Fotini Kofidou (University of Southampton; fk1@soton.ac.uk) and Babis Garefalakis (University of Southampton; cg5@soton.ac.uk)

The dynamic interplay of material culture and social life is laden with webs of choices occurring at different levels and degrees, ranging from the individual to the group to larger regional populations. The archaeological record reflects the outcome of past peoples’ selection of raw materials, technological decisions, subsistence strategies and landscape understandings. These choices are not strictly economic in nature but entail various social connotations. In any given environmental and social context, there is a vast array of possible ways to negotiate social reality through elements of material culture.

We would like to invite contributions of archaeological case studies investigating the social meaning of choices that result in the complexity of material culture. Possible lines of inquiry could be:

• What are these choices and how do they manifest in the record (variability in the chaîne opératoire, stylistic variations etc)?
• How can we detect them (different methodological strands)?
• How do they affect social dynamics (for example, individual and group identities, scales of engagement)?
• How such an approach would affect archaeological interpretations (identification and explanation of patterns, discussion of “cultures”)?