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ABSTRACTThis article argues that some elements of material culture can creatively cross the line between notions of "nature" and "culture" as these and related ideas are often tacitly understood by some modern people. This has implications for the biosphere, but the division of these categories is also tied up with the division of people, processes of identification, memorialization, and the way some people are defined out of the human realm altogether. Modern material culture—objects used, left, manipulated, and removed by people—seems particularly adept at telling us about these categories in the minds of some modern people. An archaeology of the contemporary examines how people interact with different kinds of "natural" things in places where nature and culture, in the modern imaginary, meet and conflict. In the starkly different contexts of the city of Detroit and Yosemite National Park, such objects have been managed and manipulated in a way that speaks to crucial issues of memory, identity, and race. [contemporary archaeology, nature and culture, memory, national parks, Detroit]

ABSTRACTA meeting of the Religious Society of Friends ("Quakers") formed in the British Virgin Islands in the 1740s offers a window onto broader practices of religion making. Equality, simplicity, and peace form a basis for Quaker thought, but in the BVI these ideals intersected with the realities of Caribbean life and the central fact that members also held enslaved Africans. What members did to create Quakerism varied for this group, yet it was nonetheless understood to be a part of the broader community of "Friends." Practice perspectives are employed here to gain access to seemingly ephemeral religion through the concrete objects of archaeology but also as a means of reconciling variation in practice with the idea of a coherent religion. Here religious identity was negotiated through practices on multiple scales, creating unity via larger‐scope practices of writing and reading while the most frequent identifications were local and variable. Written works are often seen to encode a static, "real" version of religion against which actions can be measured, but I will argue that religion is better seen in practice, and here Quakerism was created at least as much in the variable minutia of individual performance as in widely shared documents.

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions - from plastics to the digital to biotechnology - have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. John M. Chenoweth, is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Series Preface -- Introduction Laurie A. Wilkie and John M. Chenoweth -- 1 Objecthood Christopher Witmore -- 2 Technology Steven A. Walton and Timothy J. Scarlett -- 3 Economic Objects Paul Graves-Brown -- 4 Everyday Objects Stacey L. Camp -- 5 Art Susanne Küchler and Timothy Carroll -- 6 Architecture Paul R. Mullins -- 7 Bodily Objects Laurie A. Wilkie, Katrina C. L. Eichner, Kelly Fong, David G. Hyde, Alyssa Scott, and Annelise Morris -- 8 Object Worlds Alfredo González-Ruibal -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

All parts of the Caribbean were shaped by similar forces, including race-based chattel slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical and sometimes deadly natural environment. Within these commonalities, however, is also a great deal of diversity. Large sugar plantations populated by hundreds of enslaved Africans rightfully receive a great deal of attention from archaeologists, historians, and the public. The authors in this volume, however, use innovative techniques and perspectives to reveal the stories of places and times where the rules of this system did not always apply. Collectively, the chapters focus on the spaces in-between, alternate views of plantation landscapes, and the complex dynamics at play in the days following slavery.