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Paul Mullins

Indiana University Indianapolis, Anthropology, Faculty Member

University of Oulu, Humanities, Docent

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I am Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); Docent in American Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu (Finland); and Past-President of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2012-2013). In Fall 2012 I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oulu. I am author of Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture (1999) and Revolting Things: An Archaeology of Shameful Histories and Repulsive Realities (January 2021).

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University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

King's College London

Kansas State University

Stanford University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

The University of Manchester

University of Florida

Kristian Kristiansen

University of Gothenburg

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen

University of Cambridge

Yannis Hamilakis

Brown University

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Books by Paul Mullins

Revolting Things: An Archaeology of Shameful Histories and Repulsive Realities

Chapter 2: Postmemory, Monuments, and Revolting Heritage

The Price of Progress: IUPUI, the Color Line, and Urban Displacement

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by an means, electronic or mech... more No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 1 .3 × " The Walke r bu ild i ng wa s the a nch o r" × p. 36 1 . 4 × " Ta ke n Ca re of by the B la ck Co m mu ni ty" × p. 4 2 1 .5 × "We We re L ivi ng Good" × p. 4 8 1 .6 × "It wa s ju s t a ve ry, ve ry cl os e -k ni t , wa rm … p ro u d co mmu ni ty" × p. 56 1 .7 × To ha ve yo u r child re n [the re] wa s … l ike pu tti ng the m i n a Priva te s ch ool: f la n ne r h o u s e × p. 62 1 .8 × " The fi rs t ti me fo r B la ck s to pu rcha s e new h o mes bu il t fro m the g ro u nd u p a nywhe re" × p. 64

The Archaeology of Consumer Culture

Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture

Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut

Annapolis Pasts: Historic Archaeology in Annapolis, Maryland.

Papers by Paul Mullins

Empathy for the ‘Other’: Neglected Finnish Ethnographic War Photography from Occupied Soviet Territory

Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2021

This article examines a series of unsettling images from the Finnish Continuation War (1941–1944)... more This article examines a series of unsettling images from the Finnish Continuation War (1941–1944) and the memories of the war that these photographs construct for contemporary Finns. We argue that these images can be viewed through Alison Landsberg's (2004) notion of ‘prosthetic memory’, which underlines how visual media enable the acquisition of vivid memories of past events. The paper outlines how these long-ignored photographs narrate unexamined dimensions of World War II in ways that transform how Finns in particular remember the war. The images illustrate a neglected Finnish occupation of Soviet territories and the treatment of Russian civilians under Finnish rule. We argue that the images can provoke empathy for their experiences and therefor challenge traditional and nationalist Finnish war interpretations.

The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History

Historical Archaeology, 2014

This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a ... more This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a dimension of everyday life and experience that exists on the fringes of self-consciousness. Archaeologists interpret the meanings of material things in ways that have often sought to erase the ambiguities of material symbolism in conventional linear narratives, but oral memories routinely struggle with the meaning of things and underscore their complex and ambiguous meanings. The paper examines how the contributors to this volume illuminate the implications of oral memories on broader material culture scholarship both within and beyond historical archaeology.

Race and the Water: Swimming, Sewers, and Structural Violence in African America

Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, 2020

Block 60, 7/18/43." Historic photograph of Block 60, Butte Camp, Gila River, taken from a nearby ... more

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age, 2021

La importancia de los objetos inocuos: materialidad prosaica, vida cotidiana y Arqueología Histórica

by Paul Mullins and Revista Vestígios

Vestígios - Revista Latino-Americana de Arqueologia Histórica, 2020

Quizás el desafío más audaz de Arqueología Histórica y la Importancia de los Objetos Materiales f... more Quizás el desafío más audaz de Arqueología Histórica y la Importancia de los Objetos Materiales fue su definición ambiciosa de cultura material, que podría enfrentar una amplia variedad de preguntas sociales, pero los arqueólogos históricos continúan definiendo con prudencia a los datos arqueológicos, centrándose en los detalles prosaicos de la vida cotidiana y evitando bienes anómalos. Este artículo examina las implicancias de una arqueología histórica que responde a muchos de los desafíos de la compilación de Ferguson, apuntando a la materialidad en términos generales, abordando el profundo significado social de la cultura material arqueológica aparentemente mundana y elaborando una imagen reflexiva de la vida cotidiana y la materialidad.

