In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip archaeologists to incorporate emotions into their interpretations. We attempt to show the implications of such a vocabulary in a specific British Neolithic case study at the henge monument of Mount Pleasant.

The Atlantic era marks a turbulent period in the history of Senegambia, defined by dramatic reconfigurations in local socio-economic conditions. These ‘global encounters’ have often been equated with the subjection of African societies to the whims of an expanding capitalist economy. While the long-term effects of the Atlantic economy cannot be denied, conventional histories have often prioritized macro-trends and generalized process, thus glossing the complex mosaic of experiences that constituted the African Atlantic. By contrast, a closer look at how different categories of objects were consumed and circulated over time may provide more nuanced assessments of the impact of global forces on coastal societies. This article examines how these material entanglements took place in the Siin (Senegal), by following the social trajectories of several classes of objects in space and time, and charting their enmeshment in regimes of value, patterns of action, forms of power and historical experience. Combining these empirical insights with a broader theoretical reflection, the paper attempts to draw out the implications of rethinking the historical space of the African Atlantic through a more intimate engagement with the historicities, contingencies and materialities that fashioned African historical experiences. While this shift in conceptual priorities inevitably creates new silences, I suggest that it also re-establishes Africans as cultural and historical subjects, firmly grounded in world history, and that this perspective can provide a point of departure for the production of alternative historical imaginations and subjectivities.

The comments of Nicholas Sarkozy provide a powerful and forceful opening to Dr Richard's article and remind us of the potential significance of academic considerations of colonial legacies in the contemporary world. Dr Richard argues strongly against static conceptualizations of pre-‘Atlantic-era’ Africa and seeks to recast Africans not as victims, but as active ‘producers of history and culture’ (p. 26). In so doing he aligns himself with current trends in critical scholarship on colonial encounters in the Atlantic worlds of the last four centuries, scholarship that overtly criticizes dichotomous understandings of such encounters in favour of approaches that emphasize ambiguity (e.g. Hall 2000; Silliman 2001; 2009; Stahl 2007). Dr Richard's introductory suggestion that we should formulate ‘new questions instead of supplying different answers to the quandaries of an earlier generation of historians’ (p. 3) is clearly applicable to studies of colonial arenas beyond West Africa. In all parts of the world touched by European colonialism (including, of course, Europe itself) the ways in which scholars approach their subjects are very much conditioned by more widely held cultural memories, whatever the relationship of those memories may be to whatever may have occurred in the past.

Oliver J.T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen have written an interesting and urgent paper, raising crucial points touching upon a question at the very core of archaeology: what can we learn about the lives of prehistoric people, based solely on the material remains? Or, rephrased, how far can we reach on the Hawkesian ladder? To tackle this question, Harris and Sørensen accept the ten-year-old challenge raised by Sarah Tarlow, and suggest a vocabulary that will enable archaeologists to include emotional aspects in their interpretations. As they point out, several studies in archaeology have focused on emotion during the last decade, using burials as their main material. But as they acknowledge that emotions were a part of mundane social life, and not limited to ritualized events such as burials, they want to broaden the span of their inquiry and include materials from other contexts as well. As they do this, they make an interesting point and take a step forward in the development of archaeological interpretation. However, I would argue that they could have explored the issue even further. It would, for example, have been interesting to see them apply their ideas to some of the more mundane archaeological materials, from, for example, settlements that would be more explicitly connected to everyday life. Instead they use a quite spectacular site, where dramatic events have taken place. Is it perhaps easier to make assumptions about emotions when they are suspected to have been intense and exceptional in some way? The mundane emotions still escape us. Nevertheless, the case study chosen by Harris and Sørensen still illustrates their arguments and serves as an example for how the suggested vocabulary may be used.

I like this paper firstly for it attempts to redress, forcefully, the biased perceptions of Africa often still held by usually external observers, and secondly for it engages directly with materiality through an object-based perspective in indicating the complexities that existed in the Siin (Senegal), primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries. Richard is to be congratulated on providing us with a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper indicating that, like other recent research on African and external entanglements and connections (e.g. Croucher 2006), research framed broadly under the remit of ‘historical archaeology’ is some of the most stimulating currently being undertaken in the continent (e.g. Gavua 2008; Schmidt 2006).

I ‘full-heartedly’ agree with Harris and Sørensen that archaeologists are in need of fuller ‘appreciation of how the encounter with the material world is inherently affective’ in order to more effectively understand ‘how human beings and material things are co-constitutive’ (p. 146). Further, but assuredly not ‘foolhardily’, I would argue that in refining our appreciation and understanding of these matters of matter and emotion and being, we can make an important contribution to contemporary dialogues on emotion beyond ‘archaeological dialogues’; in particular, dialogues with psychological anthropologists.

