Replicas are material culture with a direct dependence on more ancient archaeological things, but they also deserve to be treated as things in their own right. As archaeological source material replicas help to complete the biographies of things; they certainly add to our knowledge even if they might occasionally complicate matters. The majority of such replicas date from the second half of the long nineteenth century when large numbers were produced primarily by or for art academies, individuals, antiquarian societies, museums, and art galleries. The term replica has multiple meanings, often with pejorative overtones or a definition contingent on a perceived reduction in authenticity and value (could even be imply deception); we use it in the sense of conscious attempts to make direct and accurate copies (facsimiles). Rather than dismiss replicas, we should consider their nature, the circumstances in which they came about, their impact, their changing meanings, and their continuing legacy. For this reason, our nineteenth-century case studies begin with initial replication, when replicas had great value and were used to disseminate information and stimulate discussion about the objects they replicated. Through this intertwining of original and replica as connected parts of the biography of things, we hope to bring about a new realization of the value of replicas in order to demonstrate their continuing potential as often untapped sources of knowledge.The power and value of reproductions has been identified in many academic disciplines over the last 150 years or so, and looking at how visual technologies play their part in making meaning is now also part of current scholarship.1 Perhaps surprisingly, then, with the exception of Jody Joy's study of his grandfather's replica medal -which illustrated how meaning transferred from the empty medal box of his grandfather's lost original to the replica -replicas as such have not yet featured widely in cultural biographical studies of things.2 By cultural biography, we mean studies that focus on a specific object in order to explore its changing meanings and the construction of those through time: an approach that lends itself to discovering a hundred worlds in a single object as opposed to the world in a hundred objects. 3New theoretical perspectives, however, present facsimiles in a refreshingly positive light, in which they help to explore the original and to redefine what originality is.Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe successfully challenge some of the most influential and long-standing views on the perception and reception of copies of things. In rehabilitating reproductions as originals in their own right, they observe that the real phenomenon we must explain is the evolving, composite biography of the (authentic) original and all its (reproduced) originals. 4 For our purposes there are two main ways of exploring such biographies.

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