World Archaeology

ISSN: 0043-8243 (Print) 1470-1375 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwar20

A sense of materials and sensory perception in

concepts of materiality
Linda Hurcombe
To cite this article: Linda Hurcombe (2007) A sense of materials and sensory perception in
concepts of materiality, World Archaeology, 39:4, 532-545, DOI: 10.1080/00438240701679346
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438240701679346

Published online: 01 May 2008.

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A sense of materials and sensory

perception in concepts of materiality

Downloaded by [200.189.118.104] at 11:04 04 April 2016

Linda Hurcombe

Abstract
Objects are a key aspect of archaeological evidence and theories about them should contribute to
interdisciplinary debates on materiality and material culture. Despite the primacy of this evidence there
is considerable scope for further debate about the role of materials in concepts of materiality and the
social construction of sensory perception. This is as true for a past society as it is for our own but the two
world views may be ill-matched and archaeology can miss important sensory issues in the societies it
studies. The way in which archaeology deals with objects is deconstructed to oer some criticism of
present practice, and some ideas for new ways of thinking about the role of sensory perception in
constructing concepts of materiality for past societies by a focus on attention. Further exploration of the
role of the senses in the modern craft of nds analysis is advocated, in order to elucidate the passing on
of such skills and the way in which material experiences colour modern perceptions and interpretations.

Keywords
Senses; material culture; materiality; materials; perception; nds analysis.

Opening a debate
Materials and the sensory perception of them mattered to past societies and were
appreciated within the framework of contemporary individual and cultural experiences,
and yet they are investigated and interpreted by archaeologists with an entirely dierent
set of experiences. Isayev (2006) gave a crucial reading of objects as central but not equal
to archaeology, and made a plea for interdisciplinary discussion. Though artefacts and
material culture are not the sole preserve of archaeology classical studies, history,
geography and others are all interested in this eld (e.g. Lubar and Kingery 1993; Kingery
1996) the discipline should be a key contributor to interdisciplinary debates on
materiality and material culture (Isayev 2006). There are strong inter-disciplinary
publications (for example, the Journal of Material Culture and, for gender and material

World Archaeology Vol. 39(4): 532545 Debates in World Archaeology

2007 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438240701679346

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culture, Donald and Hurcombe 2000a, 2000b, 2000c) and all the disciplines discussed by
Isayev, including archaeology, have strong postmodernist critiques (Moore 1994: 10728;
Shanks and Tilley 1987; White 1998). Yet archaeology has not reected critically on
attitudes towards materiality within its own disciplinary practices nor has there been
discussion of the manner in which the dierent evidence bases of disciplines oer varied
possibilities for presenting primary evidence in the public domain. A discussion of
artefacts as material culture (Hurcombe 2007) crystallized a sense of disquiet at the
manner and role of nds analysis into a more formal deconstruction of artefact studies
amid the current discourse on materials and materiality (Ingold 2007; Tilley 2007) and the
increasing discussion of sensory perception within other disciplines.
This paper seeks to open a debate on how archaeologists deploy their senses in the study
of objects, the senses conveyed in publications, and the way in which present-day
perceptions may aect readings of sensual perception and materiality in past societies.

Deconstructing the presentation of evidence and the archaeological study of objects