‘Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects’, posits Kathleen Stewart in her challenging experimental ethnography Ordinary affects (2007). Affects – public feelings that put intimate sentiments in broad circulation – are, for Stewart, the sinews of social life, an opaque circuit that simultaneously grounds experience in places and things and publicizes the personal. As such, affects are quintessentially archaeological in that they are both artefactual, embedded in what Bill Brown (2003) calls the ‘object matter’ of human relationships, and rooted in deep histories of material production and transformation. It is not surprising, then, that the intertwined problems of emotion and affect have re-emerged as potentially productive loci of research within archaeology itself. Indeed, as the discipline continues to extend its understanding of the social instrumentality of objects, landscapes and representations, it must, of necessity, come to terms with the affective efficacy of things, with the causes and consequences of our captivation.

I applaud Richard's article for continuing to move forwards the study of historical archaeology in African contexts. This article seems to fit within an ever-growing dynamic field of historical archaeologists who move easily between the realms of archaeological data, documentary and oral histories (e.g. Dawdy 2008; Voss 2008). As highlighted by Reid and Lane (2004a; see also contributions to Reid and Lane 2004b) it is perhaps better to conceptualize the study of historical archaeology on the African continent as a field of historical archaeologies, where pluralistic theoretical and methodological directions can be attended to, driven by a diversity of locally contextualized research agendas.

Harris and Sørensen's critique of the archaeological inattention to emotion and their recognition of the material mediation of affect bring to the fore perennial epistemological problems defining the broader archaeological enterprise. The immediate citation of the long-discredited Hawkesian ladder of inference challenges the assumption that past emotional states are unrecoverable from archaeological contexts, just as an earlier generation of archaeologists rejected processual theory that meaning, conceptual schemas and symbolism fell beyond the pale of scientific inference. Of course, Hawkes was not a materialist in the strict sense of the term, and he recognized that value systems transcended the epiphenomenal and played a vital role in structuring social practice and shaping historical process. It was his contention, however, that conceptual and symbolic schemes and their role in social reproduction were simply too complex to be read satisfactorily from material remains (Hawkes 1954; see Fogelin 2008, 129–30). He wrote that ‘there is nothing in North American ecology . . . to compel either Iroquois institutions . . . or the constitution of the United States’ (Hawkes 1954, 163). To be sure, Hawkes probably would not have denied that moved to move is intrinsic to the human condition and that affective dispositions were a force in individual experiences and the collective fortunes and self-representations of past communities. At the same time, he probably gave little consideration to the dialectical interdependence of the material world and emotion, a relationship that has captured the imagination of recent scholars. Hawkes would no doubt have scoffed at the notion that emotion as ontological problem, cultural construct or variable of social interaction is amenable to archaeological interpretation.

Asking different questions about and adopting an alternative perspective for understanding what happened in the past are rightly highlighted by François Richard as crucial to our understanding of colonial situations like that in 16th- to 18th-century West Africa. He frames his discussion with a speech given in Dakar by Nicolas Sarkozy, who in mid-2007 had just assumed the office of French president, and uses the strong reactions to those words very effectively to make it clear why thinking about the colonial past continues to matter, both in Africa and elsewhere.

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.

Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Croucher, Audrey Horning, Tim Insoll and Peter van Dommelen for their thoughtful comments. It is not uncommon for academic critique to be seduced by the facility of criticism, to draw its impulse from what, with Freud, we might call the ‘narcissism of small differences’, and proceed with the obstinacy of the hatchet headed for the jugular . . . More artful, and far more difficult, is a form of engagement that gives more than it takes, that disputes but in the spirit of generous exchange. I feel that the respondents have accomplished precisely that. They have crafted a space of ‘hospitable’ discussion (cf. Derrida 2000), which rests on a double movement of ‘interruption’ (Westmoreland 2008): of their plane of thoughts, by bringing my article within the ambit of their conversations; and of my ideas, by making them a little less self-evident, a little less ‘at home’. This act of ‘making strange’ – when one's viewpoints acquire a different face as they are presented anew through the minds of others – is the cloth of which constructive dialogue is made.

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the debate on agency and personhood in archaeology. Despite some very interesting and sharp discussions, the debate has suffered from the projection of anachronistic definitions of the person and an overreliance on specific ethnographic readings. In addition, little attempt is made to integrate abstract theoretical discussions with close analyses of empirical data. I would like to suggest that this should be our priority. In the second part of the paper, I will apply these ideas by examining notions of personhood and agency held by the inhabitants of the southern Greek mainland between ca 1800 and 1600 B.C. The analysis will be based on the mortuary practices and imagery of the period.