Imagining Musical Place: Race, Heritage, and African American Musical Landscapes

Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in ... more Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in the city's segregated near-Westside, but postwar urban renewal, construction of a university campus, and interstate displacement erased almost all of those venues by the 1970s. In the early twenty-first century, the city and developers have championed new construction, and many of those projects celebrate jazz history as the heart of the near-Westside's heritage. However, the rhetorical valorization of selectively interpreted African American jazz history aspires to rationalize a half-century of erasures of African American place. Rather than acknowledging the breadth of African American expressive culture in Indianapolis' near-Westside, the city's imagination of jazz essentializes African American expressive culture to serve contemporary economic development and paint jazz as a unifying mechanism across color lines.

Imagining Conformity: Consumption and Homogeneity in the Postwar African American Suburbs

Historical Archaeology, 2017

In the wake of World War II many urbanites left cities for a suburban life that has been persiste... more In the wake of World War II many urbanites left cities for a suburban life that has been persistently derided for its apparent social, material, and class homogeneity. This paper examines the African American experience of post–World War II suburbanization and the attractions of suburban life for African America. The paper examines two suburban projects in Indianapolis, Indiana, one a “sweat equity” housing community and the other a subdivision, both of which placed consumption at the heart of postwar citizenship. Rather than frame such consumption simply in terms of resistance to anti-Black racism, the two suburban experiences illuminate the African American imagination of visual and material “sameness” and demonstrate the challenges of archaeological studies of ethnicity and stylistic distinction.

Landscapes of Chinese Immigration (Invisible Indianapolis)

Þóra Pétursdóttir & Bjørnar Olsen (2014) Imaging modern decay: The aesthetics of ruin photography. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1).

by Þóra Pétursdóttir, Michael Shanks, and Paul Mullins

Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2014

Photographs of abandoned homes, decaying towns and industrial ruins swarm the Internet. They also... more Photographs of abandoned homes, decaying towns and industrial ruins swarm the Internet. They also fill the glossy pages of art books and popular magazine issues, and are increasingly appropriating more prominent spaces in scholarly publication on modern decay and abandonment. While its popularity speaks to its attractiveness, this proliferating ruin imagery has also become the target of harsh criticism from both con- cerned scholars and people affected by ruination. To them much of this is little but “ruin porn”: a superficial and one-eyed portrayal of urban decay that turns social and material misery into something seductive and aesthetically pleasing. This article takes a different position. Speaking from an archaeological perspective, and especially the archaeology of the contemporary past, it argues that the new engagement with ruin photography rather calls for a reconsideration and appreciation of the role of photography; not merely as a means of documentation but also as an interactive and attentive way to approach things themselves. By scrutinizing what the critics have claimed to be the fallacies of the image (its selectivity, timelessness, superficiality and tendency to aestheticize), and by emphasizing ruin photography as an engagement with things, the article aims to show that it is precisely the alleged shortcomings that make photography a valuable method in a new approach to things and ruins.

British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery: Creamware Marketing in Nineteenth-Century Northern Finland. International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2013)

by Vesa-Pekka Herva, Paul Mullins, Timo Ylimaunu, Titta Kallio-Seppä, Risto Nurmi, Teija Oikarinen, and Markku Kuorilehto

In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Ou... more In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Oulu in northern Finland. Excavations of the merchant’s stock recovered over a hundred kilograms of ceramics that was almost entirely composed of undecorated creamware, a ware and decorative type whose popularity had faded significantly by the 1820’s. The assemblage reveals the global complexities in the international ceramics trade in the early nineteenth century, provides insight into some of the massproduced commodities reaching geographically peripheral markets, underscores distinctive European market influences, and illuminates marketing and social practices that shaped consumption in markets like Oulu.

Punk Archaeology and the Mainstream

The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

by Nigel Jeffries and Paul Mullins

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Jan 1, 2012

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goo... more This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from nineteenth-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early nineteenth-century material patterns and ideological practices that were wellestablished in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.

