Earthy Matters
Exploring Human Interactions with Earth, Soil and Clay
Editor(s) Louise Steel,Luci Attala
Language: English
Genre(s): Environment
Series: Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology
- June 2024 · 242 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781837721351
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837721368
- · eBook - epub - 9781837721375
is a lively collection of theoretically informed chapters that introduce the reader to the notion that matter is a creative agent, and that it plays a key role in the formation of our material and social worlds. The focus of the book is sediments, soils, clay and earth ‒ materials that surround us and have shaped people’s interactions with the environment since even before the first farmers settled in the Near East tilling the earth, building houses from mud and plaster, and making vessels and figurines from clay. This collection questions orthodox understandings that these substances are inert and an infinite resource for humanity, rather to foreground earthy substances in their relationships with humans, and to show how these materials have co-created our social and material worlds. It is a novel and timely reminder for the reader that our lives have always been embedded within the matter of the E(e)arth.
List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Preface
Chapter 1: Introduction: The quivering potential of earthy matter
Louise Steel and Luci Attala
Chapter 2: In the red: Earthy humans and the generative qualities of ochre
Louise Steel
Chapter 3: Hard core, soft touches: A story of affect between caves, rocks and humans
Simone Sambento
Chapter 4: Plastered: People-plaster relationships in the Neolithic Near East
Joanne Clarke and Alex Wasse
Chapter 5: A melding of models: A New Materialisms approach to the earthy constituents in the ‘Ceremonial’ Hoard from Kissonerga Mosphilia
Natalie Boyd
Chapter 6: ‘Corbusian piggeries’ and ‘toytown cottages’: The social lives of concrete and brick in twentieth-century Liverpool
Alex Scott
Chapter 7: Plastic earth: Somatic correspondences with legacy contaminants in archaeology and anthropology
Eloise Govier
Chapter 8: Biomorphic ceramics
Bejamin Alberti
Chapter 9: Bodies and soils, re-placing not rewilding: The art of making compost and becoming places.
Luci Attala
Index
Author(s): Louise Steel
Luci Attala is a Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Director of UNESCO-BRIDGES Hub (UK), an organisation that promotes Humanities-driven sustainability science. She is also one of the Directors of Educere Alliance (Oxford University), a network that champions alternative pedagogies, and a Board Member of the Tairona Heritage Trust. Louise Steel is Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, specialising in archaeological theory and the Bronze Age in the East Mediterranean. Both are series editors in New Materialities for University of Wales Press, a series foregrounding the connections between physical substances (materials) and people.Author(s): Luci Attala
Luci Attala is a Associate Professor in Anthropology and the Director of UNESCO-BRIDGES Hub (UK), an organisation that promotes Humanities-driven sustainability science. She is also one of the Directors of Educere Alliance (Oxford University), a network that champions alternative pedagogies, and a Board Member of the Tairona Heritage Trust. Louise Steel is Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, specialising in archaeological theory and the Bronze Age in the East Mediterranean. Both are series editors in New Materialities for University of Wales Press, a series foregrounding the connections between physical substances (materials) and people.