Cultural Histories of the Material World

Cultural Histories of the Material World, the third volume in the series of the same name, explores the ways human beings have shaped and interpreted the material world from the perspectives of some of the world’s leading thinkers in archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, economic and landscape history, history of technology, philosophy, and literature. Through original contributions drawn from the editorial committee of the series, this collection self-consciously explores issues about material evidence, and attempts to show how attention to materiality can contribute to a more precise historical understanding of specific times, places, ways, and means. As Peter N. Miller writes in his introduction, “Objects . . . ‘stage’ evidence just as texts do, just as images can, just as performance does. One of these forms is not necessarily more eloquent, more perfect, more reliable than the others, only different in the way that different forms yield up their content.”