Towards a holistic view of material culture:
Interdisciplinary Approaches

Material culture surrounds us and yet it is usually overlooked. Although it is an integral part of our daily lives, we take it for granted. This attitude has also influenced the academic examination of material culture, although this is now beginning to change, with material culture recently emerging as a dominant field of research in the social sciences.

Carl Knappett seeks to contribute to this emerging field by adopting a broad interdisciplinary approach, based on archaeology and incorporating anthropology, sociology, art history, semiotics, psychology and cognitive science.

His approach is that people act and think through material culture. Ways of knowing and ways of doing are deeply rooted in even the most common objects. This requires us to adopt a relational perspective on material artefacts and human agents as a means of characterising their complex interdependencies. In order to illustrate the resulting networks of meaning, Knappett discusses examples ranging from prehistoric Aegean ceramics to Zande hunting nets and contemporary art.

The book Towards a Holistic View of Material Culture. Interdisciplinary Approaches [Thinking Through Material Culture] argues that, although material culture is the cornerstone of archaeology, the discipline has only recently begun to address how fundamental artefacts are to human cognition and perception. This idea of interdependence between mind, action and matter opens the way for a new and dynamic approach to all material culture, both past and present.