Hardly any area of research into the Crusader States has been more dynamic or produced more striking results than archaeology. Prominence has understandably been given in most of this research to castles and churches, the monuments that have left the largest impact on the material and written record. Since separate chapters in this volume are devoted to castles and churches – and likewise to visual culture and numismatics – this chapter will be mainly concerned with the material impact of Western settlement in the Crusader States.

The events of the so-called Northern or Baltic Crusades, a series of military campaigns sanctioned by the papacy against the pagan societies of the Baltic Sea region, have been largely studied by historians using chronicles, treaties, papal bulls and correspondence. These include crusades against the Western Slavs (or Wends), Balts and Baltic Finns. The word ‘pagan’ was used in the crusading period as a derogatory Christian term for religious outsiders. It remains commonly used in the history and archaeology of the ‘Conversion Period’ to refer to the indigenous pre-Christian religions of northern Europe. Neighbouring Eastern Orthodox Rus’ societies, particularly within the territories of Novgorod and Pskov, were also the targets of crusades. In the nineteenth century, the principal historical narratives of the crusades such as Henry’s Chronicle of Livonia and Peter of Dusburg’s Chronicle of Prussia provided the key source material for newly written national histories. For German nationalists they contributed to the perception of the crusades as part of a historical ethnocultural struggle marking the perceived superior history and territorial claims of the German Empire. Within the context of the ‘national awakenings’ of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Baltic Crusades also came to be regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of these new or revived sovereign states. They became synonymous with the struggle for independence against foreign powers, which resonated down the centuries.

“Behind the Deadline, April 1864–April 1865” examines the “second” Camp Ford – the prison camp after it swelled in size to become the largest Confederate camp west of the Mississippi River. The chapter provides a rich and textured cultural, environmental, and social history of the Union prisoners and how their increased numbers and the subsequent increase in the camp’s physical size from five to ten acres shaped their experience within and outside the new stockade. This chapter explores in detail prison life and death during Camp Ford’s most cramped and dangerous time.

“Imprisoned, July 1863–April 1864” is devoted primarily to the “first” Camp Ford from 1863 to 1864 – the prison camp before it was contained by a wooden stockade built by local enslaved people. This chapter examines the daily existence of the early federal prisoners and how they interacted with camp guards, local civilians, and enslaved people. It includes detailed discussions for how the natural environment shaped the prisoner experience and how prisoners shaped their environment.

This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary study of empire, where material culture takes center stage. Emphasis is placed on the tangible features of this socio-economic, cultural structure, attending to everyday practices that shaped and defined the empire and its aims, evading or working against that power. A theorized fashion is foundational to this study and diverse fashion-actors as well. The creative persistence of colonized and racialized communities is highlighted. Themes are outlined to be explored in later chapters: the cultural weight of whitewashing, entangled with a whiteness agenda, and the initiatives of Black laundresses, seamstresses and fashion-makers in the Caribbean; the advent of trousers as a genteel imperial fashion, birthed from maritime, plebeian roots; the determined self-directed travel of sailors, Black servants, men and women; and the material politics of British masquerades. These topics may surprise or unsettle expected narratives, with themes involving women and men, free and unfree, of diverse ethnicities, with subaltern agency centre stage.

This chapter asks the question what being ‘local’ really means. How many generations must people of Phoenician ancestry live locally before they are considered ‘locals’? Analysis and comparison of ceramics and burial rituals in Iron Age South Iberia show that locality is produced daily by myriad actors who were differentiated and connected by ethnicity, social status, age, and gender. Who is considered ‘local’ in one place might look alien compared to how other communities and individuals perform their locality elsewhere. Ultimately, this chapter debunks the persistent notion of stable ethnic identities in the ancient Mediterranean that add little to our understanding of selfhood and cultural and colonial contacts.

