The presence and power of Jesus in early Christian material culture are mediated through texts, visual depictions, and other objects, representing and re-presenting Jesus across various contexts. Focusing especially on the first five centuries ce, the analysis addresses Jesus in the materiality of text, liturgy, relic, and symbol, revealing early Christian theologies and practices that resonate in later historical periods and highlighting the complex dialectic of Jesus’s presence and absence in material forms.

This chapter studies global histories that consider aspects of the material world. It exposes the – often tacit – assumptions that guide these global material histories and holds them up for careful inspection. Its particular interest is in the grounds on which global material historians associate matter and material culture with a specific scale, context or level of observation: with world-making, the global scale and ‘connectivity’, but also with the concrete, the ‘micro’ and the intimate. In that context, the chapter discusses a wide range of themes, from the risk of fetishising material things – as in, reverencing them for properties, including ‘global’ ones, merely projected onto them – to the inevitability of canvassing some forms of materiality on a global scale: the pollution of air, for instance, or, for the post–Cold War era, the issue of resource shortages. The chapter argues that, like any form of historical writing, global material histories are under the influence of their practitioners’ own times’ socioreligious texture, global imaginary and discursive habits; mindful of the telos and conceptions that pervade their work, they will be better prepared to see the world of matter and material culture in all its changeability, elusiveness and polysemy.

Recent research is demonstrating that other women and children, besides those in senior officers’ families, lived inside Roman military bases during the Principate; however, such women are rarely discussed in written sources. Also, the archaeological remains of military bases essentially lack the types of evidence for sexed bodies and gendered practices that can be found in burial contexts and figurative representations. This chapter discusses how more material-cultural approaches to artifactual remains from such sites can be used to investigate gendered identities and lived socio-spatial practices, and to develop better understanding of the place of such women in these hypermasculine spaces. This chapter is concerned with developing approaches to the artifactual remains from these sites, and the potential range of people and activities they represent, to investigate the presence of women within the fortification walls of these bases, and the roles that they may have played here. It demonstrates how an integrated approach to “gendering” artifacts can be used to explore the probabilities, rather than the certainties, of artifacts as gender attributes and how analyses of artifact distribution patterns can be used to identify women who often are not identified through other media, and so seeks solutions to identifying gendered behaviors.

The concluding Chapter 8 examines the commemorative afterlives of the West India Regiments in Britain and the Caribbean. Placing this within the wider context of the centenary of the First World War, including the ’culture wars’ that have occurred around how the British Empire is remembered, the chapter considers the acquisition, creation and display of the regiments’ material culture.

Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

Swift’s world was a material one, influenced by his experiences of the institutionalisation of British imperialism, mercantile capitalism, science, medicine, philosophy, the book trade, party politics, and aesthetics. This chapter focuses on a single category of material culture of especial importance in Swift’s writings: consumer goods. The early part of this chapter sets out the essential background on the ‘consumer revolution’ in the early eighteenth century, before addressing its influence on Swift’s writings: in particular the pamphlets concerned with Irish manufacturing, and his fascination with the material culture of women’s dressing rooms.

Chapter 6 provides a detailed explanation of the practical and political challenges faced by the projects to introduce nutmeg (and clove) into Mauritius. It is about the experiential and unsettled knowledge mobilised in the French attempts to acclimatise spices. It engages with the material practices associated with transportation and acclimatisation. The chapter explores various examples of highly ambivalent strategies for the transport on ships and cultivation in foreign soil of the spices. All of these were by no means initiated in the metropolis. This chapter is primarily concerned with natural obstacles, or rather how local actors in Mauritius sought to overcome them by employing non-conventional strategies and initiatives. Using the example of grafting, it argues that techniques and methods were developed independently in different parts of the world, and were not ‘transferred’ from Europe to the colonies, or vice versa. The sketchy and uncertain knowledge of the French remained fragmented until at least the 1780s, which led to miscalculations and an eventual failure of the project to establish a spice trade. Exploring the reasons for this failure, the last chapter reinforces calls to understand the decentred, complex, and slow process of plant knowledge in the making.

This chapter uses archaeological theory to enrich readings of Old Norse-Icelandic literature, exploring human interactions with the physical world during the Viking Age. The focus is on artefacts, buildings and constructed places in the landscape. The chapter begins with a survey of Viking Age material culture studies, emphasizing the move beyond data collection to ways of probing meaning and highlighting new areas of archaeological research and theory, including landscape archaeology, geophysics and laboratory-based techniques such as isotopic analysis. Theories of landscape and the social significance of the physical world are discussed, and also the way materials, methods of construction, and the form and decoration of material culture carry meaning. The role of diaspora studies is also explored. The chapter continues with an analysis of three particular kinds of object – swords, brooches and combs – and moves on to consider acts of transformation and the magic associated with objects, especially hoards and ritual deposition. There are sections on the construction of Viking Age buildings, ships and mounds and what they can tell us about life in the Viking Age.

Chapter 3 describes perspectivism’s world of objects and its concept of materiality, including the material implications of its notion of reality and the practices in which the material plays a key role. Assumptions about materiality in archaeology are revised by taking the conception of matter in perspectivism and putting it in dialogue with theories of matter in material culture studies. The critical question of material agency in perspectivism, including the possibility of object agency, is taken up. Objects and materiality, under certain circumstances and in specific relational contexts in perspectivism, affect humans and non-humans through a capacity that belongs to them. Two other agencies concerning objects can be identified: the first, proper to objects as things, is their capacity as intermediaries between humans and non-humans; the second is the agency of things as non-human objects rather than as inert things. Lacking a native concept of materiality proper to a case of study in the southern Andes, perspectivism provides a stand-in; its concept of objects as possessing their qualities, and instances in which they are in active relations with humans and other non-humans, enables the analysis of the ontological status of objects in the past.

An example of another way of working with perspectivism is developed in Chapter 6, in which specific principles from the theory are adapted to specific problems based on geo-ethnographic affinity with current native ontologies. How far can one go with an interpretation of the archaeological record from that starting point? Two more examples are presented. First are the relationships between people and material culture in central Argentina’s pre-colonial societies (ca. 1200–1500 CE). In a characteristically perspectivist fashion, the use of referential fields on different media highlights a way of being in the world that was experienced as inherently unstable. The second example focuses on the relationship between people and landscape in the initial peopling of the same region at the beginning of the Holocene. What would the relationship with the landscape have been for a perspectivist people populating a space absent of humans but with other entities that had the capacity to be subjects? The relationship turns out to have been more social than ecological, established prior to any given interaction, which comes into conflict with the conventional idea of archaeological landscape as empty space.

Nicole Loraux’s understanding of ideology as a system of representations and her analysis of the beauty of the dead would all seem to offer an opening for the incorporation of material culture into an analysis of the funeral oration. In spite of this, images had almost no function in her The Invention of Athens. For Loraux, the denial of an oracular spectacle of the body offered a contrast with Homeric valuations of death. She charted a move from the beautiful dead to the beautiful death that entailed a shift from aesthetics to morals. Loraux denied any role for visual culture in the funeral oration because, she argued, hearing had replaced sight. While Loraux’s analysis emerged from iconographic and structuralist approaches that implicitly contrasted abstraction and figuration, a conception of material culture that incorporates materiality and phenomenology offers important new perspectives. The funeral oration was only one component of a ritual that moved through spaces that were laden with objects and images articulating, manipulating, appropriating and, at times, rejecting the funeral oration’s beautiful death. Considering this wider material frame allows us to nuance some of Loraux’s central arguments.