Any reader expecting yet another contribution on the urbanization of Scandinavia will be misguided reading Axel Christophersen's contribution on ‘performing towns’. As the author makes very clear, he focuses on urbanity in the sense of urban social practice rather than on urbanization itself. The latter concept is straightforwardly dismissed as belonging to processual archaeology, and was trying to understand the town as a being structure and neglecting the dynamic role of its individual inhabitants as a ‘crucial historical driving force’ (p. 110). Christophersen also omits the classic discussion – actually besides Christianization one of the two most prominent topics in early medieval archaeology – on the designation and character of the earliest towns in the north, where early towns are merely defined as population centres ‘larger than a village and smaller than a city’ (p. 112). Instead, with the adoption of practice theory, Christophersen picks one heuristic approach from modern social theory (mentalism (subjectivistic/objectivistic), intersubjectivism, textualism and practice theory itself) for the analysis of social phenomena as routinized body/knowledge/things complexes (Reckwitz 2002, 257–58).

This is an admirable, valuable piece of thinking and conceptualizing, but cramped – in my view – by the geographical boundaries which Kristiansen has set around his subject.

The rise of Symmetrical Archaeology has subtly recast archaeology as the study of things and not the study of the past or past peoples. This new description of the archaeological endeavour is often met with criticism. This paper continues in the critical vein but embraces a different strategy of engagement. Here, second-wave Symmetrical Archaeology is brought to the fore: its historical development explored, its methodology outlined, its current theoretical basis assessed. Part critique, part defence, I consider the logical underpinning of the second-wave, focusing on ontology and agency. Utilizing Levi Bryant’s ontic principle, I attend to these two issues and frame this style of archaeology as Pre-critical Archaeology. A caveat seems necessary: whilst I spend time with Symmetrical Archaeology in this paper, that does not mean I am a convert. Rather, my ambition here is to see things from the point of view of a Symmetrical archaeologist.

There's an old Ry Cooder song – written by Bobby Miller – entitled ‘If walls could talk’ (not the Celine Dion song), whose refrain is ‘Ain't you glad that things don't talk’. Archaeologists clearly wish things could talk because we, more than most, appreciate the power of things and the close relationships that exist between humans and things and their shared histories. I was struck by this one day sitting reading a book in my bedroom. I glanced up, looked around me and realized that everything in that room would be there the day after I died – everything. In fact my things would clearly outlive me, and regardless of what attachment or lack of attachment I might have to any of those things, I would not be the ultimate arbiter of their fate. That would be left to others who for a whole host of reasons might not share the same relationship with these things that I had. Most would probably be discarded while others might be kept. Those choices are just one example of the kinds of emotions and calculations that surround human–thing (HT) and human–human (HH) relations.

What is the place of imagination in archaeology? This paper works with a set of materials from the deep archive of the South African archaeologist John Goodwin (1900–59) to explore the relationship between archaeology and imagination. The first half of the paper focuses on a short story written by Goodwin, describing the accidental creation and subsequent ‘uncreation’ of an indigenous person of the Cape (described in the story as a ‘Hottentot’) by the gods on Olympus. The second half of the paper describes two encounters in life between Goodwin and indigenous people of the Cape (the first with the so-called ‘Tweerivieren Bushmen’, exhibited in life at the Empire Exhibition of 1936; the second with the human remains from Oakhurst Cave). Encounters in life, in death and in imagination, the terms of these three episodes double and repeat one another in the different forms of writing to which they give rise (the imagined world of the short story, and the ‘bare description’ of Goodwin's archaeological texts). At the centre of each is the haunted figure of the ‘Bushman’/‘Hottentot’, a being whose status is figured as a kind of ‘death-in-life’. In my telling, forms of actual and epistemic violence are never far from these events. Looking, showing and telling are described as activities which range across a set of characteristic sites: the body, the archive and the grave. In so doing, they summon their counterparts, the categories of the unspeakable and the untellable.

