ABSTRACT
How can historical archaeology develop an understanding of resistance? How can historical archaeologists avoid mapping and remapping the material culture of domination – the houses, ceramics, glasswares and personal possessions of people in positions of power? ‘Small things forgotten’, the mundanities that make up the assemblages from many sites, have long been celebrated as the mark of the common people. But, more often than not, the collections with which we work were left by slave owners, masters, bourgeois householders and farmers. The underclasses, often so difficult to find in the documentary record, are equally elusive in their material traces as well.
