MARGARET PURSER
Consumption as Communication in Nineteenth-Century Paradise Valley, Nevada ABSTRACT Historical archaeologists have studied consumption practices to identify social categories like class or ethnicity, and processes like emerging capitalism and industrialism. This paper examines the material culture of 19th-century Paradise Valley, Nevada, in terms of consumption as a process of communication . This model allows the integration of a broad range of material culture categories , from the bottles and tin cans of consumer goods to agricultural machinery, household appliances, and residential and commercial architecture . It also describes connections between local and national scale changes in the material culture and avoids a more limited causality focused on either measures of the penetration of capitalist social and economic organization, or the resistance of local forms and norms to national trends.
Introduction: Of B. F. Riley and Montgomery Ward
They tell a story in Paradise Valley, Nevada, about a respected old pioneer named B. F. Riley. He was one of the ftrst Euroamerican settlers in the valley, immigrating to Nevada from Illinois as a young man in the early 186Os. Trained as a minister, Reverend Riley preached regularly for valley residents, and raised wheat on a small farm along the valley's western rim. In later years his family sold the farm, and Riley moved into town to live near some of his children . By the early 20th century the old man's mind had begun to wander. His habits became a bit eccentric. He took to walking the dirt streets of the little town with a Montgomery Ward catalogue tucked under his arm, proclaiming it to be the Bible, and occasionally preaching from it to passersby (Buckingham 1981). Riley's story provides an allegorical point of de-
parture for the following discussion of 19th-century consumption patterns and material culture. Consumption studies in general, and the historical development of a modern consumer society in the United States in particular, have attracted increasing attention over the past 10 years in historical archaeology (cf. Spencer-Wood 1987). These interests parallel those of a broad range of historians and anthropologists, who have employed analytical techniques derived from Annales School social history, economic and symbolic anthropology, historical materialism, and market theory to examine consumption practices in historical and cultural contexts. (cf. Douglas and Isherwood 1978; Thompson 1979; Braudel 1981; McKendrick et al. 1982; Mukerji 1983; Lears and Fox 1983; Bourdieu 1984; Appadurai 1986). The historical trend towards materialism and a "culture of consumption" was not simply a matter of one set of new consumer goods succeeding another in the course of expanding production . More than the simple appearance of new things, these were new things used in new ways that made a different kind of sense than before. Many of the writers listed above have focused on this power of consumption to shape human action and its active social meanings: consumption as a form of communication. Like production, consumption is a continuous process through which people simultaneously impose meaning on and read meaning from material culture, and by extension the rest of their surrounding material and social world. To create and communicate such meaning over the past five centuries, the people of industrializing societies have increasingly exchanged any direct access to technological knowledge or productive capacity for the more relative, socially contingent controls of selective acquisition and consumer choice. At this point the question becomes, how did this happen? How did people change not just the individual items of their material culture, but the way it was organized, and the way it articulated with other cultural spheres of information and communication? In other words, what was it that B. F. Riley could read in the crowded pages of his mailorder catalogue?
