ABSTRACT
This chapter considers capitalism, drawing upon the richness of historical and contemporary archaeologies of capitalism. It outlines key archaeological insights about how capitalism works and how past peoples both participated in and resisted it in places like factories, fur trade posts, and sites of worker protest. It then introduces assemblage-based thinking about capitalism, outlining new theoretical tools that help push the discussion in new directions. Assemblage thinking turns a critical eye toward flows of capitalism and issues of desire, problematizing and building upon traditional analyses of capitalist societies. The main case study considered is the archaeology of homelessness. Historical and contemporary archaeologies combine productively with assemblage-based thinking to offer fresh perspectives on homelessness, how it reifies notions of humanist Man (Chapter 2), and how it involves much more than factory owners and other humans. The chapter concludes with some future-oriented insights from archaeologies of homelessness and how they help reframe the relationship between capitalism and the people—homed or un-homed—that it binds together.
