Archaeologically recovered material culture provides the crucial evidence for any long-term perspective on human activity. This chapter therefore grapples with the analytical challenges posed by the material record from Antikythera and then seeks to move beyond these and offer a wider history of island material culture. We begin by devoting methodological attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the archaeological record, particularly as collected by intensive surface survey, and build up a skeleton timeline of human activity on the island that provides a starting point for the two chronologically organised chapters that follow. As discussed in Chapter 2, the commentary provided later in the book can only hope to summarise briefly a considerable amount of focused artefact research whose primary publication is via a full digital catalogue and a series of specialist-led papers (referenced in detail later; see also Bevan and Conolly 2012a, 2012b for access to raw data). Following this chronological discussion, we then address a series of longitudinal, behavioural themes, such as the material culture of storage, transport, cooking, eating, drinking and conflict. A final section anticipates some of the broader concerns of later chapters by outlining ways in which Antikythera exhibits interestingly spiky patterns of both glut and scarcity in terms of its material resources. Again, we seek to place these observations in the wider behavioural context of how local communities have created, maintained and recycled their material world, particularly with regard to the themes of resettlement and recolonisation of landscapes that we first raised in Chapter 2.