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 recent intervention, Romanian philosopher and essayist Andrei Pleşu (2018) writes on the topic of destiny,

This paper develops a case study of animal exploitation in Androy, in southern Madagascar, to demonstrate the exchange and depositional processes by which animal bones can eventually end up in the ground. It examines the central role of cattle as symbol, currency and foodstuff in Tandroy life and explores some of the contexts and complexities of livestock exchange and slaughter. The results of this case study are used to suggest that standard archaeological calculations of minimum numbers (MNI) from individual sites may not always provide reliable information about livestock numbers in subsistence economies, and that the nutritional value of certain species might be the least important of their attributes. The complex exchange patterns of animals at Tandroy funerals, and the ways that their gifting and sacrifice define and reinforce social roles, identity and position, are key aspects of the social changes by which the powerful can become poor and the enslaved wealthy.

This paper critically examines how power is understood and used in archaeological interpretation of prehistoric societies. We argue that studies on power within archaeology have been haltered in their interpretive potential, frequently limited to individualizing coercive power with androcentric connotations. We explore new avenues of power through a retrospective view. Drawing on ideas first conceptualized by Hannah Arendt, while also incorporating theoretical ideas from collective action, anarchistic theory and the affective turn, we argue that power as a phenomenon and explanation within archaeology can be refined and nuanced when approached through a lens of collective agency and the affective potential of material culture. This connects, furthermore, to how we today see and act on changing power dynamics.

The underlying notion for this article is that archaeology requires an amalgamation of humanities and science, and of narrative and scientific knowledge. The need for this fusion has arisen in a context in which contemporary society is experiencing major changes in epistemics, aesthetics and fashion; an increase in virtual experiences; and an economic crisis. I refer to this situation as the neo-baroque, a condition that is elusive and partially ambiguous. This social context (perhaps the final crisis of modernity), and the breakdown of this integration in pragmatic terms, call for a repoliticization of science.

This essay starts from the initial presupposition that the landscape is more than the proverbial backcloth to human action found so often in archaeological writing. It is not just the natural feature of the environment putting important constraints on human behaviour, as a popular ‘naturalist’ tradition in archaeology would like to have it, nor is it simply a cultural construction of human conceptions about the world, as its ‘culturalist’ counterpart is advocating (cf. Descola and Pálsson 1996, 2-3). Rather the landscape is doubly-faced, consisting of a foreground actuality of every-day existence and a background potentiality of an imagined timeless ideal (Hirsch 1995). The phenomenal and the imagined landscape are alternately perceived and inextricably intertwined, in that people continuously seek to realize in ordinary life the ideals of an imaginary existence. The ways in which they imagine the world may thus heavily bear on the appearance and organization of the landscape they live in. This is true for all societies in past and present. But while in the modern west the ideals have up to a point a secular character, in all other societies, including those of Roman Gaul, the imagined landscape takes the form of a cosmology.

On the basis of the Post-Roman surface finds from the Boeotia Survey in central Greece, the use and social meaning of glazed vessels as table utensils from Byzantine to Ottoman times (ca. 10th–19th centuries A.D.) will be discussed, as well as the cultural changes in dining manners in that period. It is the intention of this paper to approach this evolution of “wining and dining” habits in an interdisciplinary perspective, in which archaeological data, textual sources and iconographical information will be combined.

I would like to focus my brief remarks on Shannon Dawdy's very important third question, ‘can archaeology save the world?’ But to show my biases up front, I would rephrase it to read, ‘how can archaeologists usefully contribute to public policy considerations on the future of this planet?’, or perhaps just modify her question to say, ‘how can archaeologists help save the world?’ As one looks at recent books such as Newman, Beatley and Boyer's Resilient cities. Responding to peak oil and climate change (2009), Richard Heinberg's The party's over. Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies (2005), or Howard and Elisabeth Odum's A prosperous way down (2001) or key articles such as ‘Ecology in times of scarcity’ by John Day et al. (2009) or ‘Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy’ by Mathis Wackernagel et al. (2002), it seems clear to me that archaeologists could readily amplify the important arguments mounted by these authors and play a useful role in helping planners confront looming global cultural–ecological issues. It is not that these writers are unaware of archaeology and its potential contributions – Heinberg (2005, 34–38), for example, looks quite favorably on the work of Joseph Tainter – but that archaeological research could be more thoroughly and productively utilized.