Julian Thomas' published work since 1988 has been largely concerned with the integration of theory and practice. If there is now a general recognition that ‘practice without theory is blind’ (Shanks and Tilley 1987), Thomas counterbalances this with a welcome reminder that ‘theory without practice is sterile’. In his words, this is an attempt to ‘write about prehistory while at the same time meditating on what that writing involves’.

Harris and Sørensen's paper is a welcome attempt to address the question of ‘finding’ and interpreting emotion in the deep past. Their contribution to this emerging area of debate is particularly valuable in that it treats upon a prehistoric context, and is thus unaided by the rich contextual information provided by historical sources; and it moves the debate away from the mortuary context towards other areas of lived experience – here the processes of constructing, inhabiting, engaging with and ultimately destroying an architecturally defined space. These are more ambitious and less obvious contexts for constructing emotional pasts. Where the authors are most successful is in the identification of cultural loci where emotions are developed and are involved in the construction of experience – such as in the production and reproduction of ‘sense of community’. Less convincing, for me, were the places where they follow the (mainly British prehistoric) ‘phenomenological’ tradition. My own view is that shared and expressed emotional values are more amenable to archaeological identification and analysis than personal emotional experience, and I shall try to explain why. I think by separating the social meanings of emotion from the physical experience of emotion the authors of this article might be able to pursue more fruitful kinds of enquiry.

The notion of the landscape has become a central issue in anthropological debates (Hirsch 1995). By comparing different conceptualizations of the relationship between people and land we can get a better understanding of our own categories of nature and landscape. But the notions of nature and landscape are not a universal categories. Each society has its own categories to conceptualize the land. Notions of landscape are always embedded in cosmological notions. Burial places, river-crossings, or mountains are not neutral places. They have meanings and values. A landscape derives its meanings and values from a wider whole encompassing the earth, the sky, the underworld, and the sea. It is populated by people, animals, imaginary beings such as dwarfs, spirits, spirits of the dead. It is also embedded in temporal categories. It has a history. Each place derives meaning from its history. Therefore a landscape is never objectively given, it is a social construction.

Before developing my comments on the Heidegger theme I would like to express my admiration for the project Julian Thomas presents in Time, culture and identity. With his point of departure in Heidegger's early reasonings, Thomas is underway on the important path of a deconstruction of the Cartesian/modern dichotomies between past-present, mind-body, nature-culture and subject-object that dominates contemporary archaeology. In short, Thomas points towards an approach, where the connection between experience-time-existence and the crucial relationship and interdependence between human being and other beings (things/artefacts), provides a powerful alternative to the traditional approaches towards these dichotomies. This alternative partly situates itself between idealism and empiricism, between subjectivism and objectivism. Thomas' project also contributes to the deconstruction of the exaggerated modern/postmodern combat that in some ways seems to have led the theoretical discourse within archaeology to a dead-end. Therefore I can only agree with the main orientation of Thomas' reasonings put forward both in his book, and in his précis of Time, culture and identity, presented in Archaeological dialogues 3.1 (Thomas 1996).

In their article ‘Romancing the stones: towards a virtual and elemental Avebury’ (Archaeological dialogues 1998, 5.2, 143–64), Joshua Pollard and Mark Gillings argued that traditional cartography no longer suffices to understand sites like Avebury. In the absence of excavation, new technological possibilities like Virtual Reality and GIS were according to them more than electronic gadgets but genuine alternatives to the usual maps and plans. Mark Bowden takes issues with what he perceives to be exaggerated criticisms of traditional archaeological survey techniques. In particular, he suggests that, far from being ‘sterile’ as Pollard and Gillings state, conventional survey plans are imbued with meaning, and are essential tools of analysis and interpretation. Users of archaeological earthwork plans must study them carefully and be critically aware to get the greatest benefit from them. Innovative new approaches must be pursued vigorously, but well-tested traditional techniques which still have value should not be abandoned lightly, Bowden argues. Pollard and Gillings reply to this challenging criticism.

I would like to begin by saluting these two different but complementary contributions. Compared to the many works, sometimes questionable and often redundant, published in this field, not only are they convincing, but above all, they truly bring something new.

