Search Results

The cognitive, psychological and sociological mechanisms underpinning complex social relationships among small groups are a part of our primate heritage. However, among human groups, relationships persist over much greater temporal and spatial scales, often in the physical absence of one or other of the individuals themselves. This chapter examines how such individual face-to-face social interactions were ‘scaled up’ during human evolution to the regional and global networks characteristic of modern societies. One recent suggestion has been that a radical change in human sociality occurred with the shift to sedentary and agricultural societies in the early Neolithic. The discussion presents the results of a focused study of the long-term development of regional social networks in the Near East, using the distribution of different forms of material culture as a proxy for the social relationships that underpinned processes of trade, exchange and the dissemination of material culture practices.

This chapter introduces the fragmentation premise — the idea that the deliberate breakage of a complete object and the re-use of the resultant fragments as new and separate objects ‘after the break’ was a common practice in the past. It also summarizes the main implications of the fragmentation premise for the study of enchained social relations and of the creation and development of personhood in the past. Enchained relations connect the distributed elements of a person's social identity using material culture. These concepts of fragmentation, enchainment and fractality are used to think through some of the earliest remains of objects in the world. Following the philosopher David Bohm, the discussion supports the co-evolution of fragmentation in both consciousness and in objects, and compares Bohm's three-stage ideas to Mithen's model of cognitive evolution and Donald's model of external symbolic storage.

Archaeological accounts of cognitive evolution have traditionally favoured an internal model of the mind and a search for symbolic proxies. This chapter argues for an external model of cognition and uses this perspective to develop the understanding of Palaeolithic material culture as based on sensory experience. It explores ways of investigating the evolution of cognition by using the social brain model combined with a theory of distributed cognition. The emphasis is on social extension, which was a necessary step to a global distribution and which was achieved by mechanisms such as focused gaze that amplified the emotional content of bonds. The discussion examines the importance of these mechanisms through three aspects of social extension — ontological security, psychological continuity and extension of self.

The preceding chapters examined three categories of objects—pottery, fibulae, and swords with their scabbards—and two ways of manipulating objects—arrangements in graves and performances involving human bodily action with objects—over the two-thousand-year period from the Early Bronze Age to the end of the prehistoric Iron Age. The focus has been on visual aspects of objects and the changes in their visual character over time. This chapter synthesizes the material laid out in chapters 5 through 10. It draws attention to the consistency of the patterns in the visual character of material culture in each of the three main periods of time considered in this book, and to the character of the changes that took place in the fifth century BC and in the second century BC.

This chapter probes how Delta blacks developed a new material culture of religious experience. It illuminates how the purchase and display of certain types of consumer goods became crucial elements of new ideas about respectability, domesticity, and the ‘black Christian home.’ Congregants purchased staid clothes, lithographs of church leaders, and religious wall‐hangings to model self‐restraint and racial pride; preachers symbolized progress by purchasing drapes, pipe organs, and electric chandeliers for their churches. Central to these new consumer and spiritual practices was the shifting association between politics, black women, and religion. As disfranchisement expelled all blacks from the politics, denominational churches increasingly excluded women from traditional leadership posts, and fraternal orders evolved as new centers of community affairs run only by men, women, in an attempt to capture a new measure of social authority, defined themselves as the curators of home and church decoration. With the support of male clerics, they openly championed themselves as the market's arbiters of public taste and domestic consumption.

Recent years have witnessed growing academic interest in material culture as a particularly rewarding approach to reinterpreting the German past. That Germany served as one of the twentieth century's busiest construction sites of political experimentation and utopian ventures of all stripes meant that the built environment was crucial for conveying new dreams of political power, place and possibility. Yet it is less well-known is that the 20th century placed great premium on the domestic interior. This chapter considers the issue of interior design and the construction of an East German Wohnkultur, or domestic ‘living culture,’ as both socialist ideal and lived reality. Attention will also be paid to the flourishing 1960s cottage industry of East German etiquette books as further efforts to stylize the socialist self and to remake home life as an outpost of socialist civilization.

This chapter deals with performances, which refer specifically to actions that people carried out in social contexts—“with an audience” and with their material culture. To be a performance, an action must be aimed at communicating with others. A performance involves some kind of movement by a person or persons, and the focus here is with those movements that involved the manipulations of objects. These include throwing swords into the lake at La Tène; arranging bent and broken scabbards in the ditch at Gournay-sur-Aronde; and placing iron tools in the fire at Forggensee. At Snettisham, they buried gold neckrings. All these actions were performed by prehistoric people and were held in open spaces where they could be seen by others, in some cases by large numbers of them.

