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Sample Publications (all in PDF)

• Race and Prosaic Materiality: The Archaeology of Contemporary Urban Space and the Invisible Color Line (in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, eds. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini, pp.508-520, 2013).
• The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age  (with Nigel Jeffries, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16:745-760, 2012).
• The Importance of Innocuous Things: Prosaic Materiality, Everyday Life, and Historical Archaeology (in "Historical Archaeology and the Importance of Material Things II," eds Julie Schablitsky and Mark Leone, Historical Archaeology Special Publication No.9, pp.31-44, 2011).
• Race, Displacement, and Twentieth-Century University Landscapes: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal and Urban Universities (with Lewis C. Jones, in The Materiality of Freedom: Archaeologies of Postemancipation Life, ed. Jodi A. Barnes, pp.250-262.  University of South Carolina Press, 2011).
• Consuming Lines of Difference: The Politics of Wealth and Poverty along the Color Line (with Modupe Labode, Lewis C. Jones, Brandon Muncy, Michael Essex, and Alex Kruse, Historical Archaeology 45(3):140-150, 2011)
• The Archaeology of Consumption (Annual Review of Anthropology 40:133-144, 2011).
• Practicing Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement: 2010 Year in Review (American Anthropologist 113(2):235-245, 2011).
• Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line (with Lewis C. Jones, Historical Archaeology 45[1]:33-50, 2011).
• The Price of Progress: IUPUI, the Color Line, and Urban Displacement (edited with Glenn Stanton White, 2010).
• Race and Class.  (in Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, eds. Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, pp.361-371.  Left Coast Press, 2010).
• Consuming Individuality: Collective Identity along the Color Line (in The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives, ed. Carolyn White, pp.207-219. Springer, 2009).
• Marketing in a Multicultural Neighborhood: An Archaeology of Corner Stores in the Urban Midwest (Historical Archaeology 42[1]:88-96, 2008).
• Excavating America’s Metaphor: Race, Diaspora, and Vindicationist Archaeologies (Historical Archaeology 42[2]:104-122, 2008).
• Imagining Blackness: Archaeological and Cinematic Visions of African-American Life (in Box Office Archaeology: Refining Hollywood's Portrayals of the Past, ed. Julie Schablitsky, pp.140-158, Left Coast Press, 2007).
• Racializing the Commonplace Landscape: An Archaeology of Urban Renewal along the Color Line (World Archaeology 38[1]:60-71, 2006).
• Ideology, Power, and Capitalism: the Historical Archaeology of Consumption (in The Blackwell Companion to Social Archaeology, eds. Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel, pp.195-212.  Blackwell, 2004)
• Engagement and the Color Line: Race, Renewal and Public Archaeology in the Urban Midwest (Urban Anthropology 32(2)[2003]:205-229, 2003)
• Racializing the Parlor: Race and Victorian Bric-a-Brac Consumption (in Race and the Archaeology of Identity, ed. Charles E. Orser, pp.158-176.  University of Utah Press, 2001)
• Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology (with Marlys J. Pearson, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 3(4):225-259, 1999)
• Race and the Genteel Consumer: Class and African-American Consumption, 1850-1930 (Historical Archaeology 33[1]:22-38, 1999).

Since 1999 much of my research has focused on the relationship between materiality and racism in Indianapolis' near-Westside.  My archaeological research focused on the Ransom Place Historic District and surrounding neighborhoods examines everyday life, materialism, and African-American culture since the late-19th century and the systematic displacement of that community after World War II for the expansion of the Indiana University Medical Center and eventually the campus of IUPUI.  Through a 2001 grant from the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Initiative, I began an archival survey of the community that once lived in the near-Westside neighborhoods that are now part of the IUPUI campus.  That survey systematically inventoried the neighborhood residents since the 1850s, their cultural identity, their occupations, where they lived, and the stores, workplaces, churches, and schools that were part of this community.   

In Fall 2010 I completed an oral history project with Glenn Stanton White that collected African-American memories of life in Indianapolis' near-Westside and the displacement of that longstanding community by urban renewal projects after World War II.  The book The Price of Progress: IUPUI, The Color Line, and Urban Displacement was released in September 2010.  The project is part of IUPUI's 40th Anniversary and is discussed on the 40th Anniversary Celebration web site.

