Christina J. Hodge | Brown University (original) (raw)

Articles by Christina J. Hodge

Historical Archaeology, 2021

Materialities of faith and gentility drew enslaved Africans and African Americans into the produc... more Materialities of faith and gentility drew enslaved Africans and African Americans into the production of white male privilege at one of its most iconic incubators, colonial Harvard College. During the long 18th century, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution was an intercultural, interracial, intergenerational space of becoming. Archaeological finds and documentary archives clarify how gentility was moralized in this religiously orthodox community, emerging as a tool of racialization and masculine gendering, as well as of status. This article focuses on experiences of the hybrid institutional/domestic spaces of Wadsworth House (the dwelling of university presidents and their households) and student chambers. In these intimate contexts, intersectionality and the concept of "homeplace" strengthen perceptions of African subjectivities within an overwhelmingly English archive. This study is salient to America's long history of respectability politics and the gendering and racializing of privilege. It produces a counter-narrative/archaeology by studying materialities of early modern white male privilege through black feminist theories.

Museum Anthropology, 2018

This paper introduces a structured interdisciplinary framework for collections‐based learning. Th... more This paper introduces a structured interdisciplinary framework for collections‐based learning. The scaffolding combines visual analysis and multisensory material properties analysis with anthropological understandings of culture, context, and materiality. It is proposed in critical response both to visual approaches of art history/critique and to new materialist approaches that elevate the physical properties of matter. Both visual and materialist approaches tend toward presentism and decontextualization. They intrinsically privilege the viewer's standpoint and interpretations over those of makers, users, and descendant community members, producing a “colonizing” effect. This outcome does not serve anthropology's decolonizing intentions of cultural relativism and context—or the “twenty‐first‐century skills” with which anthropology aligns. An anthropological understanding of material culture can enhance visual and material approaches by culturally contextualizing the multisensory experience of things and teaching cultural relativism. This paper proposes such an approach: semistructured experiential observation that unites aspects of formal art historical analysis, multisensory observation, and reflexive, polysemous cultural interpretation. The framework offers an interdisciplinary, decolonizing method of object study. [anthropology, materiality, object‐based learning, pedagogy, visuality]

Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a unique setting through which to explore cul... more Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a unique setting through which to explore cultural changes within 17th- and 18th-century America, including shifting foodways and consumerisms. Harvard’s early leaders constructed their collegiate community by controlling many aspects of scholars’ lives,
including their eating, drinking, and purchasing practices. Between 1650 and 1800, the college operated the “Buttery,” a commissary where students supplemented meager institutional meals by purchasing snacks and sundries. As a marketplace, the buttery organized material practices of buying and selling as people and things flowed through it. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveals how college officials attempted to regulate, but lagged behind, improvisational student consumerisms. The buttery market functioned both as a technology of social control and an opportunity for individual agency, providing broader lessons for consumer studies.

Journal of Social Archaeology 13(1):122–149, 2013

In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harv... more In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harvard University founded its Medical School in 1783. Excavated materials from a trash feature at Holden Chapel, site of Harvard’s early medical lectures, include anatomized human remains. There, new regimes of medical authority were created through the manipulation of bodies via transgressive practices of dissection, display, and disposal. Existing studies of nineteenth-century cadavers strongly focus on their emotional and evidentiary qualities. Close attention should also be paid to instructional bodies. Instructional human remains, uncannily both subject and object, person and specimen, were distinct from other kinds of bodies – and distinctly troubling. The Holden collection historicizes concepts of the body, permits an archaeology of early medical authority, and destabilizes archaeologists’ usual approaches to human remains, corporeality, and the individual.

