Personal Discipline and Material Culture: An Archaeology of Annapolis, Maryland, 1695-1870.

Johnson, Matthew H.

Historical archaeology has been profoundly influenced by the innovative traditions of scholarship at work on the east coast of the United States. Work by James Deetz, Henry Glassie, Mark Leone and their students has opened up a range of new approaches for the period, centring around the transition between 'pre-Georgian' and 'Georgian' ordering of space and material culture. Leone in particular has explicated this transition in terms of the rise of capitalism and thus related archaeology to important and wide-ranging historical questions.

Paul Shackel's book is the latest in this genre of studies. Shackel takes as his theme the analysis of 'power:discipline' through household goods and its role in the emergence of capitalism and colonial domination. He does so through a case-study of 18th-and early 19th-century Annapolis, Maryland, the site of much of Leone's work in this area. The central focus of the study obviously owes much to Michel Foucault and his genealogy of disciplinary forms and institutions; the other key figure cited is that of the Annales historian Fernand Braudel.

Shackel divides his study, following the lead of Braudel, into individual, social and long-term scales of history. With each scale Shackel analyses both archaeological and documentary evidence to identify a series of long-term shift in patterns of consumption, manners and personal hygiene. The archaeology of household goods is put in the context of contemporary documentary material, ranging from household inventories and local newspapers to commentaries on taste and table manners. Shackel argues that changing patterns of consumption are related to changing patterns of class relations, through lifestyle and social emulation.

Included in this analysis are a series of insights into the context and meanings of material culture. The archaeology of the toothbrush is especially fascinating. Shackel also elegantly traces the growing segmentation of the material world through clocks, scientific instruments, dining items such as knives, forks, cups and saucers, napkins, chairs, and items of personal grooming and hygiene. This book represents therefore a significant addition to our understanding of the archaeology of capitalism; its great strength is its application of close analyses of material to critical and theoretically complex problems. It applies a great deal of close scholarship in an imaginative way that should put more traditional scholars to shame. The critical comments below should be read in this light.

Shackel examines individual time in terms of the 'archaeology of the house lot' on a range of different sites in Annapolis where the house lot can be identified with an individual. The presence of standardized, mould-made ceramics on different house lots is assessed in terms of an algorithm to demonstrate the variable rate of reception of the Georgian Order by different social classes. This is an interesting approach though I am unsure about the validity of attempting to measure changes of this kind in terms of graphs and equations. In this particular case the 'taphonomic' question of variation in discard rates and preservation is not addressed. New ways of cooking and dining may have influenced discard rates of different items, as well as methods of rubbish disposal. Put very simply, the equation between what is used at the table and how and whether it is thrown out to become part of the archaeological record is never considered. One imagines a simplistic scenario of a family deciding to live in a more 'Georgian' way, throwing out all its old crockery into the backyard, passing on its cracked cups to the poor and thus leaving a pre-Georgian archaeological signature. Other measures questionable on similar grounds include that of manufacturing discipline through standardization of product.

Related problems can be raised with the analysis of inventory evidence. Despite chapter 3 being headed 'probate data and social time' I can find no mention in either text or index of that essential component of probate data, wills. Yet wills contain invaluable information on the social significance of goods, and are a useful check against the biases of inventories mentioned by Shackel. Inventories also fail to mention fixed items and one is therefore suspicious, for example, of the assertion that close stools and chamber pots indicate greater privacy. Fixed, separate latrines might be even more private but would not show up on inventory evidence.

The treatment of documentary sources as a whole invites criticism. Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son to read some pages of Latin poets while defecating before sending 'them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina' is cited as an example of time discipline; a classic piece of 18th-century satire might be a more plausible interpretation. Sumptuary laws, so central to an understanding of attitudes towards late medieval and early modern consumption, are only mentioned in passing and then in a way that implies that such legislation was generally successful.

A broader problem is the organization of the book along Braudel's schema. The data for each chapter recur within the next, and it is unclear how the different scales are differentiated. The different chapters thus become repetitive and one loses sight of the final scale -- the long term -- at all. Thus for example social time is considered by looking at documentary material on etiquette and inventories of goods; all this material is also discussed in the context of individual time and is mentioned again when considering long-term history. More fundamentally, if the rise of capitalism is about the changing relationship between individual and community, then the threefold classification is itself historically specific. At some periods 'etiquette' will be considered social in nature, at other periods individual.

How does Shackel explain this long-term shift in the consumption of goods? It is always misguided to look for one final understanding, particularly so in an historical period; indeed, one of Foucault's achievements was to move scholarship beyond the problematic of a set of causes toward a genealogy of social practices. Shackel turns to the work of McCracken 1988 on the subject of consumption, rightly stressing the historical antecedents of consumption in the 18th-century Chesapeake. Unfortunately his account of these antecedents is naive. Elizabeth I did not 'spend money with great enthusiasm' on items such as housing and hospitality; her great achievement was to do the reverse, though not quite in the manner or with the consequences that Shackel's summary of McCracken indicates.

The conclusion's identification of consumption as a key element of nascent capitalism, and its symbolic resonances, is an important insight. It is not however a new point; nor is it a self-sufficient explanation. It carries a hint of mentalism and circularity: people bought and used ever larger numbers of consumer goods because they wanted to.

Personal discipline and material culture is an important book that tries to address intractable problems in historical archaeology. That its analysis is less than convincing in several respects is a measure of the complexity and difficulty of the material, the profound nature of the questions being asked, and the urgent need for more theoretically informed work in this area.

MATTHEW H. JOHNSON Department of Archaeology, University of Durham

Reference

McCRACKEN, G. 1988. Culture and consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of goods and activities. Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press.