Thinking through material culture

Name: Professor Carl Knappett

Position: Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory, held since 2008

Affiliation: Department of Art

Education: PhD, University of Cambridge

Areas of Expertise: Aegean Bronze Age, culture studies

Teaching

FAH 206         Prehistoric Aegean and East Mediterranean Art and Archaeology

FAH 303         Emergence of Greek Civilization

FAH 2017       Art and Archaeology of the Everyday

Publications

– Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, with L. Malafouris (2008) 

– Knossos: Protopalatial Deposits in Early Magazine A and the South-West Houses, with C. MacDonald (2007) 

– Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (2005)

Major Awards & Honours

Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Exeter (2003-2008)

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries

What can we learn from Bronze Age pottery?

What can 5,000-year-old fragments of pottery tell us about our own society? According to Professor Carl Knappett, the Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory in the Department of Art, they can illuminate our current debates about “object overload” and inform our understanding of contemporary social networks.

Previously based in England, Knappett was recruited to U of T in 2008 and set up an Aegean material culture lab at the new Archeology Centre. “The art department is known as a place to study the Aegean Bronze Age. It has a strong tradition built by Professor Joseph Shaw.  The library holdings here are excellent, and research is a driving force, attracted me to the University.”

Knappett’s research focuses on the shift towards urbanism and the proliferation in the production of objects in the Aegean around 4,000 BC.  Finding that the right research tools were lacking, he developed a new way of modeling interregional networks using techniques from theoretical physics and network analysis.  “It could completely change the way we understand regional interaction,” says Knappett.

The innovative model charts networks of people and objects. “We live in a networked world, but rarely acknowledge that our networked existence involves not only people but also things,” he says. In his book Thinking Through Material Culture, Knappett argues that humans both act and think through material culture as their ways of knowing and acting are ingrained within even the most mundane of objects.

Knappett brings his interdisciplinary approach, which integrates sociology, art history, semiotics, psychology and cognitive science, to his classes. He teaches on prehistoric Aegean and East Mediterranean art and archeology, Bronze Age palaces, and a graduate course on art and archeology of the everyday, in which students are encouraged to reflect on the objects that we habitually overlook.

“On the one hand, materiality is absolutely central to humanity, with much of our evolutionary past, present and future the story of a shifting relationship with the material world,” says Knappett. “On the other hand, we still have very poor theories of materiality, which I think needs to change, if we are to meet the challenges that lie ahead of us in our interactions with the material world, in the face of expanding populations and diminishing resources.”

The Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory was established by a gift from an anonymous donor.

Story by Brendan de Caires
Photo: Donna Santos