New thoughts about the use of archaeological stratigraphies! Is this so? The discussion article by Patricia A. McAnany and Ian Hodder aims at the construction of a theoretical framework to expound and discuss the problems of archaeological stratigraphy. Such a theoretical framework is urgently needed, they feel, and has been largely neglected until now. Reading and interpreting an archaeological stratigraphic record, if carried out according to the guidelines they try to establish, may reveal much more information about past social processes that led to the formation of the specific stratigraphy. In the authors' own words, ‘thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise’ (quoted from abstract). As the record left behind by ancient communities, archaeological stratigraphies, in their view, take a middle place on a scale from micro-records endowed with meaning (artefacts) to macro-records of contextual meaning preserved in archaeological landscapes. The in-between, the immediate residues of meaningful past human behaviour encapsulated in archaeological sites, remain, in their view, undertheorized.