories, and uniformity. Mechanization was used in colonial craft shops as well as in nineteenth-century factories. Until the late nineteenth century, factory managers achieved uniformity primarily through improved handwork skills and gauging rather than with machinery. Chapter 9 will cover the mechanization of work in factories as well as efforts to achieve uniformity in machine parts. Many of the best examples of early American factories are in New England, where there was a serendipitous combination of water power, entrepreneurial capital, and the artisanal skills necessary to build mills and machinery. The textile mills erected there had a powerful influence on the evolution of American factory architecture. As we look closely at a number of New England mills, remember that similar patterns of structural development can be found in other regions of the United States and that the basic forms of the textile factory were readily adapted for other types of industry, including the manufacture of wood, metal, and paper products. Factories were not the first industrial buildings in America, nor did they represent more capital expenditure than some of the early and costly ironworks. Two processes of textile manufacturing and finishing, the carding of fibers and the fulling of woven cloth, had been powered by waterwheels (and occasionally by draft animals) before the first successful factory was built in Pawtucket in 1793. Proprietors of shops and country mills usually operated their enterprises directly with little of the managerial hierarchy and division of labor that would appear in the full-blown factory system. Shops lacked the factory’s sequential organization of powered machinery and its extensive mechanization through multiple stages of production.

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