Every discipline needs to present its primary evidence but the means dier. History has a
relatively easy task in publishing its primary textual data sources by using the medium of the
printed word. The writing of anthropology is part of the narrative and builds up verbal
images and scenes as well as illustrations (Moore 1994: 1268). Within archaeology,
landscape data can be presented as maps and other graphical representations as well as
images: here archaeology has beneted from the presentational conventions of geography.
However, for objects, archaeology has had to develop its own conventions of archaeological
illustration to solve the problem of how to show three-dimensional colourful objects in twodimensional black and white. Various disciplines use photographs, but such published
images have been limited in number and no image is allowed to speak for itself but is
captioned; the written word is never absent (though see Berger 1972). As a means of
communication, spoken and written words are familiar to all. For issues communicated via
graphics the level of common understanding of the principle is less universal. The most
familiar would be maps, with graphs less well understood and archaeological illustration
very much the preserve of specialists (Adkins and Adkins 1989; Griths and Jenner 1990).
Thus the means of communicating real objects in published sources are not as
straightforward as the means of communicating spoken words: there are practical dierences
in relating reality to the codied systems communicating them (writing, drawing).
Practical experiences also aect what is understood from words and drawings. As
written texts are codes for the sounds of speech (Ingold 2000a: 2479), ancient plays can
still be performed today. Nobody argues that staging an ancient play is a reconstruction of
past productions but, equally, the practical engagement with the words and the staging
oer another means of understanding the words on the page. Practical constraints and
opportunities are revealed and explored, and the performance itself engages more senses
for performers and audience. While modern approaches have questioned the role of
technologies (e.g. Sutton (2006) on writing as an activity threatened by word processors,
Suchman (2000) on designing via computer), the digital camera and desk-top publishing
have made the use of images less dicult and in the future 3D imagery may be common

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(Brown 2007). However, academic discourse is still rooted rmly in the published book
rather than in web video clips and images. Thus, if interdisciplinary studies of material
culture and materiality are to progress, they need to address material issues and
performance, and the transmission of these concepts within modern discourse.
Archaeology has paid little attention to the practice of nds analysis. Artefacts have
always been seen as the evidence for technology and crafts. Modernity values objects but
the postmodern spirit of self-reection has in archaeology tended to emphasize the
theoretical and has consequently devalued the human craft of nds analysis in the present
(Hurcombe 2007: chs 2, 6). There are a number of obvious issues. Archaeology has a
hierarchy and career structure which places eldwork over nds analysis (Gero 1996).
Recent discussions have noted particular concerns: many specialists are self-employed,
there are areas where the cohort of people with particular expertise are nearing retirement
and there is no formal idea of an apprenticeship or mentoring system for passing on skills
(Geary 2005; Hancocks and Powell 2005; Peachy 2005). Furthermore, specialisms are
often very compartmentalized and budget constraints allow few, if any, meetings for
specialists to share results. It is usually the excavation director who has the only chance to
bring all the material culture evidence together.
Individuals mostly learn detailed nds analysis skills on the job in eld units or as part
of their doctoral research. Teaching practical nds analysis skills in universities has in
recent years been constrained by larger class sizes and the need to curate limited artefact
teaching collections since, once published, nds from research eldwork are now often
required to go directly to museums, and museums are less willing to make long-term loans
or gifts of objects. Those universities which do pass on more detailed practical skills will
have made strong eorts to do so. Yet the pioneers of teaching archaeology at universities
clearly identied the need to gain those practical skills for themselves and to build up the
resources to pass them on to their students (Fox 2000: 53, 112). The skills of sensory
perception used in nds analyses are not often directly mentioned but Knappett (2007: 21)
briey mentions the possibility of sorting pot sherds by touch and sound and MacGregor
(1999) describes using touch and movement to interact with an artefact type in order to
gain new insights into its possibilities as objects. In lithic analysis, sight, sound and touch
are all important: a hinge fracture or use-dulled edge can be felt, conchoidal fracture
qualities can be heard and technological information requires some visual information
(speckling, patination and staining) to be ignored so that surface shapes can be perceived;
some heat damage can be seen, heard and felt while subtle heat eects aect colour and
opacity and minor heat crazing can be seen but not felt. Such statements show that a
debate on the sensory skills deployed in the processes of nds analyses might bear fruit,
since most archaeological objects are studied only by human senses and will never be
looked at through a microscope, let alone analysed by a machine.
In a curious twist, some investigations of archaeological materials rely on machines
which perceive what the human senses cannot. The most common technique is
microscopic investigation where the proof or documentation of results is presented in
the form of images. Hand lenses and stereo microscopes, normally used at magnications
well below 100X, make it easier to see things/relationships which are essentially the same
as could be seen with the naked eye. More powerful microscopes, working at more than
200X magnication, take visual perception into new territories where the parameters
have to be learned, and technical language develops to describe what has been seen.