To make domestic heritage sites useful to their communities, we must acknowledge discourses, defi... more To make domestic heritage sites useful to their communities, we must acknowledge discourses, define structures and critically examine the interplay of our own and others' practices of commemoration. How do agendas of remembering and forgetting intersect at historic dwellings? These issues are explored through the Elihu Akin House, a late eighteenth-century house museum in a New England coastal village. Existing site narratives are dissected through the social theories of Peirce and Bourdieu, revealing nostalgia as a structuring element of cultural logics. The author argues that mechanisms of nostalgia, approached critically, offer interpretive common ground for memory work at historic homes (and beyond). As a material and emotional discourse, nostalgia binds memory, place and experience. This study proposes a new model for heritage-makers seeking to alter site narratives without undermining a site's established worth. They might identify then disrupt pre-existing nostalgic narratives, finally bridging those disruptions through additional, critical nostalgic discourses. New and established narratives can coexist, in harmony and in tension, and visitors should be invited into the interpretive process.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, Jan 1, 2011

View all references, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our o... more View all references, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our own professional experiences, we use this outlet to reflect on the intersection of public and civic agendas, heritage management and social theory at historic homes and house museums. ...

Beneath the Ivory Tower, 2010

Early American Studies: An …, Jan 1, 2010

How did the early modern consumer economy transmit consumption-based social identities of status ... more How did the early modern consumer economy transmit consumption-based social identities of status and gender and standards of gentility, refinement, and propriety? How and why did new fashions become common necessities? With these issues in mind, three households are considered in two archaeological studies of colonial Newport: the Pratts, Tates, and Browns. Archaeologists use artifacts and organic remains alongside visual, oral, and written records to reveal life and experience in these households. In the following articles we will address, archaeologically, daily experiences of status, identity, and community in Newport, an early modern commercial town. The sources we as archaeologists use may be the same as those used by other disciplines, but a focus on things distinctly shapes both the questions we ask and the answers we find.

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Jan 1, 2010

The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part... more The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early modern transformations, in particular those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. This study of Elizabeth Pratt has considered dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Interdisciplinary study of Pratt's possessions and decision making suggests that she did not emulate well-to-do neighbors, nor did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town. Pratt's choices speak to developing middling discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. This study proposes that "piecemeal" refinement was not an epiphenomenonal paradox. Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth century and constitutive of social values in the long term.

Archaeologies, Jan 1, 2009

This paper reflects on processes of memory- and history-making at the Elihu Akin House, a histori... more This paper reflects on processes of memory- and history-making at the Elihu Akin House, a historic site in a New England coastal village. Since the late 18th century, the house has been a place of dwelling and deliberate recollection. Recent archaeological excavations, a 1922 silent movie, and an Akin son’s 1778 letter represent multiple media, periods, and perspectives, for which the house serves as a touchstone. These three occasions comprise an archive of nostalgia. Remembrance is repeatedly filtered through and entangled with in-process experiences. The material and emotional are mutually constituted as the house is reinvested with significance. Understanding these processes has implications as the site is developed into a heritage center striving to present not only local and regional history, but also the methods and challenges of heritage management.

Contextualizes ceramic possession in mid-18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, through an analysis ... more Contextualizes ceramic possession in mid-18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, through an analysis of newspapers and probate lists, providing background for the interpretation of archaeological remains from a mid-18th-century house lot in Newport that is now part of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard site. The interpretation of ceramic evidence is approached through notions of tediousness, taste, and distinction. The language of contemporary documents highlights differences in the perception of different ware types and forms over time; references to stoneware and creamware, for example, did not meet expectations. The relationship between levels of ceramic marking in texts and ceramics' perceived social significance is not always linear. Further research may elucidate how Newporters used ceramics to create, maintain, and transform class-based (and other) identities.

Historical Archaeology, Jan 1, 2005

Recent archaeological interpretations of colonial Native American cemeteries in southeastern New ... more Recent archaeological interpretations of colonial Native American cemeteries in southeastern New England typically focus on the interplay of resistance and accommodation and creative reimagining of Native practices in the face of Anglo-American oppression. Resistance is tracked primarily via "traditional" mortuary ceremonialism. The Waldo Farm cemetery in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, is unlike any other archaeologically known colonial Native burial ground in the region. Native burial practices there seem indistinguishable from local Anglo-American practices. How may one approach the interpretation of such a site? Postcolonial concepts such as hybridization, mimicry, and appropriation, which emphasize the interdependence of domination and resistance, are used. The local cultural context, especially the religious context, of the Waldo site may explain mortuary choices there.