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Historical archaeologists attempting to answer these questions have looked for ways to connect the archaeologically recovered artifacts of consumption practices with the broader interpretive issues raised by historical and anthropological discourse. This process has most often resulted in an approach to consumption that views patterns of purchase and use as a means to other social processes, like social status, class relations, or ethnicity. Such efforts generally have been quite successful. Assemblages of teacups and plates, porcelain bowls, wine bottles, clocks , and silverware-recovered from testpits and listed in tax recordshave been used to document emerging class and status relations among urban factory owners and laborers (Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987; Beaudry 1989), plantation owners and slaves (Orser 1987), and as a component of the general class structure of emerging industrial capitalism (Leone 1988). Consumption studies have also structured both archaeological approaches to ethnicity , and substantive critiques of such approaches (Felton and Schulz 1983; Praetzellis et al. 1987, 1988). Discovering how and why mass-produced objects came to mean what they did about class, status, ethnicity, or ideology in the context of household consumption has proved more difficult. Much of this research has focused on either the technological or economic significance of mass production and industrial capitalism, as events that framed the larger contexts in which household consumption patterns took shape (Handsman 1981; Paynter 1988). If consumption practices were strictly the inevitable and involuntary response to existing production forces, then the way that consumer goods carried and shaped meaning in social contexts could be considered equally derivative . The role of historical archaeology would be reduced to documenting the presence of the expected goods in the appropriate contexts: yes, 18th-century upper-class consumers bought pearlware plates; 19th-century laborers brought home canned goods for dinner . But anthropologists ranging from Mary Douglas to William Rathje, working on contemporary English and American purchasing and disposal pat-
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terns, have clearly demonstrated that to equate consumption with simple purchase is a mistake (Douglas and Isherwood 1978; Rathje 1982). A more complete study of the meaning of consumption practices requires examining all the processes involved in the distribution , acquisition, and use of material culture. For archaeologists , the complexities of such a study are compounded by the need to integrate analysis across a range of comparative scales . At smaller scales, consumption is revealed to be a highly diverse, contested, and manipulated area of life, varying considerably across regional boundaries, class lines, ethnic groups, and time. Yet the expansion of industrial capitalism was ultimately a global process , and recent work has moved steadily from the single household or social group to the larger community and beyond. Artifact analysis is also moving from a focus on single categories of narrowly defined goods to include all the objects, materials , technologies, and spaces used by people in a given place and time. The issue here is not what any specific category of objects might have meant, but how they meant. But the purpose of the following discussion is not to delve into semantic or semiotic issues. Rather, it is to identify some of the consequences that understanding how things carried meaning might have for archaeologists interpreting these excavated objects and spaces. The changing meaning of consumption practices is fundamentally an issue of the changing organization and significance of material culture itself. It is here that historical archaeology has begun to demonstrate its unique capacity to address the questions surrounding changing consumption practices, in terms that can encompass and ultimately extend these new theoretical perspectives (cf. Gould and Schiffer 1981; SpencerWood 1987; Praetzellis et al. 1988).
Consumption as Communication
Pierre Bourdieu has defined consumption as .. a stage in a process of communication, . . . an act of deciphering , decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code" (Bour-
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dieu 1984:2). To participate in this communication, one must know what things mean, and to whom. So " the consumer helps to produce the product he [sic] consumes, by a labor of identification and decoding," using social knowledge acquired over a lifetime of consumption and use practices (Bourdieu 1984:100). The actions involved in acquiring and using objects, materials and spaces thus become not only "a focus .. . for sending social messages, but for receiving them as well" (Appadurai 1986:31). Consumption also involves power, for to lack the appropriate knowledge is to be unable to participate in the discourse; to be unable to either send or receive information. Consumption practices therefore have not one, but many, contested sets of meanings, prompting Arjun Appadurai to refer to "regimes of value" rather than unchallenged "systems," and to assert that "the politics of value is in many contexts a politics of knowledge" (Appadurai 1986:4, 6). Furthermore, in such an inclusive model these practices cannot be equated exclusively with simple purchase or display; consumption is more than market participation or conspicuous social competition. The customary distinctions between capital goods and consumer goods, between luxury commodities and necessities, or between statusmarking "aesthetic" consumption and more "ordinary" consumption are not useful here. Instead it requires a holistic, contextual approach to all the actions involved in acquiring and using objects, materials, and spaces (cf. Mukerji 1983:2-4; Bourdieu 1984:6-7; Appadurai 1986:17,38). During the 19th century, the technological innovations of industrialization , and the profound social and economic reorganization of industrial capitalism, forced an ever greater distance between fundamental material processes like production and consumption . This institutional as well as physical distance increasingly strained the traditional meanings of all forms of material culture , and disarticulated older channels of communication that earlier goods, objects, and materials had served to create (Appadurai 1986:41-48). In the process the ways that consumption practices communicated were changed.