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However, our primary impressions are still visual. Most microscopic analyses therefore
oer their proof and documentation in the public domain as images where one of the
most crucial pieces of information will be the original magnication or a drawn scale.
Visual techniques also include the use of x-ray and infra-red images which go beyond the
human eye, not because they help us see things which are very small, but because they
penetrate (see Edwards 2001). In the past an image oered no possibilities for
quantication, but digital cameras and computerized image analysis now oer an
accessible means of turning the images into objective quantied data. This has
undoubtedly helped document results in some elds of analysis; however, there are many
cases where the visual image is still the best substantiation of an inherently visual analysis.
Furthermore, there is now research into the way in which visual outputs from brain
scanners and similar devices are aecting the presentation of the research and the
conceptualization processes of the researchers (Beaulieu 2002). Putting something which
cannot be perceived into a visual format which can be understood is clearly a powerful aid.
Archaeology also uses other machines for investigative techniques of artefact analysis.
For example, Laser Ablated Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICPMS) allows the identication of elements in a sample to assist in the characterization of an
artefacts raw material. Such techniques can help identify regional or unique sources of
origin which allow contact, exchange and trade to be investigated. The machine has gone
beyond human perception to nd out for the archaeologist something which the past
society already knew, but which was otherwise not knowable now: our etic (externally
imposed) classications based on characterization studies coincide with emic, internally
recognized object histories (Renfrew 2004: 29). The media for presenting the results of
such analyses are numerical or graphic arrays. In this way neither the operator of a
machine nor the reader of results have themselves perceived the data directly with their
senses, but the machine has presented data in a way which enables judgements to be made.
Though data are always constructed to some extent, the ability to present data for
evaluation usually relies on published words, numbers, graphical arrays or images. Whether
the data are gathered by human senses or machines, most information is reduced to a format
where visual and verbal media dominate. Thus, published sources in archaeology inevitably
downplay some of the senses used to gather information. Data-gathering issues are also
aected by debates on objective and subjective knowledge and attitudes towards science.
Archaeology has seen an ongoing debate about the role of science within the discipline
(Jones 2002, 2004) and has also undergone paradigm shifts in which artefacts feature
strongly (Hurcombe 2007: ch. 5). As such there is historical baggage brought into
discussions of objects and materiality. Though function is changeable and mediated
through social relations (Graves-Brown 2000; Ingold 2000b; Preston 2000), a discussion of
function is incorrectly identied as referring back to functionalism, a strong theme within
the archaeological paradigm of the earlymiddle part of the twentieth century and one
which has been critiqued so that functional determinism has since been categorically
rejected. Thus to talk of properties and functions can seem a retrospective step.
However, there is also a sense of antipathy between scientic facts and social theories which
inuence attitudes towards the analysis of objects. Science provides measurable objective
knowledge (e.g. trace elements or hardness) but such data can be seen as presenting raw
material characteristics devoid of social meaning, whereas to use a personal sensory
perception of the performance of materials relies on subjective experiences which are

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dicult to present for independent assessment. Although an interest in materiality oers

an opportunity for a rapprochement between these two positions (Jones 2004) there is at
present no comfortable place for an analysis of artefacts which stresses the analysts sensory
perceptions, despite a clear recognition that materials and material culture are sensual
extensions to the body and part of a melding of mind, body and objects which cannot be
disaggregated into Cartesian dualities of object/thing and subjective/objective (Knappett
2005a). This is the situation within archaeology, but it is also part of the wider phenomenon
of modernitys devaluation of practical knowledge cooking skills, for example (Sutton
2006). Such devaluation can be traced back to the nineteenth-century segregation of
practical crafts from visual arts and the elevation of the latter to a high cultural ideal and
the denigration of the former as functional (Classen and Howes 2006: 208).

