Revisiting the fragmentation revolution

Fragments are commonly encountered in the archaeological record. Historically, broken things have been considered scrap or rubbish resulting from accidental processes. However, during recent decades archaeologists have come to recognise acts of deliberate fragmentation, and fragments themselves, as performing a range of important roles in the past. A key moment in the study of this topic came with John Chapman’s Fragmentation in Archaeology, published in 2000, in which he argued that particular fragments were charged with relational meaning, serving to connect people, things and places. Since the publication of this work, Chapman’s ideas have been applied to diverse archaeological materials and augmented in a variety of ways, and much further work has examined the technologies and functions of fragmentation in archaeology. In this introductory paper we will reflect on the body of work stemming from Fragmentation in Archaeology and explore other trajectories in studies of fragmentation practices.