Discard behavior on domestic historic sites: Evaluation of contexts for the interpretation of household consumption patterns

Abstract

Consumer behavior has become an important topic in historical archaeology, and patterns of domestic acquisition, use, and discard are often directly expressed in the archaeological record. Consumption patterns are influenced by factors such as household morphology, life cycle, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, therefore analysis of domestic site formation processes should take these factors into account. The formation processes exhibited on historic domestic sites may be quite complex, but there is a broad range of analytical methods available for examination of these processes.