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Furthermore, these changes were not a monolithic, unchallenged , involuntary response to changing production practices . Instead, the new consumption practices provided grounds for an active, multi-constructed, highly contested discourse through which people struggled to redefine and gain control of new relationships between social and material life in an industrialized, capitalist world. What follows is a case study that identified some of the elements involved in the changing meanings of consumption practices in a single community between the early 1860s and the mid-1920s. Discussion will focus on changes in local consumption practices under the impact of increasing industrialism. But the purpose is to measure neither the penetration of capitalist social and economic organization, nor the resistance of local forms and norms to national trends. Rather, it is to outline the way that some members of a local community used material culture, and particularly consumption practices, to integrate, explain, and control national and local scales of change.
"HoI For Paradise!" First settlement of Paradise Valley, Nevada, by Euroamerican immigrants began in the mid-186Os, and ultimately included people from the American Northeast, Midwest, and Appalachian South, as well as Germany, Italy, China, and the Basque country. The earliest settlers were drawn by the proximity of the valley's lush native hay crop to the booming mining camp markets further to the south in the newly-created Humboldt County . Residents shifted the local economy from opportunistic hay harvesting to large-scale commercial grain agriculture after 1868. That was the year the Central Pacific Railroad passed through the county seat of Winnemucca, just two days' journey to the south. Later developments of a range livestock industry, a bustling commercial town, and a rich though short-lived silver mining boom further diversified the valley's 19th-century population and economy . The merchants and agricultural middlemen of the small town were particularly successful. By the
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late 1880s, the thriving Paradise community served as a major redistribution point for goods and agricultural products moving through the northern end of Humboldt County as well as to newer settlements farther to the north and east. Beginning in the mid-1890s, the settlement suffered through successive local droughts, killing winters, and national economic depressions, as well as the increasing integration of Paradise Valley into the more stabilized economic hierarchy of the surrounding county. These transitions reduced the valley population substantially, from approximately 1,000 permanent residents in 1890 to just over 600 in 1910. The changes also shifted the local economy to a more specialized large-scale production of livestock. An increasingly specialized economy in turn made Paradise more and more dependent on the nearby railroad in Winnemucca as the sole market for local cattle and sheep and as the only source of all necessary imported goods and equipment. By the early 1920s, changing transportation technologies and the more rigidly hierarchical county economy had severely curtailed the relative strength and diversity of smaller outlying communities like Paradise Valley. Increasingly unsuccessful commercial competition with Winnemucca drained away much of the economic autonomy of Paradise, as merchants and tradespeople moved away to the more profitable railroad town. But the community of Paradise did survive, with a total valley population of 300-400 people, while many of its contemporaries dwindled away into ghost towns (Marshall and Ahlborn 1980). A combination of environmental and economic circumstances make Paradise Valley an ideal place to study the material culture of late 19th-century American consumption practices. The valley appeared to offer early settlers of the 1860s a relatively well-watered, treeless expanse sheltered from the surrounding Black Rock and Owyhee deserts by two rugged granite ranges. But ultimately the land proved dangerously marginal and supported few local resources for construction or manufacture. Every board, nail, post, pot, plate, or bottle needed by local settlers had to be brought in from elsewhere.
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A broad range of period land divisions, roads, buildings, agricultural equipment, vehicles, household articles, clothing, and foodstuffs can be documented in the archaeological, written, and oral historical record for the valley community (Purser 1987). Because of the specific social and economic circumstances of valley life, these objects represent an almost exclusively "imported" range of material culture acquired and used in diverse ways by a wide variety of people. Yet this sample oflate 19th-century consumption practices is small enough in scale to make analysis manageable. Particularly in the case of the small central town, individual households can be associated with specific kinds of goods or with ways of using things. And these patterns changed considerably over time, as local people struggled to make a living and maintain their homes through the economic vicissitudes of major regional and national change. Nineteenth-century Paradise Valley consumption patterns therefore stand as a case study in which to examine some of the questions raised above. In particular, they can be used to address the issue of a changing organization of material culture during the period, not merely with the appearance of new objects, but also with new ways of acquiring and using them, to different ends than before. Paradise Valley Consumption Practices
If the material culture of late 19th-century Paradise Valley fulfilled such lofty functions, it did so with a minimum of flourish and expense. The local town was a rough, raw place of wide dirt streets, small frame houses, and a constant, gritty flow of wagons, draft animals, and foot traffic. Some people could indulge in a few extravagances, like white picket fences around their town lots, or new garments made from the most recent fabric shipped out from back east. A handful of merchants built two-story showcases for their businesses, decorated with false fronts and fancy pressed tin siding. But most people lived more simply as tenants in small rented or leased houses, and spent their money on the basic bulk commodities needed to feed and maintain their household.