This chapter evaluates the use of rabbinic literature in the study of Jewish daily life and material culture. It explains that one of the main problems associated with research on material culture and daily life is the establishment of a proper relationship between rabbinic literary references and archaeological data, between text and object. It suggests that these problems can be resolved by approaching the issues on the basis of a historical-critical study of rabbinic sources in a broad interdisciplinary framework, which takes account of archaeological research within the Graeco-Roman and early Byzantine context and which uses tools, methods and models developed by the social sciences.

Studies of early modern consumption have concentrated on durable objects which furnished the home, the goods recorded in probate inventories and those preserved in museums. Probate inventories are problematic because they record textiles very poorly, and museums tend only to preserve the most exquisite luxury objects, which were not typical of the period. Gentry household accounts provide the link between these two approaches to material culture, and a wealth of details about textiles and small everyday items such as pottery and glassware. The chapter looks in turn at clothing and textiles, bedroom and living room furnishings, dining ware and kitchen ware, and the meanings assigned to goods, particularly gendered meanings evident from wills.

Human nature is the product of a long history that has brought us, over the course of some 6–8 million years, from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee lineage to modern humans. The aim of this particular volume has been to bring together two powerful approaches that deal, respectively, with explanations of the evolution of human brains and understandings of cognition as a distributed system, in order to illuminate the changes that took place during the later stages of human evolution. It aims to compare inter-disciplinary perspectives on these key issues across a range of disciplines. A particular focus is provided by consideration of the role that material culture plays as a scaffold for distributed cognition, and how almost 3 million years of artefact and tool use and manufacture provide the data for tracing key changes in areas such as language, technology, kinship, music, and social networks.

This chapter discusses the material culture of the gentry household by examining the accounts of the Multons. The manorial accounts of 1324-6 tell us a great deal about the rebuilding and repairs at Frampton following the long wardship of Thomas de Multon IV. They tell us that some basic refurbishing had to be undertaken. household accounts for 1343-4 and for 1347-8. household. For the next generation, that of John de Multon I, household accounts for 1343-4 and for 1347-8 contains, in addition to the usual diet account, a further account on the dorse of the roll entitled ‘Necessary and Foreign Expenses’. Its vantage point is that of the lord, who was itinerant, and it records purchases made for him and moneys disbursed by him and his officials as he travelled around Lincolnshire.

This chapter argues that ritual needs to be given greater attention in the historiography of American Buddhism. The popularity of mizuko kuyō points to a significant turn toward appreciation of ritual in convert Zen since the 1980s, as women have taken a greater role in leadership and Zen’s own success has led to a diversification of views. Furthermore, ritual has always existed to a larger extent than previous studies acknowledged, but it was partially obscured by uncritical acceptance of Zen practitioners’ descriptions of normative practice. Future studies should try to focus on neglected areas that may bring this wider range of practices to light; possible foci include places, material culture, bodies, and emotions, all of which have been insufficiently accounted for in previous research.

The mastery of fire is a great human achievement which has helped shape our species. This chapter addresses the wider importance of fire, arguing that it is part of a fundamental motor of human evolution, deeply tied into our biology as well as economy and technology, and indeed a motor of the social brain. It seems likely that fire was involved in this nexus from a very early period, probably back to the time of increases in human brain size in the early Pleistocene, and indeed that it may have been a necessity for the subsequent physical evolutionary and social developments in Homo. Fire may be associated so strongly with imagery, imagination and symbolism in the modern world as a result of its primary role in effecting transformation of materials, and acting to link various strands of material culture.

In this chapter, three sources of information — the historical presentation of the Hebrew Bible supplemented by ancient Near Eastern documentation where applicable, the evidence of the material culture available from excavations and surveys, and the impact of Babylonian rule on the region — are brought together to construct a holistic portrait of the situation in Templeless Judah. The chapter begins with a reconstruction of sixth-century Judah from the perspective of the biblical portrait, as it is important when examining this period to be aware of how the biblical writers understood the events of the sixth century and how they portrayed them. Other sources of information about the period such as those from the archaeological record and an understanding of the Babylonian empire are used to elucidate the historical details available from biblical and extra-biblical sources. Despite devastation and severe disruption, certain clues indicated the resumption of activity and the existence of a stable infrastructure within which cultic ritual continued.

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between the different communities on the island, including indigenous slaves.