Description: An archaeological exploration of the nature of material disparity in the Nordic countries during the modern period, over the last 500 years.
Brief description: Gavin Lucas is Professor of Archaeology at University of Iceland, Iceland. His main research interests are in archaeological method and theory and the archaeology of the modern world. He is the author of Archaeological Situations (2023), Making Time (2021) and Writing the Past (2019).
Review Quotes:
"With this collection, [the book editors] deliver a thought-provoking and insightful volume." --CHOICE
"This is a thought-provoking collection exploring the causes, consequences and expressions of material plenty and poverty in early modern and modern northern Europe. It addresses fundamental questions many archaeologists grapple with: how to explain disparity in material wealth of archaeological assemblages? Is it always about social inequality? What do discarded things say about lived experiences? What emerges from these explorations is a complex image of thing-heavy and thing-lite worlds existing side by side. In these worlds, disparities originated not only from social and economic differences but were shaped by geography and connectivity, various socio-cultural norms towards consumption, worldviews and idiosyncratic choices." --Magdalena Naum, Senior Lecturer in Historical Archaeology, Lund University, Sweden