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Materials and materiality

Artefacts as a body of archaeological data are biased by what enters the archaeological
record from a living society and what survives to be recognized and recorded. The most
obvious missing data include the perishable elements of material culture, which encompass
most soft things and those materials which can be recycled with little trace. The former is
always the vast majority of the material culture repertoire and the latter includes categories
such as glass and some metals. The potential information diers even between surviving
types of archaeological materials: one rim-and-body sherd of a wheel-thrown pot can reveal
much about the pot as a whole in a way that a fragment of wood cannot. An obsidian ake
can be sourced but a int ake cannot. The fact that materials allow dierent possibilities of
understanding needs to be explicitly discussed within archaeology (Hurcombe 2007). Object
narratives and biographies are profoundly aected by the nature of the material. Knappett
(2007: 23) has called for a consideration of time within concepts of materiality in order to
incorporate a narrative element to these. Cloth and baskets can have symbols or mnemonics
literally woven into them (Ingold 2000b) or the elements can be reconstituted to take on new
or refreshed signicance (Colchester 2005; Henare 2005; Norris 2005). The performance of
manufacture and renewal can be part of these narratives where sensory perceptions may
vary through time. For example, as objects are used, or even unwrapped (Wentink 2006),
they are subtly altered. The patina of long use, seen as shine but also felt, may itself convey
meaning as part of the object narrative, and, while breakage signals the end of one part of
the object biography, a mend which renders it ineective or of limited service for its rst use
nonetheless signals that the object entered another phase in its life history, e.g. drilled holes
in pottery (Cleal 1988). Such complex narratives also show that the classic production/
consumption divide has no neat counterpart in all object life histories, but there are hints on
what might be explored in archaeological narratives on materiality.
Seminal anthropological work on material culture has focused on consumption (e.g.
Miller 1995, 1998) and, in a study of the modern cell phone in Jamaica, Horst and Miller
(2006) have claried how little production impinges on the users consciousness:
consumption dominates. The materials and nished object need to be eective and
fashionable but material sources, production methods and the geographical area in which
these occur are irrelevant to the consumption of the nished product. Many of the issues

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which archaeologists consider so important are thus irrelevant. Such a stark divorce is likely
to be more of a post-industrial reality of object narratives, as in, for example, post-colonial
cross-over commodities (Cook and Harrison 2003). However, the disjunction of productiontravel-consumption does signal that a dierent balance of parameters and materiality
concepts may develop between the perception of traded goods coming into an
archaeological society as products vs. those where the consumer was either intimately
linked with the contexts of production or those where the production processes are generally
well known. An example might be to consider the Scandinavian Bronze Age where metal
ores were absent but its society consumed ne metalwork. It is assumed that largely invisible
goods such as furs probably went in the other direction. The community receiving furs might
not have had close knowledge of the animal species from which some of the furs came, yet
the kinds of processes used to hunt, skin, cure and work hides would have been appreciated
by the consumers. The sensory experiences and knowledge of the receiving society would
allow at least some aspects of the materiality of production to be appreciated.
The relationship between materials and materiality is intimate and rooted in practical
sensory experiences. Materiality is a social construct based on materials in the same way
that gender is a social construct based on sex; gender needs the reference of sex and
materiality needs the reference of materials; see, for example, Ingolds (2007) reference to
Hodges (1964) work. Thus materials and their aordances (Gibson 1979; Knappett
2005b), and the performance of interactions with them, help shape the social construct.
Just as discussions of gender have acknowledged that present-day concepts can aect
perceptions of past gender, so present-day issues of materiality aect the ability to perceive
materiality in other cultures such that individuals from dierent backgrounds bring a
dierent symbolic system to bear in organising the same material of sensory experience
(Ingold 2000a:160). Thus the role of the senses and learned experiences are important, but
largely unrecognized, features of our ability to understand materiality in other cultures.
People in a modern society understand little about the collection and production issues
of traditional materials and, for those materials which have little contemporary usage, no
ideas of performance parameters. Metals and glass are used in our society but there is little
experience of the location of the raw materials and the processes by which the materials
can be worked. Though some wood production techniques are widely understood, e.g.
sawing, it is less likely that a sawn piece can be linked back to a tree, what that tree looks
like and where it grows. At the extreme there is aked stone, where most modern people
have experience neither of its production nor of its performance as a tool. My contention
is that this aects current sensory constructs and renders some aspects of archaeological
material culture notably dicult to perceive (Hurcombe 2007: ch. 6).
Traditionally sensory perception is described in relation to ve senses: visual, auditory,
tactile, olfactory and gustatory. This division is argued to be a convenience of analysis, but
not part of the reality of an holistic sensory system where sensations perceived via one
mechanism act as cues for the receipt of other sensations (Ingold 2000a: 268; MerleauPonty 1962) and where intersensoriality is recognized (Howes 2006). The key feature is
that the properties of materials perceived by a society are the only ones that mattered to
them: if a property cannot be perceived, it is as if it does not exist. This aects our
understanding of materiality in two ways. First, we can perceive what past societies cannot
and make this serve our own purposes (e.g. distinguishing dierent sources using trace