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For the purposes of this analysis, the material culture of 19th-century Paradise can be divided into three basic categories . The built environment encompassed a public, commercial sphere of stores, shops, saloons, and hotels arranged on a mere handful of grid plan blocks. At town's edge the two main streets merged with the main freight routes that ran out across the valley floor to several neighboring settlements, including Winnemucca . The same built environment also included the second category: a more private world of lots, residences, backyards, and alleyways, ultimately extending out beyond the town to surrounding ranches and homesteads. Finally, there were the goods, materials, and technologies that flowed between these two spheres, framing the daily routine through which town residents made a living, practiced a trade, ran a household, or raised a family. The central dynamic in this material world tacked back and forth between the actions and intentions of those who built or owned buildings, laid out land lots, or marketed imported goods, and the customers and tenants who acquired and used these items in their daily lives. This interaction was overwhelmingly commercial , tempered slightly by a small-town social context in which kinship ties often blended with business and employment relationships. The town itself had been the commercial venture of four or five early merchants and land speculators who drew up its gridded lots for the express purpose of selling them off for a profit. Since the major landowners were also the principal merchants, Paradise residents usually bought or leased their land and houses from the same people who sold them groceries and supplies. Economic vicissitudes produced another, more chronological uniformity in the town's built environment. Paradise experienced a dramatic building boom from the late 1870s to around 1885. After this period, very few structures were built, particularly those intended for residences. As a result, through the course of the later 19th and early 20th centuries, Paradise residents increasingly rented, leased, or bought homes or businesses built by and for someone else, rather than constructing any new ones of their own.
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This conservative pattern was reinforced by the local residents' extreme efforts at conserving all standing structures. Because of the high cost of importing nearly all building materials in a desert environment, Paradise residents rarely tore down buildings to replace them with wholly new structures. Instead town structures were repeatedly altered, added to, renovated, embellished, and even rearranged and moved from lot to lot. The practice extended not only the use life of the individual buildings, but the inherited, second-hand quality of town building as a whole, since structures frequently changed their function and superficial appearance, but rarely lost all traces of the original building phase. The division between builder or owner and occupant was repeated in the roles of merchant and customer in the valley community. Through much of its history Paradise supported at least three or four large general stores, as well as a dozen or more smaller shops run by tradespeople like blacksmiths, saddlers, painters, tailors, and carpenters. These people overwhelmingly controlled the flow of goods into the valley, not only because they " ran the store" but because they ran it on credit. Since the economy of the valley was tied to the agricultural cycle, local cash supplies remained limited and seasonally sporadic through the first decades of the 20th century. This situation encouraged valley residents to frequent their own local stores, whose owners were more willing to provide lenient credit and even bartering arrangements, rather than make the three-day round trip to shop at the cheaper, but less accommodating, stores in Winnemucca. Paradise merchants in turn responded to local consumer competition and demand by constantly expanding their range of available goods: everything from needles and thread to plows, engines, and early automobiles could be bought at the general store. Storekeepers would also mail-order specific items from catalogues for individual customers; the catalogue houses did not usually extend credit, but the town stores did. In the absence of a town bank, even money itself could be " bought" from the local store to pay cash debts, and added to
