Contact tracing: The materiality of encounters

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue on 'Material Encounters' by addressing the praxis of materiality across time, disciplines, areas of study, and technologies. We use the metonyms of track and trace and the distinction of objects and things to disentangle ways in which materials and understandings of the material mediate dynamic encounters with specific people or places, particularly in Oceania. These material encounters generate diverse, unstable forms of knowing on all sides, through the uneven flux of human embodiment (in encounters) and embodied materialization (in object, inscription, representation, memorialization). We juxtapose the assumed, if increasingly challenged priority of materials in object-oriented fields such as archaeology and museology; the reflective revival of material culture studies and the 'material turn' in anthropology from around 1990; and the belated recognition of the salience of materials and materialities by historians, whose craft depends on present material traces of the pasts they seek to elucidate. With reference to the agency of persons, places, time, or things, we stress the plurality of materialities and their related ontologies, and the qualities of movement, instability, and incompletion inherent in all encounters.

The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: Seven Years of the CBAP Project

“…Archaeological technologies and what they make possible in terms of new analyses and, importantly, when they make them possible are another such topic (Hayes et al 2023;Spriggs 2019b;Ward et al 2016). Wider theoretical developments in archaeology and in the historiography of archaeology have also been considered (Dotte-Sarout et al 2020b, 2021bDouglas 2023b; papers in the themed issue of History and Anthropology edited by Douglas and Ballard 2022a, persuasively situated in its introduction by Douglas and Ballard 2022b;Douglas and Di Rosa 2020;Howes 2021b;Howes and Spriggs 2019b; papers in the themed issue of World Archaeology edited by Tim Murray and Spriggs 2017a and their introduction, Murray and Spriggs 2017b;Spriggs 2018Spriggs , 2021c.…”