This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Bronwen Douglas is Honorary Professor in the College of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her work combines the ethnohistory of encounters in Oceania with the history of the human sciences and the sciences of place.

Chris Ballard is a Pacific historian at the Australian National University. His work focuses on Indigenous historicities and histories and the supplementary role in these histories of repatriated archives, grounded in collaborative fieldwork with communities in West Papua, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu.

Introduction-Contact tracing: The materiality of encounters 1. Mapping the once and future strait: Place, time, and Torres Strait from the sixteenth century to the Pleistocene 2. Re-presenting encounters: The drawings of Jean Piron 3. 'With the consent of the tribe': Marking lands on Tanna and Erromango, New Hebrides 4. Marginal history 5. Making the visual record of New Guinea: William G. Lawes's photographic encounters 6. Heads and 'cultures': A. C. Haddon, colonial exploration and the 'Strickland River' inscription 7. Smoke and mirrors in Arnhem Land: What expeditions tell us about the materiality of crosscultural encounters 8. On the banality of paperwork and the brutality of judicial bureaucracy in Myanmar