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element analysis) and, second, they can perceive what we cannot because of dierences in
personal experiences of materials. The latter are learnt, so practical participation and
action are crucial (Bourdieu 1977; Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000a, 2007: 1667). Ingold
(2000a: 316, 35860) distinguishes knowledge and physical skill; however, craft expertise
requires three things: knowledge, skill and aptitude (Hurcombe 2000a). Not everyone has
the same propensity to increase their skills: practice alone will not make an international
sports star or a da Vinci. The way in which people think via material culture and the
complexity of material engagement are interlinked (Knappett 2005a; Malafouris 2004;
Renfrew 2001). People growing up in a society may develop various materially based skills
where achieving competence or even mastery can be the norm, but exceptional excellence
can add cultural value. This can be used within a society to create value and dierences to
be exploited for social purposes. Even within a society there are multiple sensory orders
and material culture expressions according to age and other concepts of personhood
(Banerjee and Miller 2003; MacGregor 1999: 264). Such subtleties may be very hard for
someone outside a society to perceive.
If an anthropologist sees that participation and action within another culture are useful
to understand that culture and its attitudes towards materiality, then archaeology has to
do something else to inform its discussion of materiality. Rather than the properties of
materials, technological processes and functional performance being seen as boring
sidelines to the goal of social meanings, they need to be seen as crucial pathways towards
this goal. Properties should be studied as essential information to be investigated with our
senses and technologies in order to provide ideas about social contexts. Such knowledge
and sensory experiences can then inform an understanding of objects as individual pieces
and as the material evidence of past concepts of materiality.

Sensory perception and an archaeology of attention

In exploring the role of the senses and perception in archaeological concepts of materiality
it is evident that sensory perception has been considered in the related subjects of
anthropology (e.g. Classen 1997, 2005; Howes 1991) and geography (e.g. Rodaway 1994)
and in museum studies (see Edwards et al. 2006). However, dierent disciplines have oered
particular sensory perceptions (Clarke 2005; Hofmann-de Keijzer et al. 2005; Lazzari 2005;
Reichel-Dolmato 1985; Renfrew 1998; Scarre and Lawson 2006; Seremetakis 1996; Stahl
2002; Te Awekotuko 2006), although there has been a primary focus on the visual (Bataille
and Sontag 2001; Berger 1972; Grimshaw 2001). This is changing and there is now more
discussion of haptic (tactile) (e.g. Classen 2005; Hetherington 2003; Paterson 2005) and
olfactory senses (Classen et al. 1994). Archaeologists, too, are considering specic senses
and sensory perception (Cummings 2002; Dawson et al. 2007; Lazzari 2003; MacGregor
1999). Classen and Howes (2006: 199200) oer an overview and a clear statement that
sensory social constructions dier across societies. Much has been made of the visual
hegemony of western society (see Ingold (2000a: 155) for an overview). However,
anthropologists may have interpreted the role of other senses as dominant in the societies
they studied simply because these senses were more to the fore than in western society
(Ingold 2000a: 253). Even though the anthropologist can participate in another culture,
they still bring their own cultural experiences to the perception of the senses. For

