Material culture has become an important resource for interdisciplinary exchange and communication, particularly for periods which have few texts. This panel presenting the work of three historians of material culture would like to enter this wider conversation in order to discuss and re-evaluate our historical approaches to such evidence. The three papers challenge our current understanding of how people interact with material elements of performative practices. They also evaluate the extent to which we take certain aspects of material culture for granted by rethinking our approach to the materials involved in important rituals such as baptism and burial, and in doing so confront the shaky ground upon which our historical understanding of these practices stand. In the first paper, Carolyn Twomey contrasts the “standardized” ritual of Christian baptism in medieval English texts with its physical practice. Twomey argues that the materiality of the rite reveals a more fluid and flexible ritual than textual accounts allow. Andrew Welton’s paper looks in closer detail at the physical structure of objects themselves, and demonstrates how the ritual “killing” of weapons in Anglo-Saxon graves in the sixth and seventh centuries went far beyond the visible destruction of such items. A deeper, microscopic examination of these items shows that the structure of the metal itself was also damaged, preventing the weapon from being re-forged or re-used. Finally, Janet Kay explores the changing nature of burials as material objects from the late-Roman to the early-medieval periods. Her paper uses material culture and archaeological evidence to re-examine changing conceptualizations of the earth as a location for ritual deposition during the long fifth century. She argues that we should not take the burial of the dead underground for granted, and illuminates how different uses of the earth can indicate a changing view of the nature of the dead in the post-Roman period. The panel therefore focuses on these three areas of research in early medieval Britain to open a wider dialogue about the role of material culture in writing history and our disciplinary approaches to such important resources.