Rodney Harrison

Anne Clarke

Robin Torrence

Sarah Byrne

Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind glass cases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected, researched and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency. In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical frameworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present. Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies. This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.

Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum

Unpacking the Collection

Steve Brown

Ursula Frederick

Archaeologists are synonymous with artifacts. With artifacts we construct stories concerning past lives and livelihoods, yet we rarely write of deeply personal encounters or of the way the lives of objects and our lives become enmeshed. In this volume, 23 archaeologists each tell an intimate story of their experience and entanglement with an evocative artifact. Artifacts range from a New Britain obsidian tool to an abandoned Viking toy boat, the marble finger of a classical Greek statue and ordinary pottery fragments from Roman England and Polynesia. Other tales cover contemporary objects, including a toothpick, bell, door, and the blueprint for a 1970s motorcar. These creative stories are self-consciously personal; they derive from real world encounter viewed through the peculiarities and material intimacy of archaeological practice. This text can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses focused on archaeological interpretation and theory, as well as on material culture and story-telling.

Artifacts and Archaeologists

Object Stories

The Archaeology of Difference presents a new and radically different perspective on the archaeology of cross-cultural contact and engagement. The authors move away from acculturation or domination and resistance and concentrate on interaction and negotiation by using a wide variety of case studies which take a crucially indigenous rather than colonial standpoint.

Negotiating Cross-Cultural Engagements in Oceania

The Archaeology of Difference

Ursula K. Frederick

That Was Then, This Is Now is a compendium of innovative research into the ideas, experiences, and iconographies embodied in materialities of the recent past. Drawing upon a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, history, art, and cultural geography, authors examine themes of relevance to the contemporary world, such as the impacts of automobility, the invisible effects of radioactivity, and the scale of future cities. It serves as a reminder, moreover, that issues that confront us as global citizens – mass consumption, population growth, technological development, and the conditions of belonging – find expression in the everyday objects, images and vestiges encountered in our ordinary lives. Through their examination of such artefacts as comic books, road memorials, bullet holes, showbags and cable ties, the authors explore the complex relations between people, places, and things and the emotions underpinning them – nostalgia, play, grief, and humour. Issues and ideas of international scope are addressed through a focused approach as authors locate their site-specific studies in both rural and urban geographies, as well as in the spaces of the imagination, the universe and even the personal home. Given the enormous scale and diversity of material generated by the practices of living in the present, it is difficult to imagine how the archaeologies and material cultures of the contemporary world may be defined. The studies presented here offer a way forward, and, in doing so, point reflexively to the past, as well as the now and the future of things to come.

Contemporary Archaeology and Material Cultures in Australia

That Was Then, This Is Now

IS & N (3, 1995, Hērakleion)

Mario Campolargo

Greece) International Conference on Intelligence in Broadband Services and Networks (3rd : 1995 : Herakleion

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference in Broadband Services and Networks, IS&N '95, held in Heraclion, Greece, in October 1995; this book summarizes at the same time the main results of a group of RACE projects sponsored by the European Commission for several years. To meet the new challenges in broadband communication, service engineering has now emerged as a new discipline strongly related to software engineering; particularly the concepts of object-orientation and open distributed processing are being adopted. The book presents 44 full papers and 8 posters selected from 88 submissions. Among the issues addressed are service architecture, usability, communications management, advanced communication services, security, and service creation.

Third International Conference on Intelligence in Broadband Services and Networks, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, October 16 - 20, 1995. Proceedings

Bringing Telecommunication Services to the People - IS&N '95

Anne Clarke

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