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the store bill that customers paid off as infrequently as once a year. In a world so seemingly ready-made, the great majority of Paradise residents organized their material surroundings largely in the ways they arranged and used existing living spaces, or in the kinds of goods they chose from the local stores, and the ways they used those goods. They created an immediate , local material culture based far more on the logic of consumption and use than on that of production or manufacture. In itself, this was not a development produced by late 19th-century industrialization. Paradise began this way in the early 1860s. Constrained by its economy and environment and manipulated by the actions and ambitions of its individual residents, the town was given meaning in the immediate social environment of its property owners and tenants, merchants and customers , residents and passersby . Yet the course of the century brought major transformations to the material world of Paradise Valley. In local terms, these were not only changes in how things were made, but also in how they were used. By the 1920s these changes had revolutionized not only the way the valley material culture looked, but the way it worked. The character of these specific changes illuminates the link between local consumption practices and a rapidly changing national scale of new information and communication. Changes in Consumption
Isolated as it was, Paradise Valley was by no means immune to the events of the later American Industrial Revolution. On the contrary , the general transformations in Paradise material culture revolved around an increased participation in an expanding national market of industrially produced goods and the increasingly pervasive influence of nationwide architectural fashions. The basic archaeological pattern of this change is fairly familiar: in Paradise Valley over time, people used more industrially produced goods, and built more fashionable, " modern " buildings. But these changes were not simply a matter of
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Paradise residents making new choices from a tantalizing array of new goods produced in some distant industrial process. Adding new porches, kitchens, parlors, and bedrooms to residences , or fancy false fronts and plate glass windows to stores and hotels, cannot be explained entirely in terms of the growing persuasion of national architectural trends. It was the apparent change in the overall organization and significance of local material culture, more than the type and quantity of specific objects, that indicated how these new things came to mean what they did in a small western cow town. This new framework of meaning was not derived exclusively from either national or local contexts, but required Paradise residents to rework the connection between their familiar , immediate surroundings and some larger notion of national markets, information, and identity . A specific example can bring the logic of this new material world into sharper focus. A longtime town resident, and the grandson of a major 19th-century Paradise merchant, gave the following response when asked to describe what items were carried in his grandfather 's store: Well, I was telling you about the hardware they carried here [in the store). They carried everything to make a casket, see? They had the casket hinges, and the nameplates, the handles, and all the material to cover the casket both inside and outside. . . . When a person died here , of course there was no mortician here, see? And . . . one of the ranchers out there, John Bradshaw , that had an ice pond, would put up a block of ice [for the body) that weighed oh, maybe, fifty, sixty pounds. . . . And so the neighbors would come in, and take care of the body. And layout the corpse. And then , during the nighttime , why some of the friends would set up with the body. And they would pack ice around the body , see? . . . But what happened in the meantime , was that we had two carpenters here... . These men would build the casket during the night, see? So everything was ready for the funeral by the next morning. And, they had no hearse here, so for a hearse they'd take a spring wagon and they'd drape a yardage of cloth around the body of the spring wagon. . . . And then the casket was placed on this spring wagon, and after the services, on the way to the cemetery , why the six pallbearers would walk three on each side of the spring wagon . And they'd walk from the church to the cemetery. And time they got to the cemetery, their lower limbs was all full of dust. And someone at the church would toll that church bell from the time the body left the church until the time it reached the cemetery (Buckingham 1982: 3-4).