Books by Christina J. Hodge

Chapters by Christina J. Hodge

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment, 2021

Economic objects are central to understanding the rapidly globalizing world of circulating things... more Economic objects are central to understanding the rapidly globalizing
world of circulating things and people that characterized the Enlightenment
period (1600–1760). Scholars grapple especially with issues of exchange,
commodification, and consumption—foundational processes to the Western
invention of economic objects and economies during the early modern period.
Here, the cultural histories of two emblematic “economic objects”—coins
and shell beads—are reviewed. Through these goods, changing attitudes
towards exchangeable things across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
are exposed. Particular attention is paid to the ways such objects interrelated
economic and noneconomic regimes of value to produce social effects such as
structural inequality and ethnogenesis.

The Poetics of Processing: Memory Formation, Identity, and the Handling of the Dead, 2020

Nineteenth-century body-processing communicated anatomical knowledge through both production and ... more Nineteenth-century body-processing communicated anatomical knowledge through both production and circulation (of lectures, specimens, doctors, etc.). These anatomical poetics brought the inside out in a symbolically charged act of
bodily exposure over which anatomists held substantial, but not complete, power (Hodge 2013, 128; Hodge, Morgan, and Rousseau 2017, 132; Stewart 2007, 127). While obviously less than individual persons, specimens simultaneously became more than human bodies: more knowable, more stable, more perfect, easier to control (sensu Stewart 2007, 122–124). The illusory nature of this ordering of flesh and time introduced paradox into science-based processes of knowing. Resulting instability is manifested in historic discomfiture with—or outright rejection of—anatomical dissection, as well as in its practical exploitation of marginalized people (Blakely and Harrington 1997; Capozzoli 1997; Crossland 2009a; Davidson 2007; Fabian 2010; Nystrom 2017). While seeking approximations to living flesh, anatomists further distanced processed remains from their former personhood. This practice reconceived an older narrative of body parts as inherently disordered, inverting their significance. Serving the larger project of modernity, specimens were put to work in a new narrative of ordered medical knowledge to which a growing class of largely white, male, professional, medical practitioners had near-exclusive access. These poetics comprised a material discourse that reinforced emergent claims to medical authority, hence social power.

Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, 2015

Historical Archaeology, 2021

Materialities of faith and gentility drew enslaved Africans and African Americans into the produc... more Materialities of faith and gentility drew enslaved Africans and African Americans into the production of white male privilege at one of its most iconic incubators, colonial Harvard College. During the long 18th century, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, institution was an intercultural, interracial, intergenerational space of becoming. Archaeological finds and documentary archives clarify how gentility was moralized in this religiously orthodox community, emerging as a tool of racialization and masculine gendering, as well as of status. This article focuses on experiences of the hybrid institutional/domestic spaces of Wadsworth House (the dwelling of university presidents and their households) and student chambers. In these intimate contexts, intersectionality and the concept of "homeplace" strengthen perceptions of African subjectivities within an overwhelmingly English archive. This study is salient to America's long history of respectability politics and the gendering and racializing of privilege. It produces a counter-narrative/archaeology by studying materialities of early modern white male privilege through black feminist theories.

