This issue of Archaeological dialogues features a discussion article by Kristian Kristiansen on the widening theoretical gap in archaeology between people focusing on ‘genes’ and those on ‘agents’. Kristiansen's thought-provoking essay is flanked by comments from Ulrich Veit, Stephen Shennan and John Robb. We believe that the question is a broad one that merits further and open debate. Readers are therefore invited to participate in this discussion and send us their reactions in the format of a discussion comment (maximum 