SMC 47Material Cultures of Archiving

5 December 2025

Photo: De Gruyter

The new volume of ‘Studies in Manuscript Cultures’ takes its readers to the places where large quantities of written artefacts are stored, organised, and preserved: archives. Their physical nature is the focus of this cross-cultural analysis.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many Western countries disposed of a large portion of their archived public documents. More than 90 per cent of the physically preserved records were destroyed. This sparked a highly complex international debate on how to keep the size of such archives within manageable limits, and how to dispose of surplus documents correctly.

This process highlights an obvious but all too often forgotten aspect of the preservation of written documents: archives are spaces, and spaces are finite. This simple fact can raise a number of difficult practical questions: What is worth preserving? How should these spaces be designed so that written artefacts remain permanently secure and – if necessary – retrievable? How should these documents be handled to ensure their long-term preservation? And how can these requirements be met in light of local circumstances?

The new volume in the Studies in Manuscript Cultures (SMC) book series sheds light on the material aspects of archival practices. Despite their central importance, these have long been neglected by research; the literature has been dominated by an idealistic notion of ‘the archive’ as an immaterial repository of knowledge. However, in the wake of the ‘material turn’ in the humanities, greater attention is now being paid to the fact that ‘working with archived artefacts implies dirt, sweat, and physical labour’, as Markus Friedrich, the editor of the volume, emphasises in his introduction.

Approaching archiving practices from their material side also allows for illuminating comparisons of such practices across cultures and epochs. The challenges and goals of archiving can vary greatly from case to case – and, consequently, so can the technical solutions chosen to meet these challenges and achieve these goals. ‘Archiving written artefacts was – and is – an inherently local affair, situated in specific spaces and done by individuals with specific agendas, experiences, and visions,’ writes Friedrich. The physical arrangement of an archive is therefore often an implicit reference to or even an explicit articulation of a community’s culture-cultural attitude towards its written artefacts.

The book is divided into five chapters, each of which contains several case studies, with the focus shifting from the small to the large: beginning with individual artefacts to be archived, the following chapters first consider smaller and larger ‘containers’ for such artefacts, then the furniture, and finally the entire rooms or buildings in which they are stored.

Material Cultures of Archiving: An Introduction to a Global and Historical Practice is a key result of the work in the ‘Archiving Artefacts’ research field of the UWA Cluster of Excellence, which, like all other research fields, will officially come to an end at the end of this year with the conclusion of the cluster’s first funding phase. Like almost all issues in the SMC series, it is open access and can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.