Museum Anthropology, 2018

This paper introduces a structured interdisciplinary framework for collections‐based learning. Th... more This paper introduces a structured interdisciplinary framework for collections‐based learning. The scaffolding combines visual analysis and multisensory material properties analysis with anthropological understandings of culture, context, and materiality. It is proposed in critical response both to visual approaches of art history/critique and to new materialist approaches that elevate the physical properties of matter. Both visual and materialist approaches tend toward presentism and decontextualization. They intrinsically privilege the viewer's standpoint and interpretations over those of makers, users, and descendant community members, producing a “colonizing” effect. This outcome does not serve anthropology's decolonizing intentions of cultural relativism and context—or the “twenty‐first‐century skills” with which anthropology aligns. An anthropological understanding of material culture can enhance visual and material approaches by culturally contextualizing the multisensory experience of things and teaching cultural relativism. This paper proposes such an approach: semistructured experiential observation that unites aspects of formal art historical analysis, multisensory observation, and reflexive, polysemous cultural interpretation. The framework offers an interdisciplinary, decolonizing method of object study. [anthropology, materiality, object‐based learning, pedagogy, visuality]

Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a unique setting through which to explore cul... more Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a unique setting through which to explore cultural changes within 17th- and 18th-century America, including shifting foodways and consumerisms. Harvard’s early leaders constructed their collegiate community by controlling many aspects of scholars’ lives,
including their eating, drinking, and purchasing practices. Between 1650 and 1800, the college operated the “Buttery,” a commissary where students supplemented meager institutional meals by purchasing snacks and sundries. As a marketplace, the buttery organized material practices of buying and selling as people and things flowed through it. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveals how college officials attempted to regulate, but lagged behind, improvisational student consumerisms. The buttery market functioned both as a technology of social control and an opportunity for individual agency, providing broader lessons for consumer studies.

Journal of Social Archaeology 13(1):122–149, 2013

In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harv... more In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harvard University founded its Medical School in 1783. Excavated materials from a trash feature at Holden Chapel, site of Harvard’s early medical lectures, include anatomized human remains. There, new regimes of medical authority were created through the manipulation of bodies via transgressive practices of dissection, display, and disposal. Existing studies of nineteenth-century cadavers strongly focus on their emotional and evidentiary qualities. Close attention should also be paid to instructional bodies. Instructional human remains, uncannily both subject and object, person and specimen, were distinct from other kinds of bodies – and distinctly troubling. The Holden collection historicizes concepts of the body, permits an archaeology of early medical authority, and destabilizes archaeologists’ usual approaches to human remains, corporeality, and the individual.

To make domestic heritage sites useful to their communities, we must acknowledge discourses, defi... more To make domestic heritage sites useful to their communities, we must acknowledge discourses, define structures and critically examine the interplay of our own and others' practices of commemoration. How do agendas of remembering and forgetting intersect at historic dwellings? These issues are explored through the Elihu Akin House, a late eighteenth-century house museum in a New England coastal village. Existing site narratives are dissected through the social theories of Peirce and Bourdieu, revealing nostalgia as a structuring element of cultural logics. The author argues that mechanisms of nostalgia, approached critically, offer interpretive common ground for memory work at historic homes (and beyond). As a material and emotional discourse, nostalgia binds memory, place and experience. This study proposes a new model for heritage-makers seeking to alter site narratives without undermining a site's established worth. They might identify then disrupt pre-existing nostalgic narratives, finally bridging those disruptions through additional, critical nostalgic discourses. New and established narratives can coexist, in harmony and in tension, and visitors should be invited into the interpretive process.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, Jan 1, 2011

View all references, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our o... more View all references, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our own professional experiences, we use this outlet to reflect on the intersection of public and civic agendas, heritage management and social theory at historic homes and house museums. ...

Beneath the Ivory Tower, 2010

Early American Studies: An …, Jan 1, 2010

How did the early modern consumer economy transmit consumption-based social identities of status ... more How did the early modern consumer economy transmit consumption-based social identities of status and gender and standards of gentility, refinement, and propriety? How and why did new fashions become common necessities? With these issues in mind, three households are considered in two archaeological studies of colonial Newport: the Pratts, Tates, and Browns. Archaeologists use artifacts and organic remains alongside visual, oral, and written records to reveal life and experience in these households. In the following articles we will address, archaeologically, daily experiences of status, identity, and community in Newport, an early modern commercial town. The sources we as archaeologists use may be the same as those used by other disciplines, but a focus on things distinctly shapes both the questions we ask and the answers we find.

