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Two events mark the fall social season on the lower Eastern Shore of Virginia—H. M. Arnold's Bayford Oyster House Bash and Theodore Peed's Turtle Party. Theodore Peed's garage where the party takes place serves as kitchen, staging center, and workingmen's community gathering spot. Peed's snapping turtle party is also about the complex social networks that have evolved on the Eastern Shore of Virginia over the past four centuries. When Peed describes his cooking pots, he calls them African kettles and links them to deep histories of foraging, work, and race. This chapter examines community, food, race, friendship, and celebration around the dynamics of terroir and storytelling.

David, tall, lanky, middle class kid with freckles, who hung himself in the garage. When a young person commit suicide is anyone to blame? Blame is difficult because the death erases all blame and smothers finger pointing, or at least it should. What is remarkable about David and the other kids who either attempt or commit suicide (and the notes reflect this) is they all have the desire for love, to be themselves, to seek approval or to be forgiven.

In I Thought I Heard the Shuffle of Angels' Feet, a short story by Randall Kenan, a gay architect mourning the death of his lover from AIDS unexpectedly finds a second chance at romantic happiness in the local mechanic's garage.

Sites are the staple of archaeological investigation, forming the basis of many an excavation or survey project, often within a wider landscape study where it is the relationships between sites that can matter more. Think of any archaeological project or great excavation of the nineteenth or twentieth century, and you have your archaeological site, defined by convention as incorporating either settlement or industrial, religious, or military remains. These sites are often the subject of either a lengthy process of investigation and then post-excavation analysis leading to publication of results, or sometimes a short Weld evaluation prior to their destruction through development or preservation in situ. Their initial discovery may be newsworthy, and perhaps the result of some significant new development, a new landmark in the making. As we have seen, by convention archaeologists and curators generally treat those places and objects from the past as precious, valued resources for their very historicity and their cultural value, and often (correctly) seek their protection from destructive forces of the present and future. But our view is slightly different. We do not recognize the distinction between that which is old/ancient and matters, and that which is new and does not. Rather we recognize all material culture, the artefacts and sites and the wider landscape, as being suitable for archaeological inquiry and potentially holding value for this reason: not just the objects of the deeper past threatened with destruction, but also the contemporary office building that now occupies the site. Archaeology of the contemporary past even gives recognition to the ‘site to be’, the places planned for the future, a site that exists only on a planning board or an architect’s computer, or as a model, or even in the mind. With the archaeology of the contemporary past, the past, present, and future are woven together in a way that gives the subject complexity, introduces new and unforeseen challenges and difficulties, and equally gives it a heightened sense of social relevance and meaning. That said, for archaeology of the contemporary past, many of the same rules apply as for earlier periods, although, as we have seen, the sheer numbers of modern sites, and the spatial continuity of human activity and our perception and experience of it, do complicate things somewhat.

In the previous chapter, we considered those methodologies that might be seen to characterize the archaeology of the contemporary past. One of the issues raised there was the extent to which an archaeology of the contemporary past is defined by, and is even reliant upon, working with and across a series of different academic disciplines and areas of subject specialisms. In this chapter, we will look in more detail at the relationship between the archaeology of the contemporary past and the various academic disciplines on which it draws and with which it overlaps. Rather than a field defined by a series of other academic disciplines, we argue that the archaeology of the contemporary past emerges from this review as a discipline characterized by a particular vision and approach to the material culture of the contemporary world. These issues are explored in relation to various examples which illustrate both the similarities and differences between an archaeology of the contemporary past, and those various specialisms with which it has close relations. This chapter will also explore the relationship between the archaeology of the contemporary past and contemporary art, both in terms of artistic engagements with the archaeology of the contemporary past and the idea of archaeology as a form of contemporary artistic practice. A number of authors have written in detail about the historical relationship between archaeology and anthropology (e.g. Gosden 1999), and we do not have space to cover the topic in the detail it deserves here. The relationship between archaeology and anthropology is, however, particularly relevant when we are considering the archaeology of the contemporary past, as in almost all instances we are considering the material remains of societies contemporary with us. Archaeology and anthropology, although closely related, have developed along divergent lines in the different countries of the world in which they are practised, so for this reason we will focus our discussion on the historical relationship between archaeology and anthropology in North America and Britain, and the role of an ‘anthropological archaeology’ in approaches to the archaeology of the contemporary past.

