The 2002-2003 Ethnohistory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania takes as its theme the changing nature of materiality. Over the last fifteen years, across a range of disciplines, a sophisticated body of theoretical and methodological literature has transformed the study of material culture. A seminal contribution to this literature was an edited collection entitled "The Social Life of Things" (1986), which grew out of an Ethnohistory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania (1983-1984). Since then, new scholarship has raised new questions: How does physicality and its embodiments shape the human experience of materiality? How do new regimes of technology, economy, politics, and culture transform the nature of objects and their objectification? Moving from an earlier focus on the material objects themselves to the processes by which materiality is constituted, this year's workshop will bring together a diverse group of scholars to examine the dynamic ways in which our material contexts are experienced and transformed.