The Banality of Everyday Consumption: Collecting Contemporary Urban Materiality

Museum Anthropology 36(1):46-50., 2014

This article examines what defines contemporary urban materiality, focusing on the politics of ba... more This article examines what defines contemporary urban materiality, focusing on the politics of banality and everyday life and examining how museums might collect quotidian material things. Rather than engage in guesswork about what future audiences will define as early 21st-century urban significance, the article argues for a curatorial focus on the apparently prosaic dimensions of urban materiality. Such a curatorial strategy will use commonplace material things to illuminate the contemporary imagination and social construction of urban life by focusing on the things contemporary people reduced to banality and consigned to the boundaries of consciousness.

British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery: Creamware Marketing in Nineteenth-Century Northern Finland

by Paul Mullins and Timo Ylimaunu

International Journal of Historical Archaeology. With Timo Ylimaunu, Alasdair Brooks, Titta Kallio-Seppä, Markku Kuorilehto, Risto Nurmi, Teija Oikarinen, Vesa-Pekka Herva, and James Symonds, Aug 2013

Revolting Things: An Archaeology of Shameful Histories and Repulsive Realities

Chapter 2: Postmemory, Monuments, and Revolting Heritage

The Price of Progress: IUPUI, the Color Line, and Urban Displacement

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by an means, electronic or mech... more No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by an means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 1 .3 × " The Walke r bu ild i ng wa s the a nch o r" × p. 36 1 . 4 × " Ta ke n Ca re of by the B la ck Co m mu ni ty" × p. 4 2 1 .5 × "We We re L ivi ng Good" × p. 4 8 1 .6 × "It wa s ju s t a ve ry, ve ry cl os e -k ni t , wa rm … p ro u d co mmu ni ty" × p. 56 1 .7 × To ha ve yo u r child re n [the re] wa s … l ike pu tti ng the m i n a Priva te s ch ool: f la n ne r h o u s e × p. 62 1 .8 × " The fi rs t ti me fo r B la ck s to pu rcha s e new h o mes bu il t fro m the g ro u nd u p a nywhe re" × p. 64

The Archaeology of Consumer Culture

Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture

Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut

Annapolis Pasts: Historic Archaeology in Annapolis, Maryland.

Empathy for the ‘Other’: Neglected Finnish Ethnographic War Photography from Occupied Soviet Territory

Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2021

This article examines a series of unsettling images from the Finnish Continuation War (1941–1944)... more This article examines a series of unsettling images from the Finnish Continuation War (1941–1944) and the memories of the war that these photographs construct for contemporary Finns. We argue that these images can be viewed through Alison Landsberg's (2004) notion of ‘prosthetic memory’, which underlines how visual media enable the acquisition of vivid memories of past events. The paper outlines how these long-ignored photographs narrate unexamined dimensions of World War II in ways that transform how Finns in particular remember the war. The images illustrate a neglected Finnish occupation of Soviet territories and the treatment of Russian civilians under Finnish rule. We argue that the images can provoke empathy for their experiences and therefor challenge traditional and nationalist Finnish war interpretations.

The Rhetoric of Things: Historical Archaeology and Oral History

Historical Archaeology, 2014

This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a ... more This paper examines precisely how objects assume meanings in archaeological interpretation and a dimension of everyday life and experience that exists on the fringes of self-consciousness. Archaeologists interpret the meanings of material things in ways that have often sought to erase the ambiguities of material symbolism in conventional linear narratives, but oral memories routinely struggle with the meaning of things and underscore their complex and ambiguous meanings. The paper examines how the contributors to this volume illuminate the implications of oral memories on broader material culture scholarship both within and beyond historical archaeology.

Race and the Water: Swimming, Sewers, and Structural Violence in African America

Archaeologies of Violence and Privilege, 2020

Block 60, 7/18/43." Historic photograph of Block 60, Butte Camp, Gila River, taken from a nearby ... more

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age, 2021

La importancia de los objetos inocuos: materialidad prosaica, vida cotidiana y Arqueología Histórica

by Paul Mullins and Revista Vestígios

Vestígios - Revista Latino-Americana de Arqueologia Histórica, 2020

Quizás el desafío más audaz de Arqueología Histórica y la Importancia de los Objetos Materiales f... more Quizás el desafío más audaz de Arqueología Histórica y la Importancia de los Objetos Materiales fue su definición ambiciosa de cultura material, que podría enfrentar una amplia variedad de preguntas sociales, pero los arqueólogos históricos continúan definiendo con prudencia a los datos arqueológicos, centrándose en los detalles prosaicos de la vida cotidiana y evitando bienes anómalos. Este artículo examina las implicancias de una arqueología histórica que responde a muchos de los desafíos de la compilación de Ferguson, apuntando a la materialidad en términos generales, abordando el profundo significado social de la cultura material arqueológica aparentemente mundana y elaborando una imagen reflexiva de la vida cotidiana y la materialidad.

