This book is the outcome of the first joint conference of the two country's foremost societies devoted to the archaeological study of the early-modern and modern worlds. It discusses the progress of industrialization and its impact upon modern society.

'Industrial' and 'post-medieval' archaeology have traditionally been seen as two separate disciplines, with different roots and very different intellectual interests, thus separating production from consumption and leaving the study of non-industrial aspects of 19th and 20th century society in a disciplinary no-man's land. This volume, emanating from a joint conference of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology and the Association for Industrial Archaeology held in Bristol in 1999, aims to break down the barriers, both cultural and chronological, between the two disciplines. Twenty-three papers from Britain and western Europe address the relationships between production and consumption, the contribution of archaeology to a period so rich in historical sources, the nature of historical archaeology, and the role both of industrialisation itself and of its material record in the development of our own society.