Carl Knappett - Global Excellence Initiative

Ancient societies leave us many clues as to their nature in the traces of their material culture. It is these objects left behind — and particularly those that were used as containers — that is the research focus of University of Toronto art historian and archaeologist Carl Knappett, a 2024 winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship.

We may think of most of these traces through the typologies we construct to give order to the past; but the fact is that much of the pottery we study, particularly from later prehistory (e.g., the Bronze Age), served important containing functions for communities. Pottery was used to store and transport liquids such as oil and wine, to process foodstuffs through cooking, to drink in ceremonial feasts, and to bury the dead. Such a wide range of purposes, but we have rarely thought through what it meant to contain. With such objects, the aims may seem purely physical; what Dr. Knappett wants to do is think through some of the accompanying metaphysical aspects. Containment — and its corollary, release — were surely powerful metaphors for many aspects of social life.

Part of how Dr. Knappett seeks to branch out is to think about some of the similarities between past and present in how containers shape society. Containers are evidently critical to many aspects of contemporary life, from the ways we contain resources such as water, to the management of waste or the containment of forest fires. And yet, the infrastructures we employ, from the scale of the disposable coffee cup to the river dam, are frequently overlooked. Our proclivity for thinking in terms of closed categories — consider terms like ‘siloing’ or ‘thinking outside the box’— does not help us recognize the deeply embedded ways in which containers infiltrate our lives. Dr. Knappett feels that taking a ‘deep history’ approach to these questions could be one effective means of shining a light on these intractable problems.

He says he is honoured and thrilled to receive this award, which will allow him to spend the coming year researching and writing a wide-ranging book on containers and containment as physical, cognitive and political phenomena.