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This account is borne out by early probate More informal trades like cutting firewood, records for valley estates, which regularly included laundering, and selling extra eggs, milk, poultry, local store bills for casket hardware as well as for or garden produce further diversified both the the black fabric used as coffin linings and bunting, range of commercial activities and the range of and entire black suits of clothing for the deceased. households who participated in them. In such a There were also regular items of carpenters' bills small town as Paradise, these practices also further for "building and adorning coffin." These bills blurred the distinction between public and private were included in an early 1871 probate record; space and between uses of space. Even full-time they continued regularly through a final example trade specialists like smiths or carpenters often dating to 1892. But the probate of local rancher built their shops next door to, or even adjoining, Philo Moe Palmer, who died in 1904, lists the their residences, physically blending the public provision of $135 for a ready-made casket from a and private spheres of daily routine. Winnemucca undertaker's shop. Records for fuLarger-scale merchants who hoped to attract nerals performed at the Paradise cemetery by a business by linking the success of their personal Winnemucca funeral home begin in 1911. enterprise with the prosperity of the town as a The story is significant because it documents the whole played heavily on this blending of public way in which Paradise material culture operated. and private uses of space. They actively encourEarly valley residents did not have the materials on aged considerable public use of their store buildhand to build a coffin, so they had to buy things ings. Storekeepers frequently incorporated dance like sawn lumber, hinges, or black bunting ready- halls, meeting halls, or saloons into their buildmade from the local storekeeper. But the coffin ings. On a less formal basis they provided wide itself was a local product, assembled and ap- front porches in summer, warm stoves in winter, pointed by local tradespeople, and its use was em- and year-round supplies of beer and crackers at bedded in the social behavior of a community that counters inside that further encouraged casual pubincluded donating ice and ringing church bells. lie gathering. The use of component parts and local compleThe early material culture of Paradise Valley tion of the manufacturing process remained a sig- therefore was organized by consumption practices nificant part of the local material culture until at that blurred the distinctions between customer and least the tum of the century. Furthermore, a sim- community member, between the uses of public ilar situation existed with maintenance and repair structures or spaces and private ones, and between services provided by a wide variety of tradespeople local and non-local definitions of goods and matefrom blacksmiths and harnessmakers to tailors and rials. By the time Philo Moe Palmer's family orcobblers (St. George 1983). The result was a 10- dered his ready-made coffin in 1904, this order had cally controlled material culture made from non- fundamentally changed. locally produced industrial goods. The most obvious factor in this reorganization This organization of consumption practices also was not the increased availability of new industrial had implications for the built environment. The goods, but the changing economic circumstances commercial ties that structured much of the social of the community itself. By the first decade of the as well as material integration between the more 20th century, Paradise residents had to buy coffins public and private realms of Paradise life were ex- instead of coffin hinges, boards, and bunting, betremely varied during the earlier period. People cause the town no longer supported a carpenter. held regular accounts with the two valley flour Heightened commercial competition with the railmills, butchers, saddlers, blacksmiths, brewers, road towns like Winnemucca had drawn many of seamstresses, and livery stables, as well as several the smaller shopowners and tradespeople away of the local storekeepers. This arrangement meant from Paradise during the late 1890s. that a normal domestic routine incorporated daily As the smaller shopowners left, larger storeor weekly circuits of a number of shops or stores. keepers tried to replace their services, to prevent
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their own customers from taking their business to Winnemucca. But the storekeepers replaced processing services with already-processed goods. They replaced maintenance and repair services with mass-produced goods, agricultural equipment, household articles, and other items manufactured with replaceable , catalogue-order component parts. No more coffin parts, but ready-made coffins were available. No more plows, mowers, or buggies with wooden and wrought-iron parts intended to be repaired locally at smithy forges or wheelwrights; now the same equipment came with almost exclusively cast or stamped metal parts. These often bore their catalogue reorder numbers embossed directly on their surfaces . Processing and maintenance activities shifted out of a highly diversified, socially mediated local commercial context, and into either the individual household or the distant manufacturing center, with the local storekeeper acting as middleman. This shift in the kinds of goods imported into the valley actually increased the Paradise community's contact with and participation in a previously more removed world of industrially produced goods, brand-name advertising, and national-scale marketing. But the structure of this contact was far more linear and fragmentary than before. The line of connection stretched thinly from urban manufacturer through local merchant into the individual household. Largely removed from any local contexts of marketing, processing, or maintenance activities, this new purchasing pattern tended to make the unit of contact and participation that of the isolated individual household, rather than the community as a whole. What grounding in local contexts that did occur took place increasingly in socially competitive comparisons between households themselves. This form of consumerism was hardly unusual for the time among households anywhere in the industrializing United States. The growing social and economic stability of the Paradise Valley community had brought with it an increased social stratification based on property ownership, kin ties, and relative length of residence in a community settled by successive waves of immigrants. The kinds of
