ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a 200-year slice of consumption practices stretching from the American Midwestern and Chesapeake regions, across the southern Atlantic Seaboard, to the Caribbean. It addresses some themes in the archaeology of modernity and consumption. The demand for clothing and rum among Native Americans was just one historical instance of the democratization of credit, debt, and desire that Baram (1999:139) refers to as the "Big Fix" of modernity: the spread of commodities of pleasure and recreation. The cultural serving trays contain a wide array of things, substances, and ideas that are consumed in distinctive ways around the world, before being returned for seconds, thirds, and continuing iterations into the present. The space of modernity was, and is, characterized by an intrinsic "lumpiness" and positionality where race, status, gender, ethnicity, and class interrupted and redirected materiality in ways that variably produced and reproduced asymmetries and subjectivities from one region to another.
