In recent years the gap between archaeological theory and practice has been closing, but although there have been calls for ‘reflexivity’, there has been little critical examination of its meanings. Proposed reflexive methodologies still perpetuate many traditional hierarchies of power, and fail to consider the creative nature of excavation and post-excavation. Much archaeological work in Britain, Europe and North America also takes place within the commercial sphere, and post-processual ideas cannot advance archaeological practice unless they can be implemented in contract archaeology. This paper examines theoretical considerations of reflexivity, representation, subjectivity and sensual engagement to highlight their relevance to everyday archaeological practice, and their political potential to undermine existing hierarchies of power within commercial archaeology.

As we pass into an age of the Anthropocene, archaeologists, as scholars of other disciplines, are driven to consider how this physical and ideological climate change affects our craft, or how archaeology can contribute with knowledge and insight of significance in a shifting world. Basing its arguments on research conducted on marine debris and drift beaches in northern Norway and Iceland, the aim of this article is to imagine what kind of alternative ways of doing and thinking archaeology the current climate is calling for. With reference to this material, which conspicuously manifests both obstacles and promises for an ‘Anthropocene archaeology’, the article will question the worth of some perspectives traditionally considered essential to our discipline, while simultaneously building on confidence in a sincerely archaeological imagination.

This article argues that the notion of cultural biography presents a key to understanding the social and cultural practices that created archaeological records of domestic architecture, as it brings the close and dynamic relationships between a house and its inhabitants to the fore. To do so it presents a case study of the construction, habitation and abandonment cycles of late prehistoric farmsteads in the southern Netherlands. After discussing typical biographies of farmhouses and the way these are affected by a transformation from a ‘wandering’ to a stable settlement pattern, the perspective is broadened through a comparison with burial practices. These witness a roughly contemporaneous shift from monumental and communal to short-lived and dispersed cemeteries. Finally, it is suggested that we view these contrasting patterns in terms of a transformation of the perception of farmsteads as places in the landscape and land tenure practices.

The paper discusses the religious undertones classical Greek heritage is vested with in Greece. Drawing on the argument that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems, we show that classical antiquities have become powerful emotive icons for performances of national memory in the process ot imagining the topos of the Hellenic nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. We offer an explanation of this phenomenon by examining the position of antiquity in the construction of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation, as well as the ways by which Orthodoxy and classical antiquity became enmeshed in the formation of Hellenic national identity.We finally explore some of the implications that this phenomenon has for archaeology as a discipline and as social practice.

For archaeologists, stratification is an important character of archaeological deposits. Through it, layering is discerned and cultural and evolutionary interpretations are proposed. Archaeologists possess much implicit knowledge about the social practices that produce stratigraphic sequence and the specific, contextualized manner in which layers were built upon or cut into previous deposits. The aim of this paper is to gather together and formalize this knowledge so as to codify conceptual ‘tools to think by’ when recording and interpreting stratigraphy. Relevant literature is widely dispersed and here can only be sampled; authors consider stratigraphy in terms of (1) techniques of terraforming, (2) processes enacted and (3) meaning and interpretation. Techniques and processes are discussed within larger social interpretations such as memory, history-building, forgetting, renewing, cleansing and destroying. Examples are drawn from the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük and the ancestral Maya site of K'axob in Belize, Central America, to illustrate the applicability of an approach that here is called ‘social stratigraphy’. A practice-based history of stratigraphy – the recording and interpretation of strata – within archaeology is problematized in reference to codependence with geology, the deployment of labour and centralized authority within the emergent 19th- to early 20th-century field of archaeology. The contributions of and conflicts between British and American stratigraphic schools are considered in light of a potential rapprochement. Contested issues of cultural heritage – such as preservation of selected strata – suggest that thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise.

The concept of value increasingly fills archaeological debates. An examination of how value works within the diverse practices of archaeology (reconstructions of the past, heritage management and self-reflexive critique) provides an integrating factor to these debates. Through a genealogy of value in the management of material heritage, I highlight how ‘significance’ has been institutionalized from contingent forms, and the ‘the past’ rendered an object. Moreover, I follow the translation of these management procedures from the national to the global stage to highlight the emergence of economic significance in international heritage management. Providing an alternative approach to significance, the anthropological work of Weiner and Graeber locates value within practices that manage material heritage. These theories provocatively suggest that archaeological practice and heritage management are one and the same, both capable of producing value. This requires archaeologists to reconsider their discipline, and the contemporary contexts and situated ethical conditions of their work.

