This series is concerned with how things were done, why they were done that way, and how an understanding of the world was generated through making and using materials, from the earliest human engagement with the material world to the end of the European Middle Ages, and on a worldwide basis. It will consist of a series of volumes which update the earlier scholarship on the history of technology, to take into account the last 70 years of archaeological and other research. More significantly, however, it will also embrace the view that technology is a socially-embedded set of activities, sustained by the transmission of relevant bodies of knowledge and practices. People are shaped in the processes of making, as an outcome of the varied ways they shape the world. Questions of technology are existential, rather than functional. The series will therefore differ from a traditional ‘history of technology’, in that it will expand upon conventional ideas of technologically determined progress, and attempt to document human participation in, and alteration of, the material world. After much thought, however, we have decided to structure the series by material, so there will be volumes on Communication, Lithics, Pigments, Building Technologies, Textiles, Ceramics and Glass, Agriculture, Food, Metals, Transport, Military Technologies, Synthetic Chemistry and Technologies of Power.

Series editors:

A. Mark Pollard is Emeritus Professor Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford. His publications include Beyond Provenance: New Approaches to Interpreting the Chemistry of Archaeological Copper Alloys (University of Leuven Press, 2018), Archaeological Chemistry (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2017), and Handbook of Archaeological Sciences (Wiley, 2001).

Chris Gosden is Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and his publications include Celtic Art in Europe: making connections (2014), A Technology of Enchantment? Exploring Celtic Art 400 BC – AD 100 (2012) and Archaeology and Colonialism (2004).

Editorial Board: 

Ann Brysbaert, Leiden University

Shadreck Chirikure, University of Oxford

Rosemary Joyce, University of California, Berkeley

Mei Jianjun, University of Cambridge

Joanna Sofaer, University of Southampton