Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. In contrast to what films such as Titanic would have people believe, scientific knowledge about ocean liners is fairly limited.
These boats and their material culture, however, functioned as symbols of modernity par excellence and thus allow a better understanding of the advent of a new world at the turn of the 20th century. The focus of this article is a ceramic assemblage from the Red Star Line, the shipping company that transported some two million migrants from Antwerp Belgium to the United States between and The analysis of this material provides new insights into the furnishings and daily life aboard these ships.
Moreover, the possible reuse of these maritime objects ashore forms a basis for a discussion of the ways in which ordinary people entered into the modern world using material culture and to what extent they might have embraced the values associated with these mass-produced goods.
Except for some commercial and academic work on sites of the First and Second World Wars, the archaeology of the late 19th and 20th centuries in Belgium has not yet begun Tourigny et al.
Often dismissed as irrelevant, ceramic assemblages do have potential for writing new narratives of ordinary people and households, in addition to existing documentary ones. This article presents the fill of a feature excavated in the city of Antwerp, Belgium, as an example of how material culture can be used to give a complementary perspective.
