This title develops a systematic approach to materials at a time when there has been a call for a greater focus on materials in material culture studies. It establishes a new perspective on the meaning and significance of materials, particularly those involved in mundane, daily usage.

This volume provides a clear and up-to-date description of how the materials were exploited, modified and manufactured in prehistoric and historic periods.

Modern Material Culture

This work investigates the material culture of public temperatures in New York City. Numbers like temperature, while ubiquitous and indispensable to capitalized social relations, are often hidden away within urban infrastructures evading attention. This Archaeology of Temperature brings such numbers to light, interrogating how we construct them and how they construct us. Building on discussions in contemporary archaeology this book challenges the border between material and discursive culture, advocating for a novel conception of capitalism’s artifacts. The artifacts examined within (temperatures) are instantaneous electric pulses, algorithmic outputs, and momentary fluctuations in mercury. The artifacts of the capitalized never sit still, operating at subatomic and solar scales. Temperatures, as numerical materials precariously straddling the colonially constructed nature-culture divide, exemplify the abstraction necessary to pursue the perpetually accelerating asymmetrical growth of wealth—a pursuit that engenders multiple environmental and economic calamities. An Archaeology of Temperature innovatively reimagines theory and method within contemporary archaeology. Equally, in plumbing the depths of temperature, this book offers indispensable contributions to science studies, urban geography, semiotics, the philosophy of materiality, the history of thermodynamics, heterodox economics, performative scholarship, and queer ecocriticism.

Material is the mother of innovation and it is through skill that innovations are brought about. This core thesis that is developed in this book identifies skill as the linchpin of – and missing link between – studies on craft, creativity, innovation, and material culture. Through a detailed study of early bronze age axes the question is tackled of what it involves to be skilled, providing an evidence based argument about levels of skill. The unique contribution of this work is that it lays out a theoretical framework and methodology through which an empirical analysis of skill is achievable. A specific chaîne opératoire for metal axes is used that compares not only what techniques were used, but also how they were applied. A large corpus of axes is compared in terms of what skills and attention were given at the different stages of their production. The ideas developed in this book are of interest to the emerging trend of ‘material thinking’ in the human and social sciences. At the same time, it looks towards and augments the development in craft-studies, recognising the many different aspects of craft in contemporary and past societies, and the particular relationship that craftspeople have with their material. Drawing together these two distinct fields of research will stimulate (re)thinking of how to integrate production with discussions of other aspects of object biographies, and how we link arguments about value to social models.

How do archaeologists make effective use of physical traces and material culture as repositories of evidence? Material Evidence takes a resolutely case-based approach to this question, exploring instances of exemplary practice, key challenges, instructive failures, and innovative developments in the use of archaeological data as evidence. The goal is to bring to the surface the wisdom of practice, teasing out norms of archaeological reasoning from evidence. Archaeologists make compelling use of an enormously diverse range of material evidence, from garbage dumps to monuments, from finely crafted artifacts rich with cultural significance to the detritus of everyday life and the inadvertent transformation of landscapes over the long term. Each contributor to Material Evidence identifies a particular type of evidence with which they grapple and considers, with reference to concrete examples, how archaeologists construct evidential claims, critically assess them, and bring them to bear on pivotal questions about the cultural past. Historians, cultural anthropologists, philosophers, and science studies scholars are increasingly interested in working with material things as objects of inquiry and as evidence – and they acknowledge on all sides just how challenging this is. One of the central messages of the book is that close analysis of archaeological best practice can yield constructive guidelines for practice that have much to offer archaeologists and those in related fields.

Material characterization tests for objects of art and archaeology is not confined to museum professionals. It serves as an excellent and essential companion for conservators of outdoor sculpture, monuments, and buildings. The tests are applicable to a wide range of object classes including metal, textile, leather, paper, plastics and architectural materials. In addition to presenting the detailed methodology for carrying out each tests, the authors have evaluated the effectiveness of each test in order to assist the reader in selecting the most applicable test and interpreting the results.