Welcome to the Archaeology and Material Culture pages.  I am an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), where I teach Human Origins and Prehistory (Anthropology A103), Survey of Applied Anthropology (A201), Historical Archaeology (P330), Popular Culture (A460), Archaeological Theory and Method  (P402), Senior Seminar (ANTH 413), and Modern Material Culture (A460).  I also teach Field Work in Archaeology (P405), an archaeological field school that is focused on the Ransom Place Historic District and surrounding areas in Indianapolis' near-Westside.  Ransom Place, which neighbors IUPUI, has been a predominately African-American neighborhood since the late-nineteenth century.  For more information on the project and field school, visit the Ransom Place page.

My research is broadly concerned with examining how marginalized consumers--such as African Americans, working classes, Southerners, and contemporary subcultures--can criticize consumer culture's inequalities while they also press for privileges within that very society.  On the one hand, I am interested in how consumers use consumption to secure some measure of self-determination.  For instance, many African Americans often consumed model genteel goods because they understood themselves to be full Americans and did not accept the racist notion that American and Black were exclusive identities.  On the other hand, I am interested in how mass-produced objects provide a range of possible meanings that can variously accommodate resistance, simply reproduce existing inequality, or--more commonly--do both of these things.  Along these lines, I have examined Barbie material culture to probe the historically complex meanings the doll's producers have forged since 1959:  at various moments and in particular consumers' hands, Barbies have been quite visionary, politically indecisive, or utterly reactionary.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

I am currently completing the study Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (University Press of Florida, expected May 2008).  The book uses doughnuts as a mechanism to examine consumer culture’s development over the last century-and-a-half.  Once a modestly consumed ethnic food introduced by Dutch immigrants, doughnuts were served to the troops in World War I and quickly became mass-produced indulgences after the war.  By the end of World War II, doughnut marketers blanketed the nation behind a wave of chains led by North Carolina’s Krispy Kreme in 1937 and Massachusetts’ Dunkin’ Donuts in 1950.  However, in the past 20 years doughnuts have come under attack by a host of moralizing dietary challenges and competition from forces including bagels and bourgeois coffee house chains.  Many doughnut critics cast food as a moral battleground:  Doughnuts loom as one more horrid substance we shovel into our collective mouths, symbols of Americans’ ever-increasing laziness and obesity.  In the face of the “low carb” diet movement some observers--and even a few doughnut makers--have divined the doughnuts’ imminent demise.  Doughnut consumption reflects the dominant currents in twentieth-century marketing, the dynamic meanings assumed by any one commodity, the nationalist symbolism projected onto goods and marketers, and the moralizing that a host of observers associate with particular consumption patterns.  See my piece in Ambidextrous and an article from San Jose Mercury News for more on the project.

(Above) Doughnuts' first moment of fame was during World War I, when Salvation Army "lassies" distributed them in the trenches (postcard from author's collection).

My ongoing research project is the long-term study of race and racism in Indianapolis' near-Westside.  Archaeological research focused on the Ransom Place Historic District and surrounding neighborhoods is examining everyday life, materialism, and African-American culture since the late-nineteenth century.  Through a 2001 grant from the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Initiative, I began an archival survey of the community that once lived in the near-Westside neighborhoods that are now part of the IUPUI campus.  This survey has systematically inventoried the number of neighborhood residents since the 1850's, their cultural identity, their occupations, where they lived, and the stores, workplaces, churches, and schools that were part of this community.  The research has collected primary records, such as censuses and city directories, records oral histories of community residents, and inventoried the vast range of social institutions in these neighborhoods, such as churches.  A 2004 IU Home Pages article discusses the project

The campus survey project is summarized in "Engagement and the Color Line: Race, Renewal and Public Archaeology in the Urban Midwest" (Urban Anthropology 32(2)[2003]:205-229), "African-American Heritage in a Multicultural Community: An Archaeology of Race, Culture, and Consumption" in Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology (Blackwell, 2004), and "Racializing the commonplace landscape: an archaeology of urban renewal along the color line" (World Archaeology, 2006).  My paper "Ideology, Power, and Capitalism: the Historical Archaeology of Consumption" appeared in The Blackwell Companion to Social Archaeology, edited by Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel (Blackwell, 2004).  With Marlys Pearson, I am the co-author of "Domesticating Barbie:  An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology," which we published in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology in December 1999.  With Terry Klein, I am the co-author of "Archaeological Views of Southern Culture and Urban Life"  in Archaeologies of Southern Urban Landscapes (edited by Amy Young, 2000).  I am the co-author with Robert Paynter of "Representing Colonizers: An Archaeology of Creolization, Ethnogenesis, and Indigenous Material Culture among the Haida" (Historical Archaeology, 2000).  My paper "Imagining Blackness:  Archaeological and Cinematic Visions of African-American Life" appeared in Box Office Archaeology: Refining Hollywood's Portrayals of the Past (Left Coast Press, 2007).  My papers "Excavating America’s Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindicationist Archaeologies" and “`The strange and unusual':  The Material and Social Dimensions of Overseas Chinese Identity" will appear in Historical Archaeology in 2008.

Last updated March 11, 2008