With the emergence of modern techniques of environmental analysis and widespread availability of accessible tools and quantitative data, the question of environmental determinism is once again on the agenda. This paper is theoretical in character, attempting, for the benefit of drawing up research designs, to understand and evaluate the character of environmental determinism. We reach three main conclusions: (1) in a typical pattern of research design, studies seek to detect simultaneous shifts in the environmental and archaeological records, variously positing the former to have influenced, triggered or caused the latter; (2) the question of determinism involves uncertainty about the justification for the above research design in particular in what comes to biologism and the concept of environmental thresholds on the one hand and the externality of the drivers of transformation in human groups and societies on the other; (3) adapting the concepts of the social production of vulnerability and the social basis of hazards from anthropology may help to clarify the available research design choices at hand.

The histories of post-mortem intervention in 18th- and 19th-century Britain illustrate how the relationships within which the dead were located affected their post-mortem treatment and were reproduced through it. This paper explores how traditions of marking social distinctions among the dead have been incorporated into archaeological practice, tracing some of the ways in which relationships between the dead and the living define the nature and tone of post-mortem interventions. This history suggests that the conditions within which people are produced as dead bodies through archaeological practice are at present poorly understood, and, as such, I contribute some notes towards a relational understanding of this production.

The philosophical movement known as speculative realism (SR) has much in common with archaeology. As well as a shared concern with objects and with time, both have orientations towards an external reality that exists (or existed) outside the domain of human knowledge. This paper explores overlaps and commonalities in these two very different types of investigation. Proceeding from an archaeological perspective, it critically assesses the relevance of some of the key ideas of SR for archaeology, while also looking at ways in which these can be challenged, honed, adapted and transformed through encounters with archaeological objects. It asks the question, what can archaeology usefully contribute to the SR project?

‘Agency’, the concept, its connections to ontology and its uses within archaeological theory, are discussed and criticized. In recent archaeological theory, the term ‘agency’ has been attributed to things, plants, animals and humans. In this paper it is argued that the term ‘agency’ is logically meaningless if applied to everything that moves or has effects on its surroundings, and that we need a new, more precise terminology that discriminates between ‘agency’, ‘effect’, ‘actant’ and ‘effectant’. That people, of all cultures, perceive and experience things/objects as having agency is explained as being due to projections of human characteristics, human psycho-neurological functioning, and the fact that all individuals and cultures are deeply involved with and dependent on things/objects. Connected to this, questions regarding different ontologies, animism, ethics and sciences are discussed. The paper presents a critique of symmetrical archaeology and materiality studies. Broader paradigmatic perspectives, more theoretical and methodological inclusiveness, and more inter- and trans-disciplinary endeavours are suggested to increase archaeology's ‘agency’.

This paper sets out to re-member coins into archaeological discourse. It is argued that coins, as part of material culture, need to be examined within the theoretical framework of historical archaeology and material-culture studies. Through several case studies we demonstrate how coins, through their integration of text, image and existence as material objects, offer profound insights not only into matters of economy and the ‘big history’ of issuers and state organization but also into ‘small histories’, cultural values and the agency of humans and objects. In the formative period of archaeology in the 19th century the study of coins played an important role in the development of new methods and concepts. Today, numismatics is viewed as a field apart. The mutual benefits of our approach to the fields of archaeology and numismatics highlight the need for a new and constructive dialogue between the disciplines.

Urban archaeology in Scandinavia has long been dominated by a processual understanding of medieval urban development. The author proposes that the concept of urbanity in the sense of ‘urban living’ should replace the processual and functionalist-oriented concept of ‘urbanization’, and that instead focus should be directed towards social processes, practices and materiality. He perceives the emergence of urbanity in the Middle Ages in the light of the formation of specific urban patterns of practice that can be analysed with the aid of theoretical tools from recent social-practice theory. Against this background, the potential of recent social-practice theory is examined as a possible analytical tool in an urban archaeological approach to medieval urban communities. Through concepts such as interaction, event, leakage and creativity, the medieval urban landscape can be reformulated as a dynamic social space in which diverse everyday routines were intertwined in patterns, bundles and complexes.

It is argued that archaeological theory during the last decade has lost its theoretical nerve by accepting the development of epistemologically incompatible approaches. Two recent books exemplify the widening theoretical gap in archaeology between different schools of thought, with different interpretative interests. They are Steve Shennan's Genes, memes and human history. Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution (2002), and John Robb and Marcia-Anne Dobres's edited volume Agency in archaeology (2000). To overcome this theoretical divide it is necessary to revive the theoretical debate, based upon epistemological principles relevant to archaeology as a historical discipline.

