Patricia Mangan

Patricia Hart Mangan is a historical archaeologist who studies material culture and gender, focusing on the materiality of capitalism and consumerism. Her understanding of historical archaeology is grounded in the broader frames of anthropology, history, and political economy. Her research examines how ideological frameworks and materiality influence and naturalize historical social structures as embedded and natural as opposed to constructed, malleable, and subject to change. She investigates ways in which space mediates and masks social inequality and how gender is embodied in material culture. Her early research examined class distinctions as evident in faunal remains from an Early Post Classic Mayan site in Belize. Her subsequent field study examined the incipient stages of capitalism as they developed and spread in late 18th-century Catalonia, Spain. Of primary interest was the analysis of changes in the built environment as this new mode of production refigured not only feudal economic practices but notions of physical and mental space. Fieldwork in Yunnan province in China investigated how the culture of clothing served as an identity marker between different ethnic minorities. Closer to home, Mangan has conducted archaeological excavations in Deerfield, Northampton, and South Hadley, Massachusetts.

BiographyMost recently, her interests and scholarship focus on the materiality of foodways in which she seeks to go beyond providing insight into how food was prepared and what was eaten in the past to exploring broader socioeconomic patterns reflecting gender relations, class dynamics, and broad-ranging cultural influences. This research continues to probe the question of how humans, and the material culture they produce and consume, in this case, food and gastronomy, were impacted by capitalism and how they both embraced and resisted these changes.  She has published in the journal Historical Archaeology and the Journal of Religious History.