Dear Colleagues,

The Bronze Age is typically characterised as a period of technological and cultural innovation, culture contact, the development of long-distance trading links and increasingly sophisticated maritime technologies. These are typically associated with greater human engagement with, and manipulation of, the material world. Traditional narratives have focused on the emergence of complex societies (chiefdoms, palaces, urbanisation), monumentality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of an emergent elite and the development of power strategies situated in ideological control of economic resources. The proposed issue focuses on materiality, recognising the agency of matter and exploring diverse ways in which cultural knowledge developed from material engagements within the creative communities of the Bronze Age.

This Special Issue aims to explore human interactions with the environment during the Bronze Age through the lens of the New Materialisms, specifically to reassess how people and materials co-produced the material world. This approach encourages a move away from Enlightenment ontologies that view the matter of the world (water, land, minerals, etc.) as an inert resource waiting to be exploited by people. Instead, it draws attention to the very materiality of being human, highlighting how people and other materials are in relationship. It aims to interrogate how the distinct capacities of diverse substances (metals, clay, water) provoked, enabled and constrained human behaviour and how the daily encounters between these substances and people in the Bronze Age created and shaped new social and material worlds. The New Materialisms emphasise relationality between entities/matter through the concept of Deleuzian assemblages (or agencement): “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts” (Bennett 2010, 23), constantly “in a state of becoming” (Harris 2014, 90). A related approach focuses on the materiality of Bronze Age societies, looking at human–object entanglements. This draws upon the notion that objects have agency, beyond the distributed agency of human actors, and thus, the ability to shape the thoughts and actions of the people that created and used them. People and objects are situated within a recursive relationship.

This Special Issue welcomes theoretical contributions that aim to enhance our understanding of human interactions with material world during the Bronze Age. It invites papers addressing ceramic and metallurgical production, resource management (water, land, minerals) and the representation of ideological worlds in clay, metal or stone, taking account of how the capacities of these materials shaped and informed human praxis. At the core of this issue is an interrogation of human relationships and interactions with the physical world, challenging human exceptionalist ideologies that continue to imagine that materials play an incidental role in the construction of social lives.

References:

Attala, L. and Steel, L. (eds) Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Human Body. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, UK; 2019.

Bennett J. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, Durham, NC; 2010.

Boivin N. Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK; 2008.

Conneller C. An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe. New York, NY, Routledge; 2011.

Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, Durham, NC; 2010.

Drazin, A. and Küchler, S. (eds) The Social Life of Materials. Bloomsbury, London; 2015.

Harris O.J.T. Revealing our vibrant past: Science, materiality and the Neolithic. In Early Farmers: The View from Archaeology and Science. Whittle, A. and Bickle, P. Eds.; Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 2014; pp. 327-45.

Steel, L. Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland During the Bronze Age. Land. 7(3); 2018.

Dr. Louise Steel
Guest Editor

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• New Materialisms
• materiality
• Bronze Age
• objects
• entanglement
• assemblages