Deeply embedded in much of archaeological thought is an epistemological scheme of the ‘field’ as separate from the ‘home-base’, whether laboratory, archive or study. This modernist division is inadequate, for it fails to account for the interconnected and nonlinear process of archaeological knowledge construction. Taking direction from science studies and specifically from the work of Bruno Latour, this article sketches a model of multiple fields, which may serve as an alternative to this divide. Through the effective juxtaposition of two case studies from the Greek Peloponnesus, it explores two disparate yet complementary cases of how multiple fields make up the epistemological terrain of archaeology. The first case study traces the strains of an early 19th-century web, which situates the process of knowledge production at that time, while the second focuses on the archaeological process by closely following the transformation of things into documents during a regional survey. By recasting and multiplying the ‘field’ in archaeology we move from an oversimplified and bounded modernist scheme to one that allows for the complexities of archaeological practices which involve the action of instruments, media and human beings.

Many scholars working in the domain of material culture will welcome this forceful statement from Ingold, sharing his frustration with the seemingly immaterial materiality emergent in the material-culture literature, the singular focus on things already made rather than their processes of becoming, and the apparent lack of contribution from those who do study materials in depth (e.g. archaeologists) to questions of materiality and material culture. His intervention is a timely one, although the message has been expressed before, albeit in more muted tones (e.g. Ingold 2000, 53). But while Ingold may be justified in bemoaning the lack of definition and clarity in ‘materiality’, is there scope for stepping back from the polemic and finding a middle ground? I would argue that materiality may still be a useful way of understanding the conjunction or intersection of the social and the material, without the former swallowing the latter.

This paper discusses the concept of contemporaneity as it is used in archaeology. In particular, two general usages are examined. The first concerns the idea of contemporaneity in the context of archaeological dating and chronology, the second relates to the characterization of the archaeological record as a contemporary phenomenon. In both cases, related concepts are explored, namely synchronism and anachronism respectively. The paper offers a critique of these conventional usages of the idea of contemporaneity and argues for an alternative, linking this with the concept of consociation, a term coined by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz in the early 20th century.

Artefacts from military bases of the early Roman Empire potentially indicate not only the presence of women and children inside the walls, but also their movements, activities and impact on fort life. This paper explores dynamic approaches to categorizing and gendering artefacts for more holistic investigations of artefact assemblages. It uses GIS mapping techniques to analyse the distribution patterns of ‘gendered’ artefacts within three forts on the German frontier – Vetera I, Ellingen and Oberstimm. It investigates the social significance of these patterns within and between the forts to better understand women's place in this sphere.

Archaeological investigations of identity have successfully challenged traditional accounts of archaeological subjects by splintering social worlds along axes of gender, ethnicity and class. However, in so doing, they have quietly reinscribed an essential archaeological subject as a locus of analysis and as a foundation for contemporary political action. In analytical terms, the crystallization of a limited configuration of social difference constructs archaeological analyses of identity as a tautology in which contemporary configurations are read as universal and enduring rather than as immediate constructions within specific social worlds. In political terms, the tension between a cosmopolitan drive to combat the appropriation of a global human heritage by nationalist interests and an advocative archaeology dedicated to providing subaltern groups with a privileged claim to a sectional past leaves the discipline in an untenable position. The end of the essential archaeological subject requires a closer analytical focus upon the sociopolitical constitution of subjectivity and a stronger resolve to resist all claims to privilege in the present founded upon archaeological pasts. The implications of this move are sketched in relation to the kingdom of Urartu, which ruled the highlands of eastern Anatolia and southern Caucasia during the early 1st millennium B.C.

This essay differentiates between various branches of post-human scholarship as they relate to issues of colonial inequality, social action and politics. Through their critique of human exceptionalism, through their recognition of the vibrancy of matter, and in their potential connections with politically engaged scholarship, certain lines of post-humanist thought stand to make important contributions to archaeologies of long-term and colonial Indigenous history. I argue that these qualities offer nuanced perspectives on the plural colonial past and present of New England (north-eastern North America). I explore the prospects for a selectively post-human and pragmatic archaeology in connection with recent debates over stone landscapes. This approach makes room for various stakeholder narratives, finding possible common ground in a shared human condition between stakeholders, i.e. subject to ‘earth flows and lively stone’.

In this paper we explore ancient DNA (aDNA) as a powerful new technique for archaeologists. We argue that for aDNA to reach its full potential we need to carefully consider its theoretical underpinnings. We suggest that at present much aDNA research rests upon two problematic theoretical assumptions: first, that nature and culture exist in binary opposition and that DNA is a part of nature; second, that cultures form distinct and bounded identities. The nature–culture binary, which underpins much aDNA research, not only is a misunderstanding of our world but also results in placing archaeology and material culture in a secondary and subservient position to science and aDNA. Viewing cultures as distinct and bounded creates exclusionary, simplistic and singular identities for past populations. This stands in contrast to the work of social scientists, which has revealed identity to be complex, multiple, changing and contradictory. We offer a new way forward drawing upon assemblage thinking and post-humanism. This allows us to consider the messy and complex nature of our world and of human identities, and demands that we expect equally messy and complex results to emerge when we bring aDNA into conversation with other forms of archaeological evidence.