‘Outlaw’ is not a common category of archaeological thought but it is perhaps more useful than meets the eye. ‘Outlaws’ are typically viewed as contingent on legal and capitalist systems; they are, I suggest, also material, affective phenomena that draw our attention to how transgression, dissent and disorder are conceived through archaeological thinking. Here, I outline some ways in which ‘outlaw’ figures are ‘good to think with’, particularly for historical and colonial contexts but also for broader, more global frontier situations. Through three sketches of archetypal ‘outlaws’ in southern Africa's recent past, I consider where these disruptive figures draw attention to how mobility, violence, rebellion and state imagination (and the limits thereof) have been imagined through material misbehaviours.

In the years leading up to the First World War the academic understanding of the earthen mounds we know as mottes underwent a series of dramatic changes. Exploration of the paradigms behind these viewpoints tells us much about the way in which knowledge comes into being and is used. In particular, archaeologists have created their own foundation myths, complete with hero and demon figures, which serve to emphasize a progressive account of research. The reality is often somewhat more reactionary. In this paper I argue that archaeological histories have impeded understanding of the discipline as the complexities of research remain hidden. As viewpoints become entrenched, creative thought is stifled because the subject is believed to be understood. In castle studies, one a-priori paradigm is that the English motte-and-bailey castle was introduced by the Normans, an idea commonly attributed to Ella Armitage. This paper explores the context behind the adoption of this idea through a case study focusing on changes in understanding. Acrimonious dismissal of alternative points of view has maintained the dominance of this paradigm. I conclude that critical historiographies such as this best serve the development of future understanding of the discipline.

The Celtic-speaking town of Lattara (modern Lattes) in Iron Age southern Gaul was an important centre of sustained colonial interaction with Etruscans, Massalian Greeks and Romans from the sixth century B.C. One of the important consequences of these encounters was the introduction of coinage. Through an examination of the archaeological context of coins, I investigate how the use and value of money changed at Lattara after the Roman conquest. Drawing upon several anthropological discussions of money in colonial settings, particularly Jean and John Commaroff's (2006) notion of ‘commensuration’, I suggest that the incorporation of coinage into transaction systems at Lattara was related to its expedience as a standardized form of value, which facilitated exchange between the inhabitants of the town and foreign merchants.

Stating the value of archaeology for contemporary society is a very difficult task hardly undertaken by archaeologists. Work with a contemporary record directly linked to local communities, and the approach of public archaeology, have helped to bring society and archaeology closer together. However, the role of a public intellectual goes beyond archaeology, delving into current social worries. Is it possible to play this game from archaeology? The multiple and complex relations between archaeology and society open the door to participation in public debates, but we stand to lose our essence. We face a Shakespearean dilemma, a choice between having an influential voice in the present, or just an expert opinion.

This article reassesses the social significance of Early Neolithic chambered tombs. It critically evaluates inferences about social organization drawn from tomb architecture and interpretations of kinship based on aDNA analyses of human remains from tombs. Adopting the perspective that kinship is a multifaceted and ongoing field of practice, it argues that the arrangement of tomb chambers was related to the negotiation of Early Neolithic kinship. Drawing together inferences about biological relatedness from aDNA analyses with interpretations of chamber arrangements, it suggests that variation in the architectural arrangements and sequential modification of chambered tombs relates to different ways of negotiating aspects of kinship, particularly descent and affinity. It presents interpretations of how kinship was negotiated at Early Neolithic tombs in different regions of Britain and Ireland and concludes that it is increasingly possible to gauge pattern and diversity in Neolithic negotiations of kinship, descent and affinity by combining different strands of evidence, including architectural arrangement.

This paper examines the division that has grown up in contemporary archaeology between practical and theoretical branches of the discipline. It argues that the two sides of this schism are archaeological versions of objectivism and subjectivism, and that they really represent a single dualism. To break out of this, what is needed is an approach to thinking and doing archaeology that recognizes the embodied nature of archaeological engagements with material culture, together with an understanding of the emergent, relational character of archaeological data. In the light of this discussion, we attempt to redefine the building blocks of archaeology (material culture and the past), and to show with a case study how such an archaeology might generate new insights in practice.

It is a pleasure to be invited to contribute to a debate on the nature of ‘structured deposition’, even though I do not have the expertise to comment on much of the detailed discussion of British prehistoric material presented in this excellent paper. The way in which my commentary approaches structured deposition is by posing two questions relating to the field of deliberate object fragmentation – an important aspect of many sites where structured deposition has been claimed (such as Kilverstone, Etton or Windmill Hill) – (a) can the identification of deliberate object fragmentation contribute to the understanding of specific deposits, sites or landscapes? (b) To what extent does the agency of humans and objects relate to structured deposition and deliberate object fragmentation?

This paper takes the form of a dialogue between an archaeologist and a sociologist. In recent years, interdisciplinary working has become increasingly fashionable within academia. The aim of our exchange was to establish exactly what implications this way of working has for understandings of material culture. Our methodology was simple, involving the ‘archaeological’ and ‘sociological’ analysis of two different objects. In undertaking this work, we hoped to bring about new or different understandings of the objects under scrutiny. The process was indeed successful, but not necessarily in the ways we had expected. Ultimately, it revealed a complex set of questions about how the materials of culture are conceptualized and understood, and led us to a renewed appreciation of the theoretical and methodological qualities of what we do within our respective disciplines.

Archaeology has an identity problem. At least three factors are involved. The postmodern view of radical instability has collided with processual aversions towards ‘meaning’, resulting in a stalemate regarding the past. Modern problems with identity, including the role of the past and archaeology itself, have generated additional confusion. Identity is a hall of mirrors which parallels other epistemological debates in archaeology, all of which revolve around the divide between realism and idealism. Archaeology cannot resolve this problem. The solution is not, however, to become either better technicians or more strident ideologues, but to become more informed contributors to larger debates in the human sciences and philosophy, in an atmosphere of civility and pluralism.

The point of departure for this debate (and the SAA forum) was the question ‘does archaeological theory exist?’ Matthew Johnson's answer is wisely mixed, but mostly negative. Archaeological theory does not exist, he tells us, because there is hardly any distinctive archaeological way of theoretical thinking ‘to which most or even the largest group of archaeologists would willingly or knowingly subscribe’ (p. 117). I shall not spend much time on Johnson's denial, which for several reasons may well be justified, just note that if we apply his rather rigorous consensual criterion to other disciplines, we would probably be searching in vain also for any sociological, economic or even philosophical theory – which Johnson still seems quite convinced do exist.

Symbolism, symbolically mediated culture and the production of symbolically charged artefacts are today almost unanimously accepted in palaeoanthropology as the defining hallmarks of cognitively and behaviourally modern human beings. This orthodoxy, however, suffers from a number of serious problems, including pervasive dualisms, an internally contradictory methodology and an unwillingness to grapple critically with the symbolism concept. It is suggested that the symbolism paradigm originated in the ideas of Leslie White in the 1940s and 1950s, but did not become a serious presence in palaeoanthropology until the 1980s. This is explained in terms of the adoption of cladistic phylogenetics in that period, and by reference to new evidence that removed Neanderthals from the ancestry of living peoples. The implications of the growing body of evidence for Neanderthal symbolism are discussed. It is concluded that the symbolism paradigm is essentialist and ahistorical, and has acquired the character of an origins myth.