‘Places for thinking’ from Annapolis to Bristol: situations and symmetries in ‘world historical archaeologies’

Abstract

The past decade has seen many calls for the development of unified 'world historical archaeologies' of the past 500 years. While the field benefits from growing international exchanges and collaborations, retaining the diversity of regional traditions is a major and emerging challenge. As the field increasingly tests the temporal, geographical and interdisciplinary limits of archaeological perspectives, engaging with the diversity of modern material, these complexities remain little discussed, and the situations and contingencies of disciplinary narratives, priorities and interactions remain unproblematized.Exploring these matters, this paper considers transatlantic interactions between British and North American traditions of historical archaeology over the past two decades, journeying between two garden landscapes -in Annapolis and Bristol. After considering Mark Leone's 1984 study of the William Paca garden in Annapolis, Maryland, and its subsequent reinterpretations, the paper discusses an eighteenth-century 'eclectic' garden at Goldney in Bristol. The paper argues that situational and 'symmetrical', rather than interpretative, approaches to archaeological material would aid the development of multi-vocal and inclusive 'world historical archaeologies', acknowledging and celebrating the archaeological complexities that are encountered in the past and the disciplinary present. KeywordsGardens; Annapolis; Bristol; historical archaeology.A special edition of World Archaeology on the theme of historical archaeology is particularly appropriate because 'global' concerns lie at the heart of many of the interpretative themes upon which the field has focused: from industrial manufacture and trade to colonial encounters, comparative urban archaeology or maritime archaeology. It is also very timely, since, in exploring these themes over the past two decades, international exchanges and collaborations have emerged as a distinctive and increasingly influential aspect of historical archaeology (pace Moreland 2001). This is particularly true for the relations between North American and British historical archaeologies that form the subject of the present paper. Increased transatlantic communications, unusual for other fields of archaeology (Shott 2005), have proliferated, leading to special joint meetings of the British Society for PostMedieval Archaeology (SPMA) and the US-based Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) in Williamsburg, Virginia, and London in 1997 and, most recently, in the convening in January 2005 of an SHA annual conference for the first time in England. This has brought new interactions between archaeologists working on very similar materials -from creamwares or clay pipes to urban stratigraphies or rural landscapes -and upon the remains of societies that were interrelated in the past. For British and North American historical archaeologists, then, interests in 'world archaeology' highlight relations in both the past and the disciplinary present. And yet very little discussion of the manner in which we ...

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