‘A Life Proper to Matter’: Re-Animating Museum Collections Through New Materialism and Microwear

Abstract

This paper combines microwear analysis with new materialism to invigorate our understanding of past material worlds at multiple scales of analysis. Just as the development of new biomolecular approaches at scale has revealed an archive for research, so a combination of critical theoretical approaches and specific empirical analyses can do the same for objects, including those that would be considered to lack traditional ideas of ‘good context’. Through the development of concepts of multiplicity, event and assemblage and their application to the study of 431 copper-alloy, ground stone and flint objects from Later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain, we open new ways of understanding the stories objects can tell us about the role they played in past worlds. In turn, this allows us to develop an understanding of the animate properties of things, or what can be termed a life proper to matter.