Abstract

Oh yes - here is the abstract for the paper I am going to give at the SHA meetings this fall:

Material Culture and Maritime Identity: Identifying Maritime Subcultures through Artifacts.

Piracy was a significant facet of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century maritime culture, yet archaeological contributions to our knowledge of piracy are few. They are fewer still in reference to pirate interaction ashore. Material from a handful of land sites with known piratical association, contrasted with artifacts from contemporaneous non-maritime sites, provides a starting point for investigating whether or not material culture assemblages can provide any insight into differences between pirates (and other maritime cultures) and those of the general land-based society. Where these differences do exist, they may provide insight into issues of identity within these groups.