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Jan 1, 2010

The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part... more The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early modern transformations, in particular those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. This study of Elizabeth Pratt has considered dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Interdisciplinary study of Pratt's possessions and decision making suggests that she did not emulate well-to-do neighbors, nor did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town. Pratt's choices speak to developing middling discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. This study proposes that "piecemeal" refinement was not an epiphenomenonal paradox. Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth century and constitutive of social values in the long term.

Archaeologies, Jan 1, 2009

This paper reflects on processes of memory- and history-making at the Elihu Akin House, a histori... more This paper reflects on processes of memory- and history-making at the Elihu Akin House, a historic site in a New England coastal village. Since the late 18th century, the house has been a place of dwelling and deliberate recollection. Recent archaeological excavations, a 1922 silent movie, and an Akin son’s 1778 letter represent multiple media, periods, and perspectives, for which the house serves as a touchstone. These three occasions comprise an archive of nostalgia. Remembrance is repeatedly filtered through and entangled with in-process experiences. The material and emotional are mutually constituted as the house is reinvested with significance. Understanding these processes has implications as the site is developed into a heritage center striving to present not only local and regional history, but also the methods and challenges of heritage management.

Contextualizes ceramic possession in mid-18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, through an analysis ... more Contextualizes ceramic possession in mid-18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, through an analysis of newspapers and probate lists, providing background for the interpretation of archaeological remains from a mid-18th-century house lot in Newport that is now part of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard site. The interpretation of ceramic evidence is approached through notions of tediousness, taste, and distinction. The language of contemporary documents highlights differences in the perception of different ware types and forms over time; references to stoneware and creamware, for example, did not meet expectations. The relationship between levels of ceramic marking in texts and ceramics' perceived social significance is not always linear. Further research may elucidate how Newporters used ceramics to create, maintain, and transform class-based (and other) identities.

Historical Archaeology, Jan 1, 2005

Recent archaeological interpretations of colonial Native American cemeteries in southeastern New ... more Recent archaeological interpretations of colonial Native American cemeteries in southeastern New England typically focus on the interplay of resistance and accommodation and creative reimagining of Native practices in the face of Anglo-American oppression. Resistance is tracked primarily via "traditional" mortuary ceremonialism. The Waldo Farm cemetery in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, is unlike any other archaeologically known colonial Native burial ground in the region. Native burial practices there seem indistinguishable from local Anglo-American practices. How may one approach the interpretation of such a site? Postcolonial concepts such as hybridization, mimicry, and appropriation, which emphasize the interdependence of domination and resistance, are used. The local cultural context, especially the religious context, of the Waldo site may explain mortuary choices there.

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment, 2021

Economic objects are central to understanding the rapidly globalizing world of circulating things... more Economic objects are central to understanding the rapidly globalizing
world of circulating things and people that characterized the Enlightenment
period (1600–1760). Scholars grapple especially with issues of exchange,
commodification, and consumption—foundational processes to the Western
invention of economic objects and economies during the early modern period.
Here, the cultural histories of two emblematic “economic objects”—coins
and shell beads—are reviewed. Through these goods, changing attitudes
towards exchangeable things across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
are exposed. Particular attention is paid to the ways such objects interrelated
economic and noneconomic regimes of value to produce social effects such as
structural inequality and ethnogenesis.

