Consumer choice among the freedmen who worked on tenant farms is poorly represented in the archaeological record. Though tenant farming was widespread in the first decade following the Civil War, little material has preserved from tenant farm sites. As such, this study employs a unique archival resource from the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) – a general store ledger from Alachua County, Florida, circa 1873. This analysis has grouped all documented purchases by category and price, and composed biographic profiles for each individual and household. The resulting dataset shows that purchases by tenant farmers were typically of daily consumables – e.g., tobacco and coffee – which have little archaeological signature. Therefore, when archaeological assemblages are analyzed, these expenditures are entirely absent, as are the insights into individual choices they represent. These otherwise hidden choices of consumption, revealed through this analysis, offer substantive insights into the interactions between tenant farmers and an emergent consumer society.

The Musgrove Cowpens and Trading Post (9Ch137) was a rural property central to a colonial economic system that brought deerskins and cattle to urban markets in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Mary Musgrove (born Coosaponakeesa) is a woman of Creek and English descent who owned and operated this property on Georgia's coast between 1732-1738 and 1742-1746. As an interpreter, trader, and rancher, Mary was central to economic ventures reliant on political relations between indigenous communities and colonial agents. The Musgrove site embodies a colonial landscape wherein competing strategies- the deerskin trade and cattle ranching- seemingly co-existed. My analysis of over 70,000 faunal specimens from this site shows an increasing reliance on cattle over the property's occupation, potentially revealing a household adjusting its economic strategies to environmental and political changes. This shift reflects what is known historically: livestock, over-hunting, and increasing colonial settlement impacted available species, especially coastal deer populations.

European textiles were an important aspect of the 18th century trans-Atlantic fur trade and global economy. Few examples of actual cloth have been recovered from historic archaeological contexts but a common artifact that is found archaeologically are lead seals that were attached to bundles of textiles bound for North America. These seals were mainly used to signify whether taxes had been paid on the goods in question, or to mark that quality checks had been conducted by the proper authorities. Our ongoing research focuses on the cloth bale seals excavated from Fort Ouiatenon, a fur trade post established by the French in 1717 in present-day Tippecanoe County, IN. Using these seals as indicators of cloth goods present at the fort, and comparing them to contemporaneous sites, our goal is to better understand the economic and social relations in New France between and among Native Peoples and Europeans.

The Appalachian region is often defined by its isolation from the broader United States and has historically been depicted as helplessly passive, complicated in its economic disparity from the more successful country at large. Appalachia is often framed only in terms of the region’s powerlessness and idleness in the face of economic restriction, particularly within the context of Appalachian coal company towns. Appalachian coal company towns offered a uniquely restricted economic environment that typically included the establishment of company stores and company-issued currency. Using archaeological field reports from the Canal Street Site, Church Street Site, Yanac House Site, Lower Double Street Site, and Shop Hollow Dump Site 15Lr40 as case studies, this paper examines economic agency within the material culture and oral histories of Appalachian coal towns. The focus of this paper will consider the daily resistance and agency of people living in Appalachian coal company towns from 1920-1950.

Despite the Great Depression, the logging industry of Northern Arizona boomed during the 1920s and 1930s, providing laborers and their families with steady wages and buying power. At the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Company’s temporary, Grand Canyon-area headquarters of Apex, Arizona (1928-1936), artifacts reveal that residents had access to a wide range of consumer goods. Foodstuffs and dishware from local markets, such as Flagstaff and Prescott, and global contexts, such as Norway, Uruguay, and Japan, are represented in the collection. Interestingly, a large number of artifacts originated in the Los Angeles area of California, including alcohol, ceramics, and food. This paper will explore the economic intersections between the timber, railroad, and fruit-packing industries as a way to explain the California-based products in our assemblage.

Heavily saturated consumer markets, such as downtown Springfield, Illinois in the 1880s, allowed consumers to prioritize other factors beyond basic access requirements when purchasing items. In this paper, I discuss how poverty and other social determinants of health might have influenced the selection and use of a vial of Dr. Thompson's Eye Water uncovered in the Carpenter Street Site excavations in 2015. While the medicine market of Springfield, Illinois was heavily saturated with a range of consumer medicines, some patients still experienced major choice restrictions due to economic limitations and concerns. Some consumers were unable to afford doctor or pharmacy visits, and instead relied on free clinics and "doctoring books". I argue that one of these free clinics greatly influenced the consumer profile and choices of the Mullen household, forcing members of the household to rely on medicines proven to be hazardous in an effort to maintain their health.

Comprised of state and federal censuses, city directories, and town vital records, the documentary records associated with the Hassanamesit Woods Augustus Salisbury site in Grafton, Massachusetts are not uncommon for 19th-century farmsteads. However, by researching the lives of each resident family to their full extent, several patterns in geographical and socioeconomic mobility emerged, creating a compelling image of a highly-mobile working class attempting to navigate a period of rapid socioeconomic change brought about by industrialization. This research demonstrates the interpretive potential of researching both a single property through time as well as the trajectories of the individual people who moved through it. Knowing that rural labor networks frequently extended outside of the family of the owner-operator expands our notions of what constitutes a “typical” farmstead, forcing us to reconsider the material and spatial signatures of labor on these sites.

The hacienda was an economic, social, and political institution engaged in a complex interplay with the broader cultural landscape of Mexico, transforming local environments and drastically reshaping communities. Haciendas were socially complex and were hierarchically organized according to both class and racial boundaries. Often, a dominant landowner (hacendado) occupied the highest rung of the social ladder with various classes of workers comprising the rest, many of whom were bound to the hacienda via debt. This paper presents results from an ongoing archaeological investigation of Hacienda del Rincón de Guadalupe, a colonial mining hacienda located in the municipality of Apaxco, Mexico. Drawing from both the archaeological record and surviving historical sources, we examine the interactions between land, labor, and community life at the colonial estate. We consider how the hacienda both shaped and was shaped by its constituent parts as well as responded to the broader social, political, and economic landscape.