I am interested in how archaeology can illuminate the concrete ways that various people embraced, resisted, and circumspectly became part of consumer society in the last 500 years.  I examine the archaeological study of such issues in my 2011 book The Archaeology of Consumer Culture, which is part of the University of Florida Press's The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective series.  The book examines historical archaeological studies of consumption in the United States, identifying persistent themes, unique insights provided by archaeological scholarship, and my own sense of the most fruitful directions for material culture research on consumption.

Since 2011 I have been conducting a series of collaborative projects in the UK and Europe that examine the emergence of transatlantic consumer society.  In Spring 2011, for instance,  I conducted a study of Victorian-era household material goods from a series of post-1700 London sites that are now archived in the London Archaeological Archive and Research Center (LAARC) .  The project uses seemingly mundane bric-a-brac to examine patterns in Victorian ideology across the Atlantic World and assess how various consumers participated in, rejected, and negotiated dominant behavioral and decorative ideologies.  In Summer 2011 I had a visiting faculty fellowship in the Newcastle University School of Historical Studies and was part of the two-day roundtable meeting "Engaging with Oral History: New Developments in the Archaeology of 19th Century Britain” organized by Jane Webster.  In Fall 2011 I returned to the UK to conduct research on Victorian materiality and Atlantic World notions of impoverishment, studying the Alderley Sandhills collection in Manchester, the Hungate site in York, and materials from the London Archaeological Archive and Research Center (LAARC) that I had worked with in February 2011.  Research from that project appeared in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology in 2012 (The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age, with Nigel Jeffries) and Historical Archaeology in 2011 (The Importance of Innocuous Things: Prosaic Materiality, Everyday Life, and Historical Archaeology).

In July 2011 I spent a month at the University of Oulu, Finland working with archaeological material from the project "Towns, borders and material culture – the effects of modernisation and globalisation in the Northern Finnish towns and their hinterlands since the c. 17th century."  I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oulu in Fall 2012, where I have worked with Finnish historical archaeologists developing comparative scholarship that links Finnish colonization to global patterns.  Scholars at the University of Oulu have examined Finnish historical archaeological contexts since 2004, and sites in the Oulu region provide a rich range of exceptionally well-preserved urban, rural, and sub-arctic archaeological resources covering 500 years of Finnish heritage.  Nevertheless, archaeological research on Finland’s recent past is little-known outside the Nordic world, which has exceptionally rich archaeological resources and preservation.  I have contributed to research papers from the project that have appeared in Journal of Material Culture, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Scandinavian Journal of History.

My book Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (University Press of Florida) came out in September, 2008.  The study uses doughnuts as a mechanism to examine consumer culture’s development over the last century-and-a-half.  Once a modestly consumed ethnic food introduced by Dutch immigrants, doughnuts were served to the troops in World War I and quickly became mass-produced indulgences after the war.  By the end of World War II, doughnut marketers blanketed the nation behind a wave of chains led by North Carolina’s Krispy Kreme in 1937 and Massachusetts’ Dunkin’ Donuts in 1950.  However, in the past 20 years doughnuts have come under attack by a host of moralizing dietary challenges and competition from forces including bagels and bourgeois coffee house chains.  Many doughnut critics cast food as a moral battleground:  Doughnuts loom as one more horrid substance we shovel into our collective mouths, symbols of Americans’ ever-increasing laziness and obesity.  In the face of the “low carb” diet movement some observers--and even a few doughnut makers--have divined the doughnuts’ imminent demise.  Doughnut consumption reflects the dominant currents in twentieth-century marketing, the dynamic meanings assumed by any one commodity, the nationalist symbolism projected onto goods and marketers, and the moralizing that a host of observers associate with particular consumption patterns.  For more on the book and project, see ABC News's July 2008 story, a Sept. 2008 article in Indianapolis Dine, a September 24 blog piece by the Baltimore Sun restaurant critic in dining@large, and my piece in Ambidextrous for more on the project.

I teach popular culture, examining many of these same issues of inequality, materiality, and consumption in the context of more broadly defined popular cultural contexts (e.g., how race and dystopian sentiments are discussed in the Planet of the Apes film series; for more on that, see my August 2011 interview with On Point on WBUR Boston).  I also appear briefly in the documentary "Anthropology: Looking at the Human Condition" in The Adventures of the Young Indiana Jones volume 3 DVD set.  My other thoughts on a variety of threads of popular culture and the material world appear on my blog Archaeology and Material Culture.