This section explores the dead body – its parts, its distillations, its residues, and traces – as synecdoche and catalyst, and as a medium of exchange and thus broker of reciprocity. By drawing together scholars working on different aspects and temporal registers of material-corporeal transformation, this selection of essays considers the different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986) through which the corpse (or organ, bone, or ash) is produced, altered, acted upon, or signified, the larger social context in which the dead exist as generative material, and the relationship between processes of subjectification and objectification (Dziuban 2017). The emphasis on materiality and the “work of the dead” (Laqueur 2015), in whatever fragmentary or residual form, also illustrates how a more expansive anthropology of death includes not only canonical death studies’ considerations of the corpse as locus of social action – a thing to be overcome—(Durkheim [1912] 1995; Hertz [1907] 2009), or an agent of social transformation (Bloch and Parry 1982), but challenges to and movements beyond this expected theorizing. In tracing how anthropology has analyzed death’s materiality, we find disciplinary fissures and silos

The passing of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807 represented a hard-won victory, but its monumentalizing can obscure the complex time of abolition. Temporal complexity defines British literary and material–cultural representations of abolition, from the testimonies of formerly enslaved people (Cugoano and Prince), to the writings of prominent white abolitionists (Clarkson and Wilberforce), to work by ‘canonical’ Romantic-era writers (Wordsworth, Austen, and Coleridge). Through readings of key texts and artefacts around 1807, this chapter considers how the literature and material cultures of the era configure the spaces and temporalities of abolition. It argues that abolitionist arguments and sentiment depended on shifting notions of time and space in the age of interconnected global revolutions, producing abolitionist materials that worked upon the spatial and temporal gaps between the metropole and the colonies, and in many cases deliberately obscured the connections between the two.

We often conceive of objects as fixing us – and themselves – in time and space. We place them by their dates, materials, manufacturers, and other markers of origin. Yet exemplary narratives from the eighteenth century – such as “it-narratives” that imagined material objects as sentient protagonists – prioritize objects in motion. Accordingly, this chapter attends to moveable goods and what their circulation unveils about the slipperiness and unknowability of material culture. It tackles mobile material culture from three intersecting perspectives: material culture’s multidisciplinary terrains; the movements of objects across and within cultures; the movements of objects between the material and the literary. In addition to foregrounding how circulation might enrich the multidisciplinary study of material culture, it examines the key role of the cultural and geographic movement of literary and fashionable things across a global eighteenth century. Rather than fixing what we know about objects in provenance and place, this chapter highlights how objects might unmoor us and invites us to rethink rigid disciplinary categories.

Religious identity and material culture intersect in Irish society and literature. Churcharchitecture, religious artefacts, and ritual paraphernalia find their origins in theDevotional Revolution, when under the influence of Cardinal Paul Cullen, IrishCatholic practices were standardised and aligned with Rome. During this period, thebuilding of outsized churches, along with the ritualized bodies of believers, becamesignifiers of an increasingly respectable and confident Irish Catholic identity. The1932 Eucharistic Congress illustrates the merging of church and state, and theutilisation of modern modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. VaticanII’s makeover of the liturgy allowed for modern designs in architecture and print totransform the experience of the Mass. Religion and nationalism increasingly sharedthe same iconography and cultural vocabulary in twentieth-century Ireland. Such aconflation of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ finds another material counterpart in theMagdalene Laundries, which now stand as a symbol of the church/state institutionalabuse of Irish women and children.

Chapter 6 concerns the contentious issue of the role of the concept of life in the Logic and its consistency with the artifact-centered conception of teleology defended in chapter 5. There is a common tendency in the literature to think that the Life chapter implicitly imports references to the biological domain in the Logic itself. It is here argued instead that Hegel’s Life chapter must be read in “topic-neutral” terms: in a way that requires application neither to the natural or cultural domains. Once it is read in this neutral way, we can see that “logical life” is simply the notion of a self-determining purpose. However, the concept of life as developed by Hegel is not at all opposed to the artifactual domain; this is especially because the social and cultural domain (social ontology) give us prime examples of “living artifacts,” the kind of artifacts that can be based in a process guided by thought.

This chapter explores the sociopolitical significance of folk instruments, positing them as vital embodiments of cultural identity and history. Through a series of case studies (primarily, the banjo and the Appalachian dulcimer), the chapter illuminates the dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation, revealing how folk instruments are not simply static objects but actively evolving symbols of resilience and cultural memory. Through a critique of traditional taxonomies that often marginalize these instruments, the chapter advocates for a more inclusive framework that recognizes and centres the agency of makers and users. Further, by applying a postcolonial lens, it highlights the importance of embodied aesthetics and the complexities of musical practices within folk traditions. Drawing on the work of Kofi Agawu, it explores both the manufacture of instruments as well as their varied use patterns over time and geographical space. Finally, it situates folk instruments in relation to archies and processes of canonization.