This paper talks about material culture analysis and its limits within archaeology, specifically with engaging with race, gender and class. The authors describe trends across the field where historical and cultural archaeologists are joining to examine identity through personal possessions. A section titled Worn Objects and Identity describes personal adornment as a visual manifestation of one’s identity and self. Personal adornment offers glimpses into how individuals manipulated their bodies in the past and how these are systems of communication, “conveying individual and group affiliation across the fluid and changing constructions of gender, age, class, ethnicity and other modes of identity”.

White then goes on to talk about how to accurately identify and interpret personal adornment. Briefly, asserting a necessary awareness of the complexities of hybrid fashions found in colonial contexts, suggesting blended identities which emerge as reactions to colonial violence and political impact. Describing factors which might have controlled individual access to personal adornment, a topic I’ve researched in relation to Afro-Caribbean history. The intense examination of personal objects as a sort of stored information about individual identity and social performance interests me. I plan to further explore how patterns of personal adornment reflect and structure social identity, and how that relates to individual agency and gendered behavior in a Caribbean context.