Introduction
The archaeology of modern material culture, also known as archaeology of the contemporary past, has received increasing attention over the last 40 years. There have been two distinct stages in the development of this area of research. The first occurred during the 1970s and 1980s, when archaeologists in the United States began to question two core views of archaeology: that archaeological sites are only those that are concerned with a distant past and that archaeological information is obtained through excavation (Rathje 1981: 51–52). The questioning of these two assumptions led to the emergence of modern material culture studies as a sub-discipline within archaeology.
As Leone (1981: 7) points out, modern material culture studies developed two principal lines of inquiry. The first was investigation of the relationships between modern societies and their material culture to better understand material patterning in past societies is often described as ethnoarchaeology. The...
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Smith, C., Lowther, J., Ralph, J. (2020). Modern Material Culture, Archaeology of. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_1064
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