Several years ago, when I visited the Netherlands for the first time, a famous historian with whom I was walking along a road through the polders observed that the national character of the Dutch had formed through many centuries of efforts to shape nature, and that nature in its turn bears the imprint of their character. I was greatly interested by this remark on the interaction between mentality and landscape and I asked my colleague to write an article on this subject for the periodical Odissei. Chelovek v istorii (‘Odysseus. Man in history’), which focused on issues of historical anthropology and which I am publishing for several years. Although unfortunately I did not receive the article as such, I was all the more interested to read Nico Roymans' work. The perception of space and landscape does in truth change through history and it would be incorrect to interpret the natural environment as a rigid framework in which the history of mankind unfolds. It is said that culture is man's second nature – but would it not be nearer the truth to say that it is his only nature? Man is a symbolical being (animal symbolicum), who finds his way in this world by means of symbols and who perceives reality through these points of reference, which he creates or reproduces. There is no sphere of activity beyond the boundary of this symbolical world. For this reason the perception of human activity cannot go beyond or neglect this all-embracing symbolical universe. Nevertheless far from all historians have mastered the art of reading or deciphering the sign systems of the past or present, since it is by no means easy to learn to read in this manner.

I want to devote most of my comments on Rensink's interesting article to the issues raised by his review of current thinking about the Magdalenian of north-western Europe, rather than make detailed observations about the sites referred to in the text. I am particularly interested in ascertaining (as well as I can in such a limited space) the value of a concentration on the analysis of lithic raw materials as a way out of the theoretical morass he believes we have collectively become enmired in. In the course of doing all this I will advance a very simple proposition: that our salvation will spring from a comprehensive revaluation of the phenomenology of upper palaeolithic archaeological records, conducted against a background of concerted exploration of the presuppositions which currently pass for archaeological theory in this domain. Obviously salvation is not going to be easy to achieve, as witnessed by Rensink's brave but unsuccessful tussle with the problem of modelling magdalenian mobility. My central point is that given the magnitude of the task before us we should not expect early success, rather we should continue the process of reevaluation which he has begun.

From Slofstra's interesting paper it would seem that, in its main essentials, Dutch archaeology has the characteristics of most European archaeological traditions. In particular, it is wedded to an historical perspective, in which attention is paid to specific sequences and contexts. This commitment to history is evident from the Cultural-Historical Research Tradition earlier this century, it is seen in the lukewarm reaction to the generalising claims of processual archaeology, and it resurfaces in the new historical-anthropological perspective. As Slofstra argues, this last move towards a theoretically informed historical approach is a logical evolution within the Dutch tradition even if, as I will suggest below, it is also part of wider trends.

What follows is an account of an interview with Mark P. Leone, Professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeology in Annapolis project. Leone will be well known to many for his work in historical archaeology, for his use of critical theory in archaeology and for the Archaeology in Annapolis project where these interests come together. In the interview Leone explores the development of his approach, from his early work within the New Archaeology, through his growing interest in Marxist approaches to past and present, to his concerns today. This approach combines a commitment to social responsibility with a belief in scientific method. We discuss the ways in which critical archaeology has worked in practice in Annapolis over the past 25 or more years and how it has disrupted dominant modes of discussion and placed new ones more firmly on the agenda. In concluding, Leone offers some of his thoughts on archaeology and the creation of democratic discourse.

Is archaeology useful? Shannon Dawdy suggests that in the application of our knowledge to contemporary issues we find the utility in archaeological work. While I believe there are many ways archaeology is ‘useful’ beyond this application, I will pull that thread, illustrating the applications of archaeology to contemporary issues at the interface of society and environment. I then examine a few of Dawdy's concerns about the failings of archaeology.

Nathan Schlanger's entry point into the history of South African prehistory may be read as an academic coup de poing, a sharp fist strike designed to cleave its way into the archaeological establishment; yet, like the examples of such ‘palaeoliths’ that so fascinated earlier prehistorians, the object of study may require further contextualization and understanding in order to yield up its wider meanings.