We would like to thank the five commentators for their thorough and stimulating reflections on, and criticism of, our article. The different comments raise various issues, and we appreciate their diversity of perspectives and their analysis of problems in our attempt at a rethinking of emotion in archaeology. The comments are each in their own way highly rewarding for us, and they certainly bring concerns to the fore that we have left out. Here we identify several issues that the commentators address in different voices and with varying intensities, and would like to examine these in turn. First, we consider the question of ritual at Mount Pleasant and the absence of the quotidian from our account. Second, we engage with the worry expressed over the lack of specificity of emotions in our given scenarios. Third, the phenomenological perspective in our article is given some critical thought. Fourth, we address the important point on which several of the commentators agree: that we leave out how emotions unfold in historically specific and context-dependent situations. Finally we turn back to the issue of our vocabulary to see how it stands the test of both application and critique.

Shortly before her death, my grandmother expressed a strongly felt sentiment not to lie in the family tomb next to her sister-in-law. It was not quite clear what was to be done with the bones of the woman who by then had occupied the space next to her brother, my grandfather, for some five years. My mother resolved the issue by depositing the urn with my grandmother's ashes on the other side of my grandfather's coffin, stating matter-of-factly, ‘We are not about to toss the aunt out, and we will certainly not build a new tomb.’ Acting in a relational web of moral obligations and duties as a good daughter, my mother also proceeded as a rational modern individual in the universe of limited choices in Eastern Europe. Cremation replaced interment, therefore ‘lying next to’ was no longer an issue in a literal sense. At the same time, the filial duty of a proper burial in the family tomb was conducted with all the necessary ritual, wide kin in attendance. This incident came to my mind when reading about the archaeological dilemma of mortuary analysis described in Voutsaki's essay: to what extent do burials express the will, agency and station in life of the deceased as opposed to those of the wider kin relations responsible for burying them? Do the actions that archaeologists interpret on the basis of burials derive from choices by individual, cognizant agents, or do they represent a moral world in which adherence to certain practices defines a ‘good person’? I wish to address two issues from this presentation, one more philosophical and the other directly addressing the archaeological record of the Mycenaeans. First, I will consider whether the shift from agency to personhood (and back) proposed in this essay solves interpretive problems created by the recent embrace of agency. Second, I am intrigued by the question that Voutsaki poses about why images appear in this period, as it seems to me that a potential answer may lie in her detailed exposition of moral theory if one looks carefully, or extends it slightly beyond the intended meaning.

This is an interview about archaeology in Germany and beyond. Friedrich Lüth, currently president of the European Association of Archaeologists, among other positions, talks about archaeological practice and thought in Germany and Europe and the relationship between both. Is German pre- and protohistoric archaeology still best known for its disciplined approaches to material evidence and the thoroughness with regard to the data (Härke 1989)? Are there still concerns whether it is atheoretical (Klejn 1993)? In this interview Lüth reflects on university chairs versus ‘schools’, we hear about how to gain new facts and how to deconstruct interpretations, and we learn about the sixteenfold German heritage management – archaeology is the competence of the sixteen Bundesländer (states) rather than of the Bund, because state archaeological services as well as the universities fall under the laws of the states, not under federal laws. Topics range from the Bologna process to Germany's attitude towards ‘world archaeology’, from positivism to plurality, and from budgets to languages. We also learn much about the self-perception of archaeology in Germany as a subject between data and theory, between humanities and sciences, and between knowledge production and public relevance.

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’.

Sofia Voutsaki has developed a very stimulating line of thought in her paper. In my view, one of the laudable traits of this paper is that it is characterized by the same tripartite structure which actually lies behind each scientific argument. Consciously or not, all of us start with a theory or a set of assumptions; we then proceed to methods in order to achieve our goal, i.e. to arrive at transparent interpretations of the past through empirical analysis. The analysis of empirical data is the end of the process, not its starting point, even if many people think it would be the beginning of our daily research work. The claim that the use of theory is unavoidable is often denied. Sofia Voutsaki's goal, as I understand it, is to make an attempt to narrow the gap between, on the one hand, mainly theory-driven research and, on the other, empirical analysis which is thought to be free from the unnecessary ‘burden’ of theory.

In the brief space allotted for a comment, with respect to the theoretical discussion I will say only that I find the argument insufficiently developed and would rather that Voutsaki had paid closer attention to Dornan's useful critique of Bourdieu and Giddens and the uses to which their sociological theories have been put by archaeologists (Dornan 2002). As a proponent of adding moral philosophy to the archaeological arsenal of theory, Voutsaki might also have dwelt on Walzer's powerful argument about the interrelationship between ‘thin’ minimizing and ‘thick’ maximalizing moralities, since they disabuse us of the restraints of our local and universal ideologies and help us understand how individual actors and the groups of which they are a part are constrained by a plurality of moral decisions. My thoughts here, however, will focus on the case study, since that is the area of my own primary interest and expertise.