Wrapping and Unwrapping Material Culture ─ Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives

This innovative volume challenges contemporary views on material culture by exploring the relationship between wrapping materials and practices and the objects, bodies, and places that define them. Using examples as diverse as Egyptian mummies, Celtic tombs, Native American ceremonial bundles, baby swaddling, and contemporary African textiles, the dozen archaeologist and anthropologist contributors show how acts of wrapping and unwrapping are embedded in beliefs and thoughts of a particular time and place. These context specific, cultural, and technical acts offer a new lens on material culture and its relationship to cultural meaning.

Susanna Harris is British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. She is researching the relationship between textiles and animal skins in prehistoric Europe and the role of cloth-type materials as cloth cultures.

Laurence Douny is an independent scholar, and an honorary research fellow at UCL Department of Anthropology. Since 2001, she has been conducting research in the Dogon region of Mali in West Africa on landscape and material culture issues. She also researches wild silk and indigo techniques in Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Ivory Coast, and Nigeria. She has written several papers on West African material culture in relation to shrines, domestic waste, heritage, wild silk textiles, and the anthropology of techniques.