Harvard Archaeology Program Seminar Series Spring 2018 Schedule

Barbara Heath, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Barbara Heath reconstructs the social lives of objects that were products of the natural world but are deeply entangled in global and local histories – shells belonging to two species of Indo-Pacific snails, Monetaria moneta and Monetaria annulus. She explores their changing social contexts, uses, and values in southern New England from the mid-1700s to the turn of the twentieth century, to consider how they functioned in global and regional commerce, in the sacred realm as ritual objects connecting Africans to the world of their ancestors and to each other, as profane objects of masculine immorality and feminine refinement, and as mnemonics, through which people connected with their family histories. Cowries were bound up in intimate practices of cultural expression and social exchange that both codified and challenged boundaries of ethnicity, race, and class which were actively under construction during the period of rapid social and economic change.