This is one of those books that had a long gestation. It began primarily as an attempt to develop some of the themes explored in the last chapter of my book Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (Lucas 2001a; see also Lucas 2001b), in which I looked at the idea of archaeology as a materializing practice. These ideas were most immediately developed in the context of seminars I gave, first at the Department of Archaeology at Manchester University in 2002 and then at the Center for Archaeology at Stanford University in 2004. Much of this work has been used extensively in Chapter 6. I first started to write a book on this theme during a sabbatical break in Portugal in 2005, but it simply did not work. In the same year, however, I published a book called The Archaeology of Time (Lucas 2005), and the chapter I wrote on the archaeological record was instrumental in taking me in a new direction. Discussions on the subject with Tim Murray during this period were particularly influential (see e.g. Lucas 2007b), and these ultimately led me to develop the concept of a book on the archaeological record, but connecting it to my earlier interest in materiality. My sabbatical in the fall of 2008 took me back to Stanford, where I began work on the new manuscript in earnest. Over the next few years of writing the book, interrupted inevitably by other tasks, I also wrote and published a number of shorter articles in which I explored and rehearsed many of the themes addressed in this book, especially the rather complex ideas presented in Chapter 5 (e.g. Lucas 2007a, 2008, 2010b, 2010c).

Given all this, many people need to be thanked: the University of Iceland, for the time in which to write this book; the Archaeology Center at Stanford University, for hosting my sabbatical as a visiting scholar in 2008, especially Ian Hodder, Lynn Meskell, Michael Shanks, and Barbara Voss; Tim Murray, for his inspirational conversations on the archaeological record; Oscar Aldred, Tim Webmoor, Chris Witmore, and Tom Yarrow, for our various conversations on themes related to the ideas in this book; Astrid Daxböck, Natascha Mehler, and Aline Wacke, for help with the German references to archaeological source criticism discussed in Chapter 2 and especially Astrid for her translations. I particularly thank those who read draft versions of chapters for this book and offered valuable and critical comments in many key places: Victor Buchli, Steve Roskams, Michael Shott, Tim Webmoor, Chris Witmore, and Alison Wylie, as well as four anonymous reviewers. I am also very grateful to Beatrice Rehl of Cambridge University Press, who has managed the book from proposal to publication; Peggy Rote of Aptara, Inc., who supervised the production process; and Katherine Faydash, who edited the manuscript. My brother, Mark Lucas, kindly drew the cartoon that is reproduced in Figure 1. Finally and most important of all, I thank my partner, Elín, for her unflagging support over what has been a very protracted process. To her and our two boys this book is dedicated.