The Royal Wood Factory, established in 1790 and located near the Leiria Pine Forest, was an industrial facility dedicated to the production of tar and other resinous products. This factory employed three different models of tar kilns, each with its own technical and intellectual dynamics. Through the various kiln models constructed, it is possible to observe a progression in technical updates, not only through the adoption of new techniques from other regions but also through their adaptation within the factory to make these methods more efficient and to achieve a higher-quality product. Academics from the University of Coimbra contributed to rethinking the factory’s production methods, particularly through their interactions with the factory director. In this paper, we have followed “the money trail” methodology, which has allowed us to see when the appropriations and adaptations to the kilns began, as well as allowed us to identify important “invisible technicians” such as the tar master inside the factory, who had a higher salary than the factory director.

The paper discusses the origins and background of Materials Science and Engineering in Brazil. In 1970, Brazil's first higher education program in this field was created at the UFSCar, with financial support from the Inter-American Development Bank, marking the establishment of the first Materials Engineering course in Latin America. However, research on materials had already been carried out by industries and research institutes in Brazil since the 1930s, primarily linked to universities and the government. Collaboration between companies, engineers, scientists, and the government aimed at developing and adapting technologies. The creation of the course in 1970 sought to deepen research in materials, particularly in engineering, inspired by the experiences and internships of Brazilian professors at U.S. universities in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the publication of the COSMAT (Committee on the Survey of Materials Science and Engineering) report in the U.S. influenced the organization of the field in other countries, including Brazil. This interdisciplinary approach and public funding with private sector participation, present at the foundation of the course, also shaped the development of Materials Engineering in industrialized countries, seeking to use scientific technology for economic development through research projects that required larger public funding and private corporate involvement. Thus, it can be argued that between the 1940s and 1960s, Brazil developed a "scientific technology" or "engineering science" (both terms used in the historiography of technology), which served as a precursor to the emergence of the field of Materials Science and Engineering in the country.

Dunedin, New Zealand, is one of the few sites worldwide to retain its nineteenth-century ‘disappearing gun’. Completed in 1889, Fort Taiaroa typified an emergent conjunction of coastal defense architecture and military technology, paralleling similar transformations in warship design and capability. By 1914, reinforced concrete emplacements boasting heavy-calibre, breech-loading guns were integrated with advanced optical sighting and electromechanical signalling systems. Until 1945 these major capital works projects proliferated around coastlines, from North America to South Africa, Malta to Cuba, Taiwan to Norway. Many remain archeologically legible today. Indeed, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Paul Virilio’s seminal exhibition and catalogue, ‘Bunker Archeology’, which both documented and critiqued Germany’s vast Atlantic Wall program. Virilio argued that the global proliferation of bunkers was an architectural response to escalating offensive mobility, rapidity and firepower. Faced with this apparently worldwide conjunction of stable technological forms, how might the remnants of coastal defense fortifications be reinterpreted through postphenomenology? Comparing Fort Taiaroa with Fort Wallace near Newcastle, Australia, this presentation focuses on the energy, information and material flows through these installations. In particular, it asks whether such sites were inherently ‘glocal’, both global and local, in ways that determined their location, typology and function. Key considerations include the local environment, from geology to prevailing winds, plus the physical logistics and electromagnetic spectra that governed their military effectiveness. The phenomenological archaeology of bunkers is also considered, especially in-situ cultural performances such as vigilance, discipline and steadfastness. Can postphenomenology adequately explain the monumental materiality of these historic coastal defenses?

Premodern Japan saw the emergence of a system of waterways, with Edo (Tokyo) and Osaka as its focal points. Inevitably, river transportation played a very important role in this system, but by the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, the navigability of those rivers had deteriorated. After the Meiji restoration, the improvement of the rivers was a priority of the newly established government, but, as the railway network rapidly grew, the emphasis of the improvement work gradually shifted from navigability to flood protection. Indeed, the railways were regarded as replacing rather than complementing inland navigation in the modernising Japan.
This technological choice was made in a complex socio-political context. Out of fear of the consequences of capital investments by Western powers, Japan’s modernisation was financed by a heavy tax on land. However, disgust over the tax fuelled a popular movement that demanded freedom and people’s rights and which also attacked the perceived neglect of flood protection by the government. In contrast to this neglect, railway construction accelerated under elaborate governmental protection, mobilising private funds, including ex-samurai rentiers.
The problem of river improvements was enthusiastically discussed at the first Imperial Diet as well, which passed the first River Law in 1896, which emphasised the state’s role in flood protection. The law gave the coup de grace to inland navigation, which was still thriving in the lower rivers around Tokyo, while also being compatible with the policy of creating enlightened and modernised subjects who were willing to support the imperial government.