Earthy Matters: Exploring Human Interactions with Earth, Soil and Clay

The book Earthy Matters: Exploring Human Interactions with Earth, Soil and Clay is part of the Materiality in Anthropology and Archaeology series . It explores how lives are shaped through interactions with earth, soils and clay and reminds the reader that they are fundamentally part of the Earth.

Edited by Louise Steel and Luci Attala, UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES; University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Earthy Matters is a lively collection of theoretically informed chapters that introduce the reader to the notion that matter is a creative agent, and that it plays a key role in the formation of our material and social worlds. The focus of the book is sediments, soils, clay and earth ‒ materials that surround us and have shaped people’s interactions with the environment since even before the first farmers settled in the Near East tilling the earth, building houses from mud and plaster, and making vessels and figurines from clay. This collection questions orthodox understandings that these substances are inert and an infinite resource for humanity, rather to foreground earthy substances in their relationships with humans, and to show how these materials have co-created our social and material worlds. It is a novel and timely reminder for the reader that our lives have always been embedded within the matter of the E(e)arth.

Discover more here on the University of Wales Press site: Earthy Matters | UWP