A landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms
 
Institutions pervade social life. They express community goals and values by defining the limits of socially acceptable behavior. Institutions are often vested with the resources, authority, and power to enforce the orthodoxy of their time. But institutions are also arenas in which both orthodoxies and authority can be contested. Between power and opposition lies the individual experience of the institutionalized. Whether in a boarding school, hospital, prison, almshouse, commune, or asylum, their experiences can reflect the positive impact of an institution or its greatest failings. This interplay of orthodoxy, authority, opposition, and individual experience are all expressed in the materiality of institutions and are eminently subject to archaeological investigation.
 
A few archaeological and historical publications, in widely scattered venues, have examined individual institutional sites. Each work focused on the development of a specific establishment within its narrowly defined historical context; e.g., a fort and its role in a particular war, a schoolhouse viewed in terms of the educational history of its region, an asylum or prison seen as an expression of the prevailing attitudes toward the mentally ill and sociopaths. In contrast, this volume brings together twelve contributors whose research on a broad range of social institutions taken in tandem now illuminates the experience of these institutions. Rather than a culmination of research on institutions, it is a landmark work that will instigate vigorous and wide-ranging discussions on institutions in Western life, and the power of material culture to both enforce and negate cultural norms.
 

“Editors Beisaw and Gibb draw together 14 contributions by historical archaeologists dealing with some less well-known institutions of US and Australian life. These include one-room schoolhouses, almshouses, prisons (wartime and general), insane asylums, and communal societies. All articles, including introductory contributions dealing more generally with theoretical approaches to these institutions, stress that the institutions must be understood by contextualizing them with what can be drawn from the historical record that, they also demonstrate, proves in all cases to be extraordinarily rich. It is only through the historical background that the archaeologist can develop 'histories' of the artifacts recovered through excavation, often quite limited in number and specific in function. Furthermore, in understanding the institutions themselves, archaeologists must engage the shifting and variable understanding of the relations in capitalistic societies because these “minor” institutions, in many ways, reflect power relations that have been variously interpreted. For professional archaeologists and certainly for college and university libraries with graduate and undergraduate programs; the general public also will find much of interest, but also much that is stiff going. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.”
—CHOICE
 
“Addressing a long-neglected facet of the archaeology of our modern world—our institutions—this volume reveals the interesting and insightful past of a class of sites that are deeply and inextricably tied to a core aspect of modernity.”
—Jamie C. Brandon, Arkansas Archeological Survey
 

“This volume highlights the use of interdisciplinary approaches and multiple lines of evidence as crucial to understanding the material culture of institutions and the relations of power that they embody. Institutions embody a worldview and the lives of their residents, staff, and community observers are influenced and constrained by the ideology which fashioned it. Researchers of any discipline who share an interest in power relations, childhood, gender studies, community relations, and institutional history will all find food for thought within The Archaeology of Institutional Life.”
—Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology