A general interest in centralized institutions, state formation and prestige objects has dominated research on social organization and dynamics in Scandinavia from the Late Iron Age to the Middle Ages. Accordingly, a focus on kingly power, aristocratic influence, hierarchies and warrior might has dominated archaeological research designs for the last forty years. Subsequently, other perspectives have been evaded and their significance has been diminished. In this article, I use anarchistic principles as an analytic perspective and present examples of anarchistic actions – network organization, justified leaders and decentralization – drawing on well-known but ambiguous phenomena such as thing sites, the southern Danish defence system Danevirke, and migration and mobility. I suggest a perspective that recognizes resistance, authority and decentralization as well as centralization and institutionalization, allowing a broad spectrum of social engagement and interrelations to influence social organization. I will argue that human intentionality has been overlooked in favour of structures and institutions, and that the power of network organization and decentralization is influential in shaping social organization and dynamics.

The European Association of Archaeologists has long fostered critical analysis of the relationship between archaeology and politics, particularly the politics of national, regional and supra-regional identities. Although the role of nationalism in the birth of archaeology as a discipline is well recognized, the events of the past few years – from the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, to the movement for secession in eastern Ukraine, and the rise of explicitly nationalist political movements across the continent – suggest that the (re)formulation of national identities is likely to continue to have major implications both for our interpretation of the past and for the practice of archaeology in the present. In light of this, the Archaeological dialogues editorial board organized a round table at the EAA meeting in Glasgow in September 2015 to explore the extent to which institutional, legislative and funding structures as well as political and cultural imperatives continue to bind our discipline into the construction of nationalist narratives, and this more or less in spite of long-standing critical debates within the discipline itself that for decades have problematized the relationship. Are we caught in a ‘can't-live-with-and-can't-live-without’ situation? While explicitly nationalist archaeologies have become almost obsolete in the European academies, we rarely contemplate the impact of nationalism on funding or the definition and protection of cultural heritage, for example. Several of the following papers suggest that without the nation state's involvement, the vicissitudes of global capitalism would result in a situation where it would be extremely difficult to adequately protect our ‘heritage’, however that is defined.

Viewed from the perspective of early Roman Italy, Versluys's stimulating proposal is extremely thought-provoking, both with regard to the framework proposed and with regard to what we might call an ‘ahistorical’ approach that explicitly places a material-culture studies perspective at the centre of analysis. This proposed approach interacts in a variety of fascinating ways with the direction that study of the early Roman expansion and Roman Italy has taken over the last two decades, both in terms of research topics and questions, and also in terms of the academic and disciplinary setting within which they have developed. In order to stimulate the debate from the perspective of ‘the beginnings’ of the expanding Roman world, I would like to reflect briefly here on some of these potential interactions as I see them. Below, I will sketch the development of the discussion for early Roman Italy and raise two main, interrelated points.

In this statement, I argue that one way for archaeology to realize the potential of its materials to tell us something different about the past is to confront the question of alterity, understood as the ontological difference that lies at the roots of much archaeological material. If we accept alterity as a starting point of analysis then we stand a chance of challenging the strictures of interpretive frameworks that foreclose the possibility of encountering something new. Methodologically and theoretically I argue for risk-taking, especially taking on conceptual resources from indigenous thinkers and adopting a stance of wonder in the face of our materials which can open up unsuspected archaeological realities.

This paper discusses the relationship between art, perception and human engagement with the environment in Minoan Crete through the depiction of landscapes and the ‘natural world’ in art. It is argued that the conventional approaches to Minoan ‘nature scenes’, based on the representation and expression theories of art, are overshadowed by modernist assumptions about art and human–environment relations. The paper then proceeds to discuss the workings of visual perception and the dynamics of human–environment systems. On that basis, the nature of human–environment relations in Minoan Crete is reconsidered and an ‘ecological’ approach to ancient art explored. A tentative suggestion is made that Minoan nature scenes might be understood as instruments for perceiving and knowing the environment, and some broader implications of the ecological perspective for the interpretation of the archaeological record of Minoan Crete are indicated.

Research on food has a long history in archaeology and anthropology, with many agreeing that we need to examine the food of complex societies in a more holistic way, through the various stages from production to disposal. Typically, this has occurred through the application of the concept of foodways, although this has a range of definitions and is generally only used in historical archaeological and anthropological research. By building on this important area of research this paper will explore the usefulness of applying a food-systems framework to understanding food in the past. Systems research is already well established in archaeology, sharing elements with approaches such as social-network analysis and complexity science. These theories have been used to address a broad array of questions about the relationships between actors, activities and outcomes for individuals and larger groups at a range of social scales. Thus food systems can help us to explore greater connections between food, human society and the environment via a combination of different archaeological evidence and comparative data.

Philosopher and physicist Karen Barad (2003; 2007; 2012) has brought a new understanding of causality to the academic discourse (agential realism theory). Inspired by this new take on causality, I problematize the argument that archaeologists ‘follow’ materials. I begin by challenging the act of ‘following’ on two counts (causality and universalism), and then consider the work of Malafouris (2008a) – a thinker whose ideas have the potential to remediate this issue through his examination of the ‘in-between’ humans and matter. I argue that, despite offering an inspirational approach to mind–matter relationships, the dialectical relationship he evokes remains problematic from a Baradian perspective as it is still rooted in ‘following’. I suggest that Barad’s agential realism offers a valuable conceptual framework for researchers who are weary of ‘unilateral’ linear causality and keen to move beyond dialectical thinking (Barad 2007, 214).

Do archaeologists recover the material record of past processes or the residues of the material conditions that made the presence of a kind of humanness possible? This paper attempts to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between these two options and argues the case for, and briefly contemplates the practical implications of, an archaeology of the human presence.

Miguel John Versluys has produced a stimulating and thought-provoking agenda to reinvigorate study of the Roman world, with its myriad social, political and economic connections between Rome and the diverse cultures and communities that fell within and beyond the boundaries of its empire. He teases out the explicitly anti-colonial nature in recent decades of specifically Anglo-Saxon discussions of Rome and its empire in response to Romanization. He also sets these particular understandings of what it meant to live within that empire in a comparative context with other scholarly traditions that engage with Roman studies. He advocates both globalization theories and material-culture perspectives to reconsider aspects addressed by Romanization as a means of pushing the discussion beyond Romans and Natives, where ultimately it still lingers in the guise of much more recent perspectives, which emphasize imperialism. The critical evaluation of Romanization of the 1990s in the Anglo-Saxon tradition was not a unique process for Anglo-Saxon scholarship engaged in study of colonizing cultures, however. Parallels can be seen in contemporary Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the Greek world as well. Does this mean that the potential Versluys sees for Roman studies in the marriage of globalization and material-culture approaches can apply to Greek studies too?

In recent years archaeologists have celebrated the emergence of a critical history of archaeology which has assumed a central position in disciplinary debates. This new historiography has been characterized by the adoption of an externalist or contextual approach primarily concerned with how social, economic and political conditions have influenced the interpretation of archaeological data. While externalism has played an essential role in the recognition of the history of archaeology as a field, I suggest in this article that it is time for historians to explore new ways of conceptualizing the social dimensions of archaeological knowledge. In particular, I consider how certain debates held by historians and sociologists of science during the last years can encourage historians of archaeology to enquire more critically about the blurry boundaries between ‘archaeology’ and its ‘context’.

Veronica Strang has written an excellent account of the fluid relationships between humans and the non-human materiality of water. The very idea of anthropology of water challenges our commonly held assumptions about water being just a material or economic resource (or, conversely, about anthropology being just the study of people). It holds that water is socially, politically and ritually constituted, while acknowledging at the same time that water also has an existence outside the human domain. There is much to agree with and to be inspired by in the paper, which is especially strong on ‘fluidity and consistency at every level of human–non-human engagement’ (p. 133). By virtue of the emphasis on that specific aspect, however, there are some aspects which are underemphasized, and it is these which I focus on in my comments.

This article examines the role of social memory and the treatment of the corpse within the reconfiguration of personhood in the Roman world. Exploring the significance of ‘remembering and forgetting’, it emphasizes the importance of memory and the body as a context for the manipulation of post-mortem personhood and identity. An extraordinarily rich collection of archaeological and epigraphic evidence associated with the Augustan-period senator Marcus Nonius Balbus provides an almost unparalleled context in which to explore the significance of these observations. This particular example from Herculaneum demonstrates that the realignment of relationships during mortuary activities could produce a new sense of personhood for both the deceased and mourners that was constructed in the context of communal remembrance. Subsequent commemorative activities, focused on the material manifestation of these relationships and the ‘dividuality’ of the dead within the urban fabric, may consequently have acted to promote a new civic ancestor for the community of Herculaneum.

Ethics are fundamentally important to all forms of archaeological theory and practice and are embedded within many professional codes of conduct. The ethics of archaeological engagement with conflicts around the world have also been subject to scrutiny and debate. While archaeology and archaeological heritage are increasingly viewed as significant elements of post-conflict work, with much to contribute to rebuilding stable and secure societies, there has been limited acknowledgement and debate of post-conflict ethical issues and challenges for archaeologists. This paper is intended to stimulate discussion around major ethical issues, the problems and possible ways forward for post-conflict archaeology and archaeological heritage.

Having followed with great interest the latest scholarly literature on ontology-related archaeologies, especially in this journal, this essay will problematise the extractive nature of much of this scholarship in the long-history of Western imperialism, in which Indigenous knowledge has been collected, depoliticised, classified, and then re-signified within Western frameworks.

One of the most important developments in the study of the northern frontier provinces in recent years has been growing realization of the complexity of the populations living within, as well as around, imperial Roman military bases. It is clear that, even within the walls, such bases were not the exclusive preserve of soldiers, or even males. (It has been especially delicious to see the outraged reaction of some conservative practitioners of Limesforschung to the idea that there could possibly have been women living inside Roman forts.)

Archaeology in South Africa has always been political and no one has articulated this relationship better than Martin Hall in a career that has spanned both the political upheavals in South Africa and the theoretical transformations in archaeology over the past four decades. In research that has traversed the Iron Age to the Internet, he has explored the multifarious ways in which material culture operates in everyday life and how power is mobilized through materiality. He is also an example of a scholar who thoroughly embodies the very modern duality of the local and the global through his work, which is both highly engaged within the context of South Africa (and Africa in general), while also clearly international in its scope and relevance.

In a provocative article published recently in Archaeological dialogues (23(2)), Olivier Gosselain proposes ‘to get rid of ethnoarchaeology once and for all, and join forces with other, more serious, disciplines’. In this reaction article, I challenge Gosselain's sweeping statements about ethnoarcaheology. In particular I argue against the notion that methodological weakness is unique to ethnoarchaeology, that the questions under study ignore the complexity of the social context, and that the search for cross-cultural regularities denies the historical dimension of technical practices. In conclusion, I suggest that rather than getting rid of ethnoarchaeology, it would be more helpful to meet the ambitious goals of ethnoarchaeology by improving and strengthening the methodology.

I congratulate Duncan Garrow on his very engaging history of the concept of structured deposition, although I find it slightly terrifying that this history now extends over nearly 30 years. I find much to agree with in his account, notably the distressing point that what was originally intended as a heuristic has sometimes become an end in itself: the identification of a class of deposits that are ‘structured’. Thus, for instance, Bishop, Church and Rowley-Conwy argue (2009, 82) that pits in Neolithic Scotland may have represented ‘places of structured deposition rather than domestic settlements’, and that therefore the plant remains contained within them should be regarded as unrepresentative. Here, structured deposits take on the abject character that used to be afforded to ‘ritual’ phenomena in archaeology: having been identified as irrational and abnormal, their interpretation is considered beyond archaeological competence, and they are not subjected to further analysis.