The Archaeology of Citizenship

Stacey Lynn Camp
Michael S. Nassaney

Details: 192 pages     6x9
Cloth: $69.95   ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4459-0   
Pubdate: 8/6/2013
Series: The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective

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Overview

"Elegantly and thoughtfully written and expands the notion of citizenship and its implications for archaeological inquiry to include types of scholarship and topics that are not traditionally considered under such an analytical rubric."--Jane Eva Baxter, author of The Archaeology of Childhood: Children, Gender, and Material Culture

"An engaging book that makes an important contribution to the study of citizenship and its manifestation in the archaeological record. It is a fine and timely example of the way that archaeologists can make the past meaningful in relation to the present."--Carolyn White, editor of The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives

While the subject of citizenship has often been examined from a sociological, historical, or legal standpoint, historical archaeologists yet to fully explore what it means to be an American from a material perspective. The Archaeology of Citizenship aims to fill that gap.
Since the founding of the United States, the rights to citizenship have been carefully crafted and policed by the Europeans who settled and formed the country. Immigrants have been either extended or denied citizenship in various legal and cultural ways.
Using a late-nineteenth-century California resort as a case study, Stacey Camp discusses how the parameters of citizenship and national belonging have been defined and redefined since Europeans arrived on the continent. In a unique and powerful contribution to the field of historical archaeology, Camp uses of the remnants of material culture to reveal how those in power sought to mold the composition of the United States as well as how those on the margins of American society carved out their own definitions of citizenship.

Stacey Lynn Camp is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Idaho.

A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney

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