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goods a household could buy , from brand name foodstuffs and fashionable clothing to parlor stoves and pianos, served as a major competitive arena in local struggles for social status and economic power. This focus on competitive display and control also affected the built environment, with architectural embellishment serving as a main vehicle for "keeping up with the Joneses ." Such embellishment extended beyond imported picket fences and scroll-sawn architectural ornaments to include the additions of whole rooms. Once again, at least in part this local fashion reflected a broader national trend towards greater segmentation and specialization of domestic built space (Wright 1981; MeMurry 1988). Even houses that did not increase in size subdivided earlier rooms to provide newly distinguished parlors, kitchens , bedrooms , closets , or bathrooms. Competition and control over the built environment were also significant issues in the public life of the town. Entrepreneurs spent increasing sums of money on fashionable architectural embellishments like tall false fronts, fancy wall coverings, mirrors, lamps, and glass windows. But the significance of these changes in material culture cannot be explained entirely in terms of national consumerism and popular culture. For example, one important factor was reflected in the fact that large general stores no longer dominated the public life of the town. Storekeepers, threatened by their declining economic power , had begun to scale back their operations by reducing the multiple public uses of their buildings to the simple buying and selling of goods. The reigning town enterprise shifted to the more restricted realm of the local hotels. These had grown from earlier, residence-sized boarding houses to multi-story rambling structures that were lavish by local standards. The organization of public space fostered by hotels was very different than in earlier years. The amount of town space available for informal public gathering declined, as hotels fenced off their property from the street. Like their neighbors had done with private homes, hotel owners formally segregated the internal spaces of their buildings into bar
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control over the consumption of that public built environment as one of the main routes to establishing their position in the town's emerging social hierarchy. Gone too were the many neighbors who had ground flour, brewed beer, repaired plows, shoed horses, or built coffins for the old man's household, thus extending the range of public life into private lots, houses, and kitchens. Now, Riley and his children imposed order within the confines of their own households, buying the new goods from the catalogue, and shaping a private world in which to use them. But this new household order of name-brand goods, national advertising, and fashion could hold considerable power for its participants. In Paradise the key to understanding the changing organization of material culture lay in learning to exercise that power and in finding a way to participate. That shift from old order to new required that anyone who lived in town take part in the new means of controlling the surrounding material culture, whether they could actually afford to "buy" it or not. For example , Riley's daughter-in-law Lizzie was the main provider in one of the town's poorest households in the 1920s, with her income as a part-time laundress. She bought her brand-name laundry soap by the box, and her back porch ultimately housed a museum collection of washing appliances and technologies. But she never could afford the fixtures of indoor plumbing for her kitchen or bath. Still, sometime near the end of the decade, she partitioned off her old kitchen to create a tiny chamber in the rear. She painted the walls pink and installed an old wash basin in a simple Discussion wooden counter along one wall. It had no fixtures, but Lizzie Riley's house had its bathroom. B. F. Riley read aloud from his Montgomery It was in this context that Paradise residents Ward catalogue to a world that made a very dif- completely redefined their town's material culture ferent kind of sense than it had when he had ar- between the early 1860s and the early 1920s. They rived in the valley half a century before. At the did so mostly by altering the ways that they seheart of this new logic lay the new ways of using lected, exchanged, used, and displayed things. In objects, materials, and technologies to impose or- the simplest terms, Paradise residents made the intrusive new goods, materials, styles, or technolder on a changing material and social world. Individuals like Riley had lost much of their ogies make sense by grounding them in the familpower to use the public world of their town as they iar setting of a locally created and controlled built chose. An emerging local elite had expanded its environment. Merchants displayed them in town
rooms, dance halls, and club rooms. Unlike the storekeeper's front porch, all of these spaces required cash payment for entry or purchase. And although hotel owners continued to encourage public use of facilities like bars or halls, in practice the clientele of individual hotels grew more socially and ethnically segregated , mirroring the increasing social stratification of the town community . The earlier, more flexible use of built space also declined in more general terms with the simple reduction in the kinds of public spaces Paradise residents used. The declining number of tradespeople in town and the more streamlined distribution and acquisition of goods further reinforced the new distinction between public and private built environments created by the increasingly restricted commercial realm of stores and hotels. No one built an adjoining shop and residence in town after 1885; only two people built shops at all. Most former shop structures began new lives as private residences. The more exclusive dependence by town households on the larger general stores, in the absence of smaller specialized shops, simulated earlier, commercially-based ties between public and private contexts of town life. But in fact during this era the isolation of households and social groups within the community actually increased. At the same time, differing consumption levels of higher- and lower-status goods, competitively reiterated in new kitchens, parlors, or gingerbread trim, helped to delineate the growing social stratification of the town community .