Parked outside the El Capitolio Nacional in Old Havana are long lines of pre-1959 American cars built in Detroit and sold to Cubans many years ago. These cars, already extinct in the streets of the United States, are working cars called ruteros, and they are taxis that run back and forth all day in fixed routes from the Capitol's steps through the main roads of the city. While new factory-made spare parts have not been available for North American cars in Cuba since the United States stopped doing business with the island in October 1960, most of these ruteros were altered by mechanics who learned to combine Detroit engines with diesel models. This chapter presents a historical overview of motor vehicles in Cuba up until the Revolution. It discusses the first cars and garages that appeared in Cuba, Havana's first fleet of taxis, auto racing, and the numerous attempts by the government to solve the public transportation crisis.

This chapter discusses the opening of rural Cuba outside of its cities by highways and the increasing reliance on automobile transport in Cuba. The Locomobile, the first North American car to reach Santiago de Cuba, Havana, appeared in May 1902. The second car, a Fiat, appeared in 1904. The city's first garage opened in 1907 and by 1913, there were over 4,000 motorized vehicles in Cuba and in 1931, Cuba had 22,695 registered cars, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

This chapter examines and analyses the industrial developments, international influences and local productions relating to Irish cinema in the Celtic Tiger period. It considers funding opportunities, specifically in relation to the Irish Film Board, for Irish filmmakers, and comments upon the consequences of the growth of digital film-making during this time. The end of the Troubles and a new perception of Ireland overseas, expressed through cultural product such as Riverdance and chick lit, are linked into altered expectations of what Irishness signifies. Specific points include the rise of a new generation of Irish male film stars, from Colin Farrell to Chris O'Dowd. Barton reviews of the shift in representations by local Irish filmmakers, from films that celebrate the new spaces of globalised Dublin (About Adam and Goldfish Memory) to an accelerating trend that focuses on Dublin as a dangerous space inhabited by a disenfranchised underclass (Intermission and Garage). In addition, the chapter critiques the representation of new Irish immigrants, arguing that their depiction is more to shed light on indigenous Irish identity concerns than to engage with the experiences and expectations of this specific group of individuals.

This chapter presents an interview with filmmaker Len Abrahamson. Abrahamson began shooting shorts while studying Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. After a period of post-graduate study in Philosophy at Stanford University in California, he returned home to concentrate on filmmaking. His first two features were collaborations with writer Mark O'Halloran. The first, Adam & Paul (2004), was included in the Official Selection at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival. Garage (2007) was the recipient of the CICAE Art Cinema Prize in the Director's Fortnight at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The interview covered topics such as Abrahamson's working partnership with O'Halloran and the sensibilities they share; the advances he observed between Adam & Paul and his second feature, and the main lessons he learned; and the factors contributing his spare minimalist style.

This chapter focuses on the origins and rise of another new form of secondhand exchange: the garage sales. Hosted and attended mostly by women, garage sales emerged in 1950s suburbs as tactics for newly isolated housewives to earn intermittent income, participate in politics, and build community networks. From huge Barry Goldwater campaign fundraisers to small family sales to raise "pin money," these intimate events both adapted to and defied the spatial limitations of suburban domesticity and postwar gender expectations. Moreover, garage sales introduced a new, larger-than-ever generation of middle-class youth to secondhand goods and clothing—providing provocative glimpses of the tools that could be used in a partly generational rejection of class status, sexual normativity, and political consensus.

The conclusion offers some assessment of how thrifty practices are faring in the sciences today, and how they are being re-evaluated among hacker and maker communities taking a less formal, more makeshift approach to experiment, invention, and technology. Some consideration is given to how sustainable these practices are, and how we measure sustainability. Thrifty science is connected to Hasok Chang’s call for a new "complementary science." The book concludes that oeconomy and thrifty science are experiencing a revival and their history might therefore be of service in achieving sustainability in the future.