ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the history of science has engaged with material culture, and considers how archaeological perspectives might expand this approach for both the history of science and the history of archaeology. It begins with a brief exploration of how historians of science shifted from a focus on intellectual history to an interest in the material culture of science in the last decades of the twentieth century. Historians of science now increasingly share with archaeology an interest in re-stagings and re-enactments of past practices as a source of evidence for enriching historical understanding. The history of instruments and models demonstrates how the legitimacy of different forms of material culture as evidence in a science may take much time and effort to establish. Archaeology itself contributed much to the history of science in the twentieth century, particularly in excavations of chemical and alchemical sites in the post-war era.
