Earthy Matters 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.
Tabella dei contenuti
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
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