Substance worlds: engaging matter beyond things
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 21/04/2017

We live in an age of plastic, glass, and stainless steel. Objects like smartphones, whiteware crockery, and Ikea furniture come to us fully formed, with definite, homogeneous surfaces, and when those surfaces are broken or tarnished we discard them. We internalize this way of engaging with the material world: it shows in our material culture theory, with its rich “object worlds” (Meskell 2004) of pots and handaxes, figurines and baskets, following “biographies” from the time their surface forms to the time they are discarded (Joyce and Gillespie 2015).
Without denying the sweeping advances in ‘thing theory’ in the past 20 years, we argue that material cultural concepts, terms and methods tailored to bounded objects struggle to comprehend that omnipresent category of material substance that is loose, aggregate, heterogeneous and unbounded. Substances like clay, dung, ash, compost, rubbish, and soil are not ‘things’. They behave differently in physical terms and invite different engagement from human bodies and
minds.
Drawing on examples from our fieldwork on tell sites of the Age of Clay, as well as contemporary material culture, we attempt to outline the particularities of a material culture theory of unbounded substance. We discuss implications of substances’ physical proclivities and the demands of working with substance; suggest common ways in which substance affords skill, thought, and discourse; and reflect upon the phenomenological foundations of ‘thing theory’ in light of this broadened horizon. In conclusion, we suggest that, although some of our modern material cultural habits shape archaeological thought to be partly-incongruous with the substance world, the intimate engagement with substances that archaeological practice demands and the sturdy roots of 21st century material culture theory provide ample resources for a revitalization of  unbounded substances in archaeological understanding in coming years.

Kevin Kay, University of Cambridge, and Laurence Ferland, Université Laval, Canada