Matter, Materiality and Modern Cultureoffers a new approach to the study of contemporary objects, to give the reader a new understanding of the relationship between people and their material world. It asks how the very stuff of our world has shaped our societies by addressing a broad array of questions including: * why do Berliners have such strange door keys? * should the Isle of Wight pop festival be preserved? * could aliens tell a snail shell from a waste paper basket * why did Victorian England make so much of death and burial?P.M. Graves-Brown studied Archaeology and Prehistory at Sheffield University and gained his PhD in archaeology at Southampton University. He currently works as an archaeological curator in South Wales. He has published a wider variety of work, mainly on human origins and modern material culture.