The Poetics of Processing: Memory Formation, Identity, and the Handling of the Dead, 2020

Nineteenth-century body-processing communicated anatomical knowledge through both production and ... more Nineteenth-century body-processing communicated anatomical knowledge through both production and circulation (of lectures, specimens, doctors, etc.). These anatomical poetics brought the inside out in a symbolically charged act of
bodily exposure over which anatomists held substantial, but not complete, power (Hodge 2013, 128; Hodge, Morgan, and Rousseau 2017, 132; Stewart 2007, 127). While obviously less than individual persons, specimens simultaneously became more than human bodies: more knowable, more stable, more perfect, easier to control (sensu Stewart 2007, 122–124). The illusory nature of this ordering of flesh and time introduced paradox into science-based processes of knowing. Resulting instability is manifested in historic discomfiture with—or outright rejection of—anatomical dissection, as well as in its practical exploitation of marginalized people (Blakely and Harrington 1997; Capozzoli 1997; Crossland 2009a; Davidson 2007; Fabian 2010; Nystrom 2017). While seeking approximations to living flesh, anatomists further distanced processed remains from their former personhood. This practice reconceived an older narrative of body parts as inherently disordered, inverting their significance. Serving the larger project of modernity, specimens were put to work in a new narrative of ordered medical knowledge to which a growing class of largely white, male, professional, medical practitioners had near-exclusive access. These poetics comprised a material discourse that reinforced emergent claims to medical authority, hence social power.

Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches, 2015

The Materiality of Individuality, Jan 1, 2009

Post-Medieval Archaeology, 2019

Review Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age by H. Geismar. 141 pages, illustrated. London: U... more Review Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age by H. Geismar. 141 pages, illustrated. London: UCL Press, 2018. ISBN 9781787352834 (hbk). Open Access: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352810.

Winterthur Portfolio, 2019

In The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, Jennifer Van Horn provides a convi... more In The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, Jennifer Van Horn provides a convincing argument for the centrality of material culture studies to the ever-evolving American historical imagination. Her thesis is that “elites’ assemblages of artifacts enabled them to … forge a collective identity as a nation of citizens. Americans’ body politic emerged out of colonists’ earlier material associations” (10–11). While not novel, this perspective is communicated with new force through Van Horn’s theoretical frameworks and case studies. She argues that networks of people and things allowed British America’s upper sorts to craft a communal identity in opposition to those of indigenous and African peoples in their midst, as well as to the pejorative accusations of savagery directed at them by English metropolitan commentators. High-style consumerism thus reconciled their liminal situation between “civilized” metropole and “barbarous” colony. The author’s most important contribution is her integration of racializing discourse into the discussion of fashionable consumption. The argument that racial anxieties drove elite British American consumerism offers not only to bring the broader decolonizing project—often isolated in studies of indigenous and African histories—into conversation with studies of the consumer revolution, but also to make it the explanatory heart of that dialogue.

Historical Archaeology 46(2):196–198, 2012

Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting. John Potvin and Alla Myze... more Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev, eds. Burlington, VT : Ashgate. 234 pp.

A Roman Drainage Culvert, Great Fire Destruction Debris and Other Evidence from Hillside Sites No... more A Roman Drainage Culvert, Great Fire Destruction Debris and Other Evidence from Hillside Sites North-
East of London Bridge: Excavations at Monument House and 13–21 Eastcheap, City of London. By Ian Blair
and David Sankey. MoLAS Archaeology Studies Series 17. xii, 79 pages, illustrated. London: Museum of
London, 2007. ISBN 1-901992-69-1. £8.95 (pbk).

The Finds Research Group AD 700–1700: Datasheets 25–40, A Consolidated Reprint of Datasheets Issued
by the Finds Research Group Between 1999 and 2007. Edited by L. Gilmour, J. Bayley and R. Tyson.
120 pages, illustrated. Sleaford, Lincolnshire: Finds Research Group, 2008. ISSN 0962-2217. £7.50 (pbk).

