ABSTRACT
The 18th century witnessed a great many changes in Western culture and society: the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions; the rise of capitalism; the burgeoning of the slave trade; the technological changes of the industrial revolution and the cultural developments in worldview, ideology, and social relationships. In his widely influential In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life, James Deetz found material culture evidence in New England for what he described as the developing Georgian worldview. Instead, he suggests an emerging culture of capitalism as responsible for the range of changes that Deetz and others observed in New England. This chapter also discusses the archaeology of an admirable 18th-century woman: Anne Catharine Green provides an example of the roles and limited options available to Euro-American women in the 18th century. She was a member of a gender whose power and voice were muted in a society where women had little autonomy.
