Employing the considerable archaeological and historical skills in her armory, Susan Piddock tries to lift the lid on the lunatic asylums of years gone by. Films and television programs have portrayed them as places of horror where the patients are restrained and left to listen to the cries of their fellow inmates in despair. But what was the world of nineteenth century lunatic asylums really like? Are these images true, or are we laboring under a misunderstanding?

This book presents a series of papers reflecting the latest approaches to the study of buildings from the historic period. This volume does not examine buildings as architecture, rather it adopts an archaeological perspective to consider them as artefacts, reflecting the needs of those who commissioned them.

The archaeological assemblage from the Hyde Park Barracks is one of the largest, most comprehensive and best preserved collections of artefacts from any 19th-century institution in the world.

An archaeology of lunacy is a materially focused exploration of the first wave of public asylum building in Britain and Ireland, which took place during the late-Georgian and early Victorian period. Examining architecture and material culture, the book proposes that the familiar asylum archetype, usually attributed to the Victorians, was in fact developed much earlier. It looks at the planning and construction of the first public asylums and assesses the extent to which popular ideas about reformed management practices for the insane were applied at ground level. Crucially, it moves beyond doctors and reformers, repopulating the asylum with the myriad characters that made up its everyday existence: keepers, clerks and patients. Contributing to archaeological scholarship on institutions of confinement, the book is aimed at academics, students and general readers interested in the material environment of the historic lunatic asylum.

The nineteenth-century asylum was the scene of both terrible abuses and significant advancements in treatment and care. The essays in this collection look at the asylum from the perspective of the place itself – its architecture, funding and purpose – and at the experience of those who were sent there.

Representing the first substantial English-language text on Industrial Archaeology in a decade, this handbook comes at a time when the global impact of industrialization is being re-assessed in terms of its legacy of climate change, mechanization, urbanization, the forced migration of peoples, and labour relations. Critical debates around the beginning of a new geological era - The Anthropocene - have emerged over the last decade. This approach interrogates the widespread exploitation of natural resources that forged industrialization from its early emergence in 18th century northern Europe to its contemporary ubiquity, environmental impacts, and social legacy within our globalized world. Through a broad international and multi-period set of chapters, this volume explores the complex origins, processes, and development of industrialization through both its physical remains and human consequences - both the good and the bad. It provides a diverse material framework for understanding our modern world, from its industrial origins through its future paths in the 21st century.