Seminar Series, 2020

CLICK TITLE ABOVE - THEN "4 files" FOR LINK TO VIDEO: Dr. Hodge's seminar presentation supplement... more CLICK TITLE ABOVE - THEN "4 files" FOR LINK TO VIDEO: Dr. Hodge's seminar presentation supplements Modeling Mesoamerica: Origins and Originality in a Teaching Exhibit (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/75f4d95bb7b44808b7eafa808b266d58), the newest virtual exhibition from the Stanford University Archaeology Collections. It was no simple “pivot” moving student curation online in response to Covid. It demanded a wholesale redesign of course content and project goals. Despite my best intentions, a modest exhibit became an ambitious digital publication. This project illuminates larger issues of resources, mission, and digital learning curves that face museums as we increasingly “go digital” with formal and informal learning.

Discover famous artifacts from the Maya and Aztec world through 3D physical and digital reproductions, learn about the personal motivations of 20th-century model makers, and see the original ancient monuments and elite goods that Stanford’s models recreate. Modeling Mesoamerica was curated by Stanford students in Hodge’s spring 2020 course Museum Cultures and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).

"The Harvard Indian College: Then and Now" at the Langley-Adams Library, Groveland, MA (Hodge 2013)

Scholar Christina Hodge will discuss her new book Gentility and Consumerism in Eighteenth-century... more Scholar Christina Hodge will discuss her new book Gentility and Consumerism in Eighteenth-century Newport: A Widow’s Story. Focusing on the life of Newport widow and shopkeeper Elizabeth Pratt, Hodge will explore the role of the developing American middle class in colonial Newport and the groundwork it laid for future generations.

Between 1733 and 1734 Elizabeth Pratt finds herself battling a series of lawsuits in the courts of Newport surrounding years of consumer purchases of everything from silk riding hoods to silver spoons. Pratt, once a shopkeeper and tastemaker in Newport society, eventually finds herself losing her business, her home on Spring Street, and her freedom. Worse yet, Pratt loses her status in the “middling sorts:” the class of property-owning entrepreneurs who begin to expand colonial America’s class system, eventually leading to the rise of the middle class.

Through the study of court records, as well as significant archeological evidence from Pratt’s own home, the effect of changes in material culture on class and gender relationships takes shape. Hodge will explore this emergence and the “Genteel Revolution” led by middling sorts, like Pratt, through their consumer and commercial practices.

Christina J. Hodge and Michele E. Morgan will outline the osteological, archaeological, and archi... more Christina J. Hodge and Michele E. Morgan will outline the osteological, archaeological, and archival approaches to studying the collection of anatomized skeletal material found under Harvard’s Holden Chapel to illuminate the social and institutional contexts of early nineteenth-century anatomization.

Christina J. Hodge
Academic Curator and Collections Manager of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections, and Museum Associate at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Michele E. Morgan
Museum Curator of Osteology and Paleoanthropology & Senior Osteologist at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

This talk presents an interdisciplinary study of a mid-18th-century Newport woman—widow and shopk... more This talk presents an interdisciplinary study of a mid-18th-century Newport woman—widow and shopkeeper Elizabeth Pratt. Widow Pratt’s home is now part of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard historic and archaeological site, owned by the Newport Historical Society. Thousands of excavated artifact fragments and documentary evidence from merchant and court records provide an intimate perspective on the Pratt household’s material world and daily activities. Pratt lived during a time when Newporters of all social stations were united by new consumer possibilities, economic opportunities, and social uncertainties. The Consumer Revolution brought mass production and mass markets. People all over the British Empire shared in a burgeoning World of Goods, especially in urban trading centers like Newport. Shop keeping was a new opportunity for literally and figuratively fashioning identities, relationships, and values. Trading transformed Pratt’s life and her social relationships, as it transformed her broader world.

AAA session Call for Papers: Work with university collections or know someone who does? Looking t... more AAA session Call for Papers: Work with university collections or know someone who does? Looking to present as AAA's in 2018 in San Jose? I am working (late) to organize a session exploring the “pragmatic imagination” of university anthropology museums through examples of current practice that combine inventiveness and practicality in ways that drive our field forward. Please share and get in touch with me if interested!

