Buchili, V. and G. Lucas (eds.)
2001       Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past.  London: Routledge.

Buchili and Lucas’s volume contains essays revolving around the archaeology of twentieth- and early twenty first-century life.  Two chapters stand out in particular: Laurie Wilkie’s essay regarding the appropriation by certain groups (black sharecroppers in Louisiana and white fraternity brothers at Berkeley) of symbols unearthed via archaeological excavation and David Hart and Sarah Winter’s chapter on the political context of national monuments in South Africa.

Climo, J. and M. Cattell
2002       Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives.  Blackwell: Oxford.

Climo and Catell’s volume brings together essays on memory and history, but only a small number of its chapters include a significant material component.  Doris Frances et al. discuss the cemetery, and even individual headstones, as nodes of social meaning and of identity construction in their chapter.  Larry Nesper’s contribution, on the other hand, incorporates similar theoretical notions, but revolves around an historic Meshingomesia Indian schoolhouse.

Connerton, P.
1989       How Societies Remember.  Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Connerton discusses how social groups define their identities based on habits and rituals passed from one generation to the next.  His first chapter deals with the notion of “habit memory,” a form conveyed via seemingly automatic bodily movements and via ritual performance.  Those forms of memory, unlike historical narratives, go comparatively uncontested.  The second chapter revolves around commemorative ceremonies, noting their material component and linking habit memory and historical narrative.  Building on the first chapter, Connerton’s third (and final) chapter discusses the “embodiment” of group memory in habitual gestures.

Halbwachs, M.
1950 [1993] On Collective Memory.  Translated by L. A. Coser.  University of Chicago Press: Chicago.

Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory is one of the earliest works on topic.  In it he argues that individual memory operates within social context and that differences in collective memory among social groups lead to different patterns of behavior, anticipating Connerton.

Jones, A.
2007       Memory and Material Culture.  Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Jones suffered a stroke while writing the work, and he notes the profound influence the experience had on its crafting.  He retooled many of his ideas during his period of recovery.  Jones makes a few important points in the book, arguing (1) that objects act as more than external symbolic storage, as they interact with human beings, whose sensual and intellectual experiences differ with every exposure, (2) that biological memory ought not be viewed simply as symbolic storage either as storage, as memory is in actuality a process, (3) that memory (and thus its mnemonic objects) is inextricably intertwined with identity -- that objects invoke memories, in other words, causing the revitalization or modification of notions of identity, and (4) that objects serve to link entities together in networks, helping to forge group identity.  He refers to objects as “indexes,” a member concept of his network analytical schema that allows archaeologists to better understand relationships between artifacts, places, and people.

Jones, A. and G. MacGregor
2002       Colouring the Past: The Significance of Colour in Archaeological Research.  Berg: Oxford.

Jones, who also authored Memory and Materiality, co-edited this volume, one that puts together multiple interpretations of color in archaeological contexts through case studies.  Jones’s co-author, Gavin MacGregor, wrote the chapter most relevant to the theme of memory and materiality, discussing the deliberate use of color in expressing meaning in the prehistoric stone monuments of Northeast Scotland.  MacGregor investigates the Recumbent Stone Circle tradition, concluding that color served as a “vehicle for the expression of meanings and identities,” reflecting shared notions of landscape, places, cosmology, and everyday practice.

Lowenthal, D.
1985       The Past is Foreign Country.  Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Lowenthal uses varied sources (literature, art, historical documents, material culture, etc.), both recent and historical, to discuss the connection between social memory and identity.  The book’s second section is especially relevant to researchers of material culture, as he discusses there the relationships among history, memory, and relics.  Lowenthal traces notions of personal identity through history, noting that in the present people build their identities creatively (at least they believe they do), that in the recent past people built their identities based on shared histories, and that in the deeper past (pre-nineteenth century) people largely considered identity static if they thought about it at all.

Lucas, G.
1997       Forgetting the past.  Anthropology Today 13(1): 8-14.

Lucas discusses historical memory as it relates to archaeologists and the artifacts they come into contact with.  He reviews the employment of periodization and typological schemes throughout the history of the discipline, seeing archaeological work as reflective of context-specific modes of developing historical memory.  Lucas concludes that the field has placed insufficient focus on failures in the transmission of memory (forgetting).

Renfrew C. and D. Scarre
1998       Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage.  Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs.

The volume resulted from a conference session inspired by Merlin Donald’s work on the evolution of cognition, particularly Donald’s notion of theoretic culture and the use of external symbolic storage.  Many of its chapters revolve around memory, reflecting multiple perspectives.  Stephen Mithen’s chapter, for example, explores religious thought in prehistory.  He argues that such thought involves significant unintuitive aspects, requiring external representation in order to facilitate perpetuation.  Julian Thomas, focusing on Neolithic materials in his chapter, suggests that such artifacts do not represent the perpetuation of fixed ideas, but local and generational understandings of received notions.

Van Dyke, R. and Alcock, S. (eds.)
2003       Archaeologies of Memory.  Blackwell: Malden, Mass.

Van Dyke and Alcock have combined two groups of papers here: one originally presented in a session on archaeology and memory at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Anthropology in 2000, the other a product of a session entitled “Mediterranean Memories, Archaeologies of the Past in the Past” at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2001.  Most of the volume’s chapters address the role of objects and structures in the development of social identity and power relationships between social groups.  The book covers a broad range of periods and geographies including the ancient West, the Byzantine East, in addition to European and North American prehistory.