materiality Archives

Materialising the Roman Empire

Materialising the Roman Empire defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the processes of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so provides up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology.

Each chapter offers a critical overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The initial chapters address major technologies which, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing and coinage. The focus then shifts to analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the inter-connections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other.

Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of ‘thinking through things’ literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology.

As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events explores the traces of London’s most significant modern ‘mega events’. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe and their organisers self-consciously seek to leave a ‘legacy’ that will endure for decades or more.

With London as his case study, Jonathan Gardner argues that these spectacles must be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply transient or short-term. Using a novel methodology drawn from the field of contemporary archaeology – the archaeology of the recent past and present-day – a broad range of comparative studies are used to explore the long-term history of each event. These include the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary ‘afterlife’ at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new post-war British identity; and how London 2012, as the latest of London’s mega events, dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste and heritage in its efforts to create a positive legacy for future generations.

This book offers significant new directions for the study of mega events in its comparison of how three mega events changed London over three centuries. Drawing on a varied selection of theoretical and methodological frameworks and a rich array of sources, it demonstrates the great potential of contemporary archaeology for re-examining recent processes of urban transformation.

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation

An Anthropology of Architectural Transformation is an ethnographic investigation of everyday life in a Romanian apartment block, from its construction in 1974 to the present day. It provides a unique window into how inhabitants, through everyday creative engagements with their apartments, come to terms with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing society, caught in between the vulnerabilities of both socialism and capitalism. The book attends to the micro, day-to-day transformations of individual apartments and the way in which they cumulatively affect ‘larger’ urban changes in Piatra-Neamț, transforming both the urban fabric and the local sense of what defines a good life. This book also provides social scientists with a novel way of thinking about the fundamental relationship between people and buildings, while inviting architects to consider how buildings are transformed in time by their inhabitants. With minute ethnographic detail, Maria Șalaru demonstrates how social order is created and maintained through the materiality of the building.