Jessica MacLean and I are organizing a session on multiple/intersectional identities at the next ... more Jessica MacLean and I are organizing a session on multiple/intersectional identities at the next SAA’s (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 29 - April 2, 2017), titled Gender, Race, and other Consequential Categories: Experiments in Intersectional Archaeology. We welcome statements of interest and feedback!

As the title suggests, we are more interested in approach than subject, and we embrace an exploratory mindset for discussion and debate. The session abstract is attached. Among other concerns, we wonder: what do archaeology and intersectional theory offer each other? And, what are the boundaries of intersectionality’s application in our field?

We invite those explicitly experimenting with intersectional theory, as well as those considering covalent identities through other frameworks.

Please contact us for more information or to express interest.

Can we assume that social rank predicted consumer choice in colonial Anglo-America? Did the middl... more Can we assume that social rank predicted consumer choice in colonial Anglo-America? Did the middling sorts simply emulate their social superiors? If not, how might we think about their choices' relationships to deeper social structures? These questions are central to this historical archaeological dissertation on middling identity in 18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, on the northeastern coast of the United States. Colonial Newport—distinguished by burgeoning trade and a climate of religious tolerance—epitomized the successful American entrepôt. The central data set for this study is an artifactual assemblage from the Wood Lot area of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard site, including over 15,000 fragments of 18th-century household goods and food remains. Select printed sources and archival documents contextualize these finds.
Artifacts recovered from the Wood Lot are direct evidence of the middling individuals living there ca. 1720–1775. Given this evidence, we should not dismiss middling consumerism as an imperfect emulation of elite consumerism, as middling consumerism typically has been in American historical and material studies. Notions of "tasteful consumption" and "middling gentility" are productive alternatives to "emulative consumption" and "elite gentility."

Society for Historical Archaeology, 2016

A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment, 2021

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

Society for Historical Archaeology, 2016

Museum Anthropology, 2018

Northeast Historical Archaeology, 2013

Northeast Historical Archaeology, 2006

The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the United States, 2016

In 1801, Holden Chapel at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts was retrofitted for anat... more In 1801, Holden Chapel at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts was retrofitted for anatomical and chemical instruction and to house the Harvard Medical School. The chapel was used for anatomical teaching until 1862. There, faculty and students attended lectures, dissected cadavers, and studied a wide variety of specimens and anatomical preparations. In 1999, archaeologists recovered human skeletal material and other artifacts from a dry well in the Holden Chapel basement, a once-temporary trash receptacle that was filled before 1850. New osteological and documentary research on this collection documents aspects of the materiality of early modern anatomical instruction, including the roles of preparations. This chapter discusses this evidence of historical practices of anatomization, providing insight into the creation of medical authority, shifting ethical norms, and concepts of identity, personhood, and the body during a transformative period in medical education.

Comparative Archaeological Approaches, 2015

Beneath the Ivory Tower, 2010

Museum Anthropology, 2011

Journal of Social Archaeology, 2013

In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harv... more In response to the violence of the Revolutionary War and affirming Enlightened philosophies, Harvard University founded its Medical School in 1783. Excavated materials from a trash feature at Holden Chapel, site of Harvard’s early medical lectures, include anatomized human remains. There, new regimes of medical authority were created through the manipulation of bodies via transgressive practices of dissection, display, and disposal. Existing studies of nineteenth-century cadavers strongly focus on their emotional and evidentiary qualities. Close attention should also be paid to instructional bodies. Instructional human remains, uncannily both subject and object, person and specimen, were distinct from other kinds of bodies – and distinctly troubling. The Holden collection historicizes concepts of the body, permits an archaeology of early medical authority, and destabilizes archaeologists’ usual approaches to human remains, corporeality, and the individual.

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2011

View all references, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our o... more View all references, p. 2). Inspired by the persistent centrality of houses to heritage and our own professional experiences, we use this outlet to reflect on the intersection of public and civic agendas, heritage management and social theory at historic homes and house museums. ...

The Poetics of Processing: Memory Formation, Identity, and the Handling of the Dead