The H-Net Network on Material Culture and Vernacular Landscapes and Artifact Preservation will promote and support the study of objects, buildings, sites, structures, landscapes and other material cultural productions as part of the visual record of life.

We welcome announcements, CFP's, queries, contributions, and discussions of all things material! To add yours, click the orange "Start a Discussion" button above this text. 

We also welcome totally new projects. If you have an idea for a new on-going feature or a one time resource for the field, let us know. We are barely scratching the surface of what this website can do and we have a great staff of tech-minded folks at H-Net. If you've got a grand idea, we have people who can help make it happen. Podcasts? Video tours? Image galleries? Digitization projects? We can do those, and more! There are a few thoughts here, but the internet's the limit. Let us know what you're thinking.

And we tweet, too! https://twitter.com/H_Mat_Culture

You can see Recent Queries and Recent Discussions below, and Recent Announcements at the bottom of the page below the scrolling "Occasional Objects" images. All CFP's posted to the site can be found in the links on the right, as can Jobs in Material Culture Studies.

Recent Queries

Discussion published by John McCarthy on Monday, January 8, 2018

Confidentiality of Site Locations vs Public Interpretation

Archaeologists, having seen lots of destruction of sites due to looting, some of a commercial (rather than hobbyist) scale, tend to want to hold all information about archaeological sites (location, contents, etc.) as confidential, actually, as secret.  While this is somewhat understandable, this presents a significant challenge to public education and interpretation on archaeologial topics where often “place” and site content are key aspects of a site’s interpretive value.

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Recent Discussions

Discussion published by Linda Levitt on Monday, February 4, 2019

Snow Globes: From Art to Kitsch

Snow globes are childhood’s wintery dreamlands, so powerful an allegory that they appear in films, television series, and commercials to carry spectators into a holiday happily-ever-after. During the holiday season, should a snow globe not be readily available from a nearby toy chest or shelf, you can download a snowglobe app for both iPhone and Android, transforming your quotidian emails and social media sites. The ongoing popularity of these iconic pop culture objects, now transformed to the digital realm, gives pause to ask: why snow globes?

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Occasional Objects series

The scrolling images to left are from H-Material-Culture's "Occasional Objects" series--a periodic informal examination of objects sent in by our subscribers. View the full collection, read the essays, and add your contribution here in Occasional Objects.

Recent Announcements

Discussion published by Jennifer Black on Tuesday, March 12, 2019

job guide digest, 12 Mar edition

The following jobs were posted to the H-Net Job Guide  to 11 March 2019.  These job postings are included here based on the categories selected by the list editors for H-Material-Culture.  See the H-Net Job Guide website at
http://www.h-net.org/jobs/ for more information.  To contact the Job Guide,
write to jobguide@mail.h-net.msu.edu, or call +1-517-432-5134 between 9 am and 5 pm US Eastern time.



ANTHROPOLOGY

Discussion published by Laura Newman on Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Collections in Circulation Conference, Kew Gardens, London UK, 9-10 May 2019

Registration is now open for the Collections in Circulation conference organised by the AHRC Mobile Museum project which will take place at Kew Gardens, London, UK on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th May 2019.

Full details of the programme, abstracts and biographies of all speakers are now available on the project website at https://royalholloway.ac.uk/mobilemuseum/conference.

Discussion published by Caroline Cheong on Wednesday, March 6, 2019

8.1 Gentrification and Heritage Conservation 

8.1 Gentrification and Heritage Conservation 

Change Over Time is pleased to announce the launch of issue 8.1 Gentrification and Heritage Conservation. This issue provides a valuable contribution to a more rigorous discourse and, we hope, constructive action regarding the gentrification/conservation intersection. Through various lenses of policy, history, climate change, and community development the articles in this issue critically examine conservation as an agent of neighborhood change.

Discussion published by T. Kurt Knoerl on Wednesday, March 6, 2019

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology Announces the Creation of a Small Boat Recording Lab

The MUA is proud to announce the creation of our Small Boat Recording Lab. Thanks to the generous support of the site's viewers and the Coastal Heritage Society, the MUA now has four small boats available for students and researchers to study. These boats will immediately be used by students at Georgia Southern University to learn documentation techniques but all university programs are welcome to make use of this collection.

Discussion published by Jesse Draper - Associate Director, Networks on Friday, February 22, 2019

OAH Amplified Initiative - Now Available on the H-Net Commons

Your network editor has reposted this from H-Announce. The byline reflects the original authorship.

Dear H-Material
Culture Readers: Last year H-Net partnered with OAH to conduct interviews with historians and record panel sessions at the organization's annual conference.  This project deepened H-Net's longstanding service to scholarly organizations through conference reports, special sessions, and recordings that bring timely research and teaching materials to distant audiences unable to attend. 

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