A New Ceramic Price Index for the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

An ongoing challenge in historical archaeology is the search for rigorous methods of exploring socioeconomic inequality. One frequently used method is ceramic price scaling, introduced by George Miller in 1980. While Miller’s ceramic price index has proven effective in a range of contexts, it does not extend into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Consequently, the discipline lacks a widely applicable ceramic price index for this later period. We address this problem by presenting a new ceramic price index for the period 1880–1929. The new index is based on approximately 11,000 vessel advertisements in 23 mail-order catalogs. The index provides relative price values for 4 ceramic vessel ware types, 3 decoration types, more than 30 vessel forms, and multiple timescales, including 1-, 10-, 20-, 30-, 40-, and 50-year time spans between 1880 and 1929. The large sample of price data, diversity of vessel ware types and forms, and range of temporal scales should enable application of the index to late-19th- and early-20th-century ceramic assemblages from a wide variety of archaeological contexts in the United States.

Department(s)

Sociology, Anthropology and Gerontology

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.1007/s41636-023-00395-2

Keywords

ceramic index, ceramics, mail-order catalog, price scaling

Publication Date

6-1-2023

Journal Title

Historical Archaeology

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