Imagining Musical Place: Race, Heritage, and African American Musical Landscapes

Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in ... more Indianapolis, Indiana, once had a rich range of African American music and performance spaces in the city's segregated near-Westside, but postwar urban renewal, construction of a university campus, and interstate displacement erased almost all of those venues by the 1970s. In the early twenty-first century, the city and developers have championed new construction, and many of those projects celebrate jazz history as the heart of the near-Westside's heritage. However, the rhetorical valorization of selectively interpreted African American jazz history aspires to rationalize a half-century of erasures of African American place. Rather than acknowledging the breadth of African American expressive culture in Indianapolis' near-Westside, the city's imagination of jazz essentializes African American expressive culture to serve contemporary economic development and paint jazz as a unifying mechanism across color lines.

Imagining Conformity: Consumption and Homogeneity in the Postwar African American Suburbs

Historical Archaeology, 2017

In the wake of World War II many urbanites left cities for a suburban life that has been persiste... more In the wake of World War II many urbanites left cities for a suburban life that has been persistently derided for its apparent social, material, and class homogeneity. This paper examines the African American experience of post–World War II suburbanization and the attractions of suburban life for African America. The paper examines two suburban projects in Indianapolis, Indiana, one a “sweat equity” housing community and the other a subdivision, both of which placed consumption at the heart of postwar citizenship. Rather than frame such consumption simply in terms of resistance to anti-Black racism, the two suburban experiences illuminate the African American imagination of visual and material “sameness” and demonstrate the challenges of archaeological studies of ethnicity and stylistic distinction.

Landscapes of Chinese Immigration (Invisible Indianapolis)

Þóra Pétursdóttir & Bjørnar Olsen (2014) Imaging modern decay: The aesthetics of ruin photography. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(1).

by Þóra Pétursdóttir, Michael Shanks, and Paul Mullins

Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2014

Photographs of abandoned homes, decaying towns and industrial ruins swarm the Internet. They also... more Photographs of abandoned homes, decaying towns and industrial ruins swarm the Internet. They also fill the glossy pages of art books and popular magazine issues, and are increasingly appropriating more prominent spaces in scholarly publication on modern decay and abandonment. While its popularity speaks to its attractiveness, this proliferating ruin imagery has also become the target of harsh criticism from both con- cerned scholars and people affected by ruination. To them much of this is little but “ruin porn”: a superficial and one-eyed portrayal of urban decay that turns social and material misery into something seductive and aesthetically pleasing. This article takes a different position. Speaking from an archaeological perspective, and especially the archaeology of the contemporary past, it argues that the new engagement with ruin photography rather calls for a reconsideration and appreciation of the role of photography; not merely as a means of documentation but also as an interactive and attentive way to approach things themselves. By scrutinizing what the critics have claimed to be the fallacies of the image (its selectivity, timelessness, superficiality and tendency to aestheticize), and by emphasizing ruin photography as an engagement with things, the article aims to show that it is precisely the alleged shortcomings that make photography a valuable method in a new approach to things and ruins.

British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery: Creamware Marketing in Nineteenth-Century Northern Finland. International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2013)

by Vesa-Pekka Herva, Paul Mullins, Timo Ylimaunu, Titta Kallio-Seppä, Risto Nurmi, Teija Oikarinen, and Markku Kuorilehto

In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Ou... more In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Oulu in northern Finland. Excavations of the merchant’s stock recovered over a hundred kilograms of ceramics that was almost entirely composed of undecorated creamware, a ware and decorative type whose popularity had faded significantly by the 1820’s. The assemblage reveals the global complexities in the international ceramics trade in the early nineteenth century, provides insight into some of the massproduced commodities reaching geographically peripheral markets, underscores distinctive European market influences, and illuminates marketing and social practices that shaped consumption in markets like Oulu.

Punk Archaeology and the Mainstream

The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

by Nigel Jeffries and Paul Mullins

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Jan 1, 2012

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goo... more This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from nineteenth-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early nineteenth-century material patterns and ideological practices that were wellestablished in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.

The Banality of Everyday Consumption: Collecting Contemporary Urban Materiality

Museum Anthropology 36(1):46-50., 2014

This article examines what defines contemporary urban materiality, focusing on the politics of ba... more This article examines what defines contemporary urban materiality, focusing on the politics of banality and everyday life and examining how museums might collect quotidian material things. Rather than engage in guesswork about what future audiences will define as early 21st-century urban significance, the article argues for a curatorial focus on the apparently prosaic dimensions of urban materiality. Such a curatorial strategy will use commonplace material things to illuminate the contemporary imagination and social construction of urban life by focusing on the things contemporary people reduced to banality and consigned to the boundaries of consciousness.

British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery: Creamware Marketing in Nineteenth-Century Northern Finland

by Paul Mullins and Timo Ylimaunu

International Journal of Historical Archaeology. With Timo Ylimaunu, Alasdair Brooks, Titta Kallio-Seppä, Markku Kuorilehto, Risto Nurmi, Teija Oikarinen, Vesa-Pekka Herva, and James Symonds, Aug 2013

Memory of Barracks: World War II German ‘Little Berlins’ and post-war urbanization in Northern Finnish towns

Scandinavian Journal of History, Jul 1, 2013

Race and Prosaic Materiality: The Archaeology of Contemporary Urban Space and the Invisible Colour Line

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, eds. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini, pp.508-520., 2013

Race has long been rendered invisible in everyday materiality or remade to mask the relationship ... more Race has long been rendered invisible in everyday materiality or remade to mask the relationship between material things and the color line. This paper focuses on a public sculpture project in Indianapolis, Indiana that aspired to reinterpret a little-recognized 1890s statue of an Emancipated captive. The case reveals how racist privileges and African-American heritage are at the heart of American experience even as the racial dimensions of seemingly mundane materiality are unseen or concealed, even in the case of a monumental public statue. The Indianapolis experience reflects the ways many communities struggle to simultaneously remember, displace, and memorialize African-American heritage and race in cities where there appear to be no contemporary material traces of the color line.

The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age

This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goo... more This paper examines Gilded Age affluence by focusing on apparently inconsequential decorative goods and assessing how such goods were part of shared transatlantic patterns that reached beyond the Gilded Age and the confines of urban America. The paper focuses on figurines recovered from 19th-century sites in London and underscores how the American Gilded Age amplified many early 19th-century material patterns and ideological practices that were well-established in the United Kingdom and continued after the height of Gilded Age affluence. This study examines the symbolism of such aesthetically eclectic goods and focuses on the socially grounded imagination that was invested in them borrowing from dominant ideologies and idiosyncratic personal experiences alike.

Race, Displacement, and Twentieth-Century University Landscapes: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal and Urban Universities

The 20th-century urban landscape was forged through a series of state-sanctioned displacements th... more The 20th-century urban landscape was forged through a series of state-sanctioned displacements that routinely took African Americans as their primary target. Many American universities profited directly from the removal of urban communities, and many campus landscapes were carved largely if not wholly from such communities. Nevertheless, relatively few institutions have acknowledged that heritage, and many continue to expand into surrounding neighborhoods with the same rationalizations developed in Victorian slum discourses. This paper examines archaeology’s potential role in confronting the concrete processes that created urban campuses, focusing on the near-Westside of Indianapolis, Indiana where urban renewal made way for the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). We examine how archaeology can contribute to a public acknowledgement of institutional complicity in urban displacements and probe how such profound and recent transformations are systematically effaced and ignored on many campuses that continue to reach into neighboring communities.

The Importance of Innocuous Things: Prosaic Materiality, Everyday Life, and Historical Archaeology

Perhaps the boldest challenge of Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things was... more Perhaps the boldest challenge of Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things was its ambitious definition of material culture that could confront a vast range of social questions, but historical archaeologists continue to circumspectly define archaeological data, focus on the prosaic details of everyday life, and avoid anomalous goods. This paper examines the implications of a historical archaeology that answers many of the collection’s challenges, taking aim on materiality in broad terms addressing the profound social significance of apparently mundane archaeological material culture and crafting a reflective picture of everyday life and materiality.

The Archaeology of Consumption

A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is per... more A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally
powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods-dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.