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archaeologists who have only the material culture, the challenge is more severe. If material
culture gives expression to a sensory order (Classen and Howes 2006: 212, 218) then,
although cultural outsiders cannot experience the material culture as originally intended, it
is still possible to think through what features would draw attention by considering the
material culture of past societies holistically. The key is to engage more senses in discussions
about perception in the past and to give some consideration to what is missing.
One way to think of the environment of natural and made things is to focus on
attention-drawing phenomena. Though Ingold (2000a) has argued that learning a skill is
an education of attention, there is a more general issue at stake. Certain qualities of the
world around us attract attention and can be used to dierentiate between moving and
static entities, light-catching and light-absorbent things. Movement draws the eye and
produces sounds, movement of the air transmits smells and causes lighter entities to move
and make a noise. Dierent landscapes sound dierent (see Gell 1995; Ingold 2000a: 251)
and the sounds inside a house or cave or under a rock shelter all dier substantially. In
cultures where rivers and water are important, perhaps the sound-carrying qualities of still
water or the sounds from moving water were incorporated into cosmological views.
Someone working just outside a house would have a natural sound reector at their back.
Some activities, such as smithing, have distinctive and ringing sounds, others, such as rush
basketry, have soft rhythms of weaving interlaced with the squeak of squeezing air out of
the rush. No one familiar with basketry or sewing would nd it odd to see a rhythm in the
nished work. As part of an idea of performance in archaeology, sensory perception and
the role of objects for the senses could be a powerful tool for new insights. For example, if
archaeologists used evidence from the location, environment, structures and material
culture from a site, it would be possible to know a great deal about the setting (see Watson
and Keating (1999) for an investigation of the acoustic qualities of monuments). Asking
what might draw attention would focus on a way of engaging the senses. Thinking in this
way, the cooking pot is associated with re (heat, movement, smoke, smells) but the aroma
of what was cooking might be the sensory perception that was strongest. A pot could thus
be a mnemonic for a smell or food. The food vessels in graves could be there as
mnemonics for sustenance but could also stand for the smells and tastes of the cuisine of
their society. Thus, by focusing on what might be the sensory perceptions of objects in
their past social settings/environments, new meanings for them can be considered. Also by
focusing on what would draw attention we can, in part, consider their world view rather
than our own. A few examples make this point.
There is a growing archaeological literature on colour (Boivin and Owoc 2004; Jones
and MacGregor 2002; Russell 2000), but less discussion of other visual phenomena such as
sparkle and shine (Keates 2002; Saunders 1999), or contrasts and patterns (Cooney 2002).
The act of smoothing a surface can accentuate and clarify such qualities. Cummings (2002)
argues that it is the act of smoothing that is important, but perhaps this is because it is a
transforming action which reveals and amplies both the colour and latent qualities as has
been suggested for amber polishing (Jones 2002: 164). The availability of objects which
catch the light, oer translucency, transparency or strong colours are so endemic in our
own society that they blind us to more subtle textures and pattern eects in societies
where the possibilities for strong colour and sparkle are much more limited (Hurcombe
2007: ch. 6). Furthermore, the palette of colours available in earlier periods was restricted.
Black, white and the earth tones of red/yellow/brown are the most obvious. I can think of

