Routledge Archaeologies of the Contemporary World
About the Book Series
An historian once described, ’all history as contemporary history’. All archaeology is contemporary for the same reason - in its persistence, its resilience, its place in the contemporary world, on or beneath its surface. But increasingly archaeologists are focusing attention on the contemporary world itself, its materiality, the behaviours that underlie it, and the heritage it creates. Archaeology provides a distinctive and meaningful contribution to understanding the contemporary world - a contribution grounded in materiality, and in seeking to understand the often complex relationships between people, their behaviours and things. This series of books will generate new and deeper explorations of these relationships, creating and promoting archaeologies of the contemporary world through a range of formats (single-authored works, edited collections, Research Focus outputs) encouraging diversity of approach towards new interdisciplinary encounters with our supposedly ‘familiar past’.
The Archaeological Transformation of the Western European Rural World, 18th-21st Century: Industrialization and the Process of Modernity
1st Edition
By Carlos Tejerizo-García
December 20, 2025
How the rural world in Western Europe became modern? Who were the main agents of this change? Did these transformations had an impact on the local environment? This book explores the process of transformation of Western pre-industrial rural societies into industrialized ones through an ...
A Contemporary Archaeology of Post-Displacement Resettlement: Delhi’s 1947 Partition Refugee Homescapes
1st Edition
By Erin P. Riggs
May 14, 2024
This book explores the archaeology of the 1947 Partition, the largest mass migration in human history, and the resulting resettlement of half a million refugees in Delhi, India’s capital city. Interweaving material analysis with oral history collection and archival sources, this book considers how ...
An Archaeology of Temperature: Numerical Materials in the Capitalized Landscape
1st Edition
By Scott W. Schwartz
May 31, 2023
This work investigates the material culture of public temperatures in New York City. Numbers like temperature, while ubiquitous and indispensable to capitalized social relations, are often hidden away within urban infrastructures evading attention. This Archaeology of Temperature brings such ...
After Discourse: Things, Affects, Ethics
1st Edition
Edited
By Bjørnar Olsen, Mats Burström, Caitlin DeSilvey, Þóra Pétursdóttir
December 22, 2020
After Discourse is an interdisciplinary response to the recent trend away from linguistic and textual approaches and towards things and their affects. The new millennium brought about serious changes to the intellectual landscape. Favoured approaches associated with the linguistic and the textual ...