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stores and customers used them in their kitchens, parlors , or backlots. In the process, the objects themselves unavoidably transformed that built environment, changing how it worked, and how it made sense . This new " sense" that the material world of Paradise came to make can be understood by comparing the very different ways that consumer goods and the built environment changed over time . The inherited, much refurbished character of Paradise Valley's conservative built environment produced a type of change in that environment which was additive, cumulative, and which recorded the logic and history of new choices in the material culture itself. Over time, town residents built many new bathrooms , parlors, kitchens, or false fronts to house and display their new plumbing, iceboxes, pianos , ready-made suits, and brand-name goods. In the process they introduced fundamentally new ways of using homes , lots , streets, and commercial structures. But the record of these choices remained visible in the surrounding built environment and served as a powerful referent to its new uses . In contrast, the new goods and technologies that increasingly flooded into town toward the end of the century completely replaced pre-existing materials and ways of using them . This change was not grounded in the local environment, but was defined increasingly in terms chosen by the manufacturers and advertisers who produced the goods in distant urban centers. This change was not a history. It was "fashion"; it was "progress." It was by definition discontinuous , open-ended, and contingent on a discourse of meaning and information that lay well outside the valley community in any direct sense . Consumption practices in Paradise communicated by continually playing off history against replacement, and internally framed definitions against externally framed ones. Over time, the language of this discourse drew less from the local community than from a national popular culture of fashion and innovation. Townspeople participated more directly in this culture as disparate households than as a localized community. This participation was true not just for a limited elite who
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could afford the latest status-marking commodities , but ultimately for anyone who lived in a house, walked down the street, bought food, plowed a field, or lit a kitchen stove in Paradise Valley.
Conclusion In terms of consequences to archaeological interpretation, the preceding discussion holds four main points . First , archaeologists can productively study consumption as a process of communication, as well as a means of communicating specific information about status or ethnicity. Second, consumption practices are inherently changeable things, and their temporal variability must be taken into account in analyses that use consumption to describe other social categories or processes. Third, expanding the material culture categories examined from consumer goods to include durable goods like machinery, bulk commodities, and the built environment can provide valuable context for interpreting plates , cups , and bottles . And finally , regional variability was also a crucial factor in the historical development of an American consumer society. This phenomenon is particularly true in the case of people living in western territories, who experienced " industrialization" as a time of actual depopulation rather than population growth, of economic reduction rather than expansion, and of increasing ruralization rather than urbanization.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the hospitality and support of th.e people of Paradise Valley, who sustained the SIX years of fieldwork involved in this p~oject. I am particularly indebted to the late Fredenck .~ . Buc~lng ham, Sr., who provided so much specitic detail on commercial practices in the valley, and to cattle rancher Leslie Stewart, who first pointed out the significance of the transition from wrought iron and wooden machine parts to cast metal ones. I would also like to thank Barbara Little and Paul Shackel, for their tireless efforts to get this volume published. I also owe a debt to Larry McKee and two add i-
CONSUMPTION AS COMMUNICATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PARADISE VALLEY, NEVADA
tional anonymous reviewers, for their substantive and insightful comments.
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~ARGARET PuRSER DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY ROHNERT PARK, CALIFORNIA 94928