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no strong blue available in Neolithic Britain except as owers. However, plants could have
opened up some avenues of colour symbolism even if in a transient way. Modern dyes give
strong and lasting colour for items of jewellery, clothing, bags and containers to which we
give little thought. In contrast historical and ethnographic studies have shown that indigo
as a dye stu has issues of cultural circulation and meanings (Balfour-Paul 1997). While
ochre is the most obvious early colouring substance, the possibility exists for the use of
more ephemeral organic dyes on organic materials; these are rare nds: for an example of
dyed and embroidered textile at Irgenhausen, see Petrequin and Petrequin (1988: 246) and
for discussion of the nature of the evidence trail for plant-based material culture see
Hurcombe (2000b). However, there are occasionally hints that dyes might be used. At
Etton causewayed enclosure, the bark brought onto the site could have been used in
tanning hides (Taylor 1998: 131, 158), but it is also a dye stu and mordant and an aid in
colouring dye-resistant plant-based bres (Barber 1991: 236; Hartl and Hofmann-de
Keijzer 2005). If such bark can be used to colour and preserve, then the use of the tree in
other contexts may play on these other roles. My point is that without a knowledge of
substances and technical processes such possibilities for interpretation are overlooked.
Moreover, because colour is so often used to give strong patterning in our society, subtle
tonal patterns such as natural dierences in shade in two similar plants or subtle textural
dierences such as slight changes in the weave would not to our eyes be as strong a pattern
as might have been intended and perceived in a society where strongly coloured material
culture was rare. Equally, materials such as faience would have been even more striking to
their past society than they are to us. There is a case for thinking through the range of
colours, textures, sounds, smells and tastes available within the societies we study in an
holistic way to understand what might draw or deliberately deect attention in that
society. Such an approach focuses on attention and narrative.
There is also a case for working across the senses and across dierent material
components of the cultural repertoire. Stonehenge itself, and the material culture of the
society which built it, can be viewed holistically to oer cosmological symbolism across
dierent material categories (Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998; Parker Pearson et al.
2006). Likewise in Mexico, Hosler (1994, 1995), has been able to integrate the colour, sound
and cosmology of metal, linking sensory perceptions with a world view and Keates (2002)
notes that in Copper Age Italy components of metals dier in technical detail and colour and
he links this with the colour and pattern of cloth, as part of a holistic symbolic system. Yet
there are still sensory qualities which are barely reaching our consciousness as issues in
material culture, e.g. stickiness (Engelke 2005) or grease (Jonaitis 2006). Texture can be seen
as well as felt and can reveal information about the origins and links of an artefact. The
visual texture of hide as suede or buckskin is quite dierent from skins which retain the
pattern of hair follicles known as grain pattern where a knowledgeable eye can discern the
kind of animal and even information on its age and the manner of tanning used on the skin
(Reed 1972: 258). A knowledgeable person could thus read aspects of status, animacy and
sensuous qualities in the textures and drapes of a garment even without reading shape and
decoration for other identity issues. Perhaps objects like polished amber can be important
because they are solid, but things can be trapped inside them or light be seen as trapped
inside. Haptic texture and visual texture would dier. Thus there may be ways in which
objects oering contradictory sensory experiences are valued for precisely that quality.

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Conclusions
Though archaeology has much to oer an interdisciplinary approach to material culture
and considerable expertise in dealing with objects and communicating the results in
publications, it could be more self aware. Material culture exists in 3D full colour
perceived by all the senses working together, but it is conveyed via words and limited, 2D,
mostly black and white illustrations. Many specialists have a clear sense of their own
material and bring their sensory perception to its study, but this is not overtly discussed:
the craft of nds analysis deserves more attention. Furthermore, it is necessary to consider
more integrated concepts of materiality. Few researchers make holistic judgements
because they are unlikely to be experienced in the sensory perception of all of the nds or
to have experience of all of the materials used by the society under study. One approach to
dealing with both the missing elements of the material world of the past, and past sensory
perceptions, requires a more holistic approach which examines the totality of the materials
available and draws out the attention and narrative issues within the available and
produced material culture repertoire. There is a case for having a better sense of materials
and sensory perception in concepts of materiality.
Archaeology Department, University of Exeter
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Linda Hurcombe is a senior lecturer and Head of the Archaeology Department at the
University of Exeter. Via experimental archaeology, she has practical knowledge of a wide
variety of materials, especially lithics and organics, and has worked on projects across
dierent time periods and in Europe and Asia. She is most interested in prehistoric
material culture and the methods of studying artefacts. Her current research theme focuses
on the use of inorganic artefacts to reveal evidence for organic material culture.