Fashions, trends, and dating material culture
May 23, 2022 6:10:54 GMT -7
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brokennock, artificer, and 1 more like this
Post by paranger on May 23, 2022 6:10:54 GMT -7
Something that has been kicking around in my head, most recently in the 18th c. shot pouch thread, but with application almost anywhere in material culture:
Changes in material culture tend to unfold over time, with no "hard dates" or clean breaks. You could say the same today, although I think this was even much more true in the pre-industrial 18th century, before the pace of technological development and accumulation of material wealth accelerated those changes.
While at first blush this may seem a blinding flash of the obvious, we humans still seem to revert to the comfortable reductionism of clear definitions and neat categories out of habit if we are not careful. Spence seems to have a better natural instinct for countering this tendency than most.
Examples, you ask? French fly and drop front breeches co-existed for nearly a century. There was no sudden sweeping shift after the French and Indian War, as some seem to suggest.
Shot pouches, in general, got larger while powder horns, in general, got smaller progressing from the mid-18th to the mid 19th c. Yet documented exceptions clearly exist: Sir Edward Hale's ca.1744 shot pouch exhibits many if not most of the characteristics we might normally associate with an early 19th c. pouch.
Even earth shattering technological advancements like the advent of percussion firelocks took a while to catch on with trappers, natives, and traders on the frontier.
All of this is not to say that developing "rules of thumb" are not useful. On the contrary, some of you know that I am a proponent of quantitative analysis to help determine just WHEN, WHERE, and to the extent we can know WHY these shifts occur. The more data we have to outline the nature, timing, and extent of these shifts in material culture, the more informed our impressions - not because we always choose the "norms," but because we can accurately quantify and qualify an intentional deviation from them.
Just a thought. Need more coffee now.
Changes in material culture tend to unfold over time, with no "hard dates" or clean breaks. You could say the same today, although I think this was even much more true in the pre-industrial 18th century, before the pace of technological development and accumulation of material wealth accelerated those changes.
While at first blush this may seem a blinding flash of the obvious, we humans still seem to revert to the comfortable reductionism of clear definitions and neat categories out of habit if we are not careful. Spence seems to have a better natural instinct for countering this tendency than most.
Examples, you ask? French fly and drop front breeches co-existed for nearly a century. There was no sudden sweeping shift after the French and Indian War, as some seem to suggest.
Shot pouches, in general, got larger while powder horns, in general, got smaller progressing from the mid-18th to the mid 19th c. Yet documented exceptions clearly exist: Sir Edward Hale's ca.1744 shot pouch exhibits many if not most of the characteristics we might normally associate with an early 19th c. pouch.
Even earth shattering technological advancements like the advent of percussion firelocks took a while to catch on with trappers, natives, and traders on the frontier.
All of this is not to say that developing "rules of thumb" are not useful. On the contrary, some of you know that I am a proponent of quantitative analysis to help determine just WHEN, WHERE, and to the extent we can know WHY these shifts occur. The more data we have to outline the nature, timing, and extent of these shifts in material culture, the more informed our impressions - not because we always choose the "norms," but because we can accurately quantify and qualify an intentional deviation from them.
Just a thought. Need more coffee now.
