Investments of meaning: An archaeology of style, social identity, capitalism and ideology in a nineteenth century Australian town

Abstract

Capitalism and ideology are two theoretical topics which saturate much of the recent literature on historical archaeology, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they are seldom defined explicitly. In many instances, architectural style is used as the vehicle for moving between the theory and the data, without examining the nature of the complex relationship between capitalism, ideology and style as a mediator of relative social identity. This study is an investigation of the relationship between the development of capitalism and the expression of ideological information within the architectural style of buildings in the town of Armidale, in New South Wales,Australia. My principal theoretical concern lies in addressing the complex issues of how style encodes meaning and how, as a medium for the creation of identity, it might be related to the social contexts and relationships within capitalism, which are in turn related to the construction of ideology. A principal result is that both local scale membership in a particular form of capital production and larger scale membership in a particular social class (as a relationship to the means of production), influence the stylistic construction of identity. Stylistic features come to be indexical of membership in particular groups and subsequently symbolic of the relationship between that group and other groups. This semiotic process creates both notions of stylishness and of value, which in tum become incorporated into contemporary and subsequent contexts of meaning and thus implicated in the construction of ideology.