Shopping and historical archaeology: exploring the contexts of urban consumption

Despite a tradition of consumer studies in historical archaeology and other fields, few historical archaeologists have addressed how the place or act of shopping may affect our understanding of goods recovered from the archaeological record. Yet, historical accounts of shopping suggest that different market places were the scenes of very different social and consumer dynamics. With a focus on the archaeology of working-class life, this paper explores whether shopping is important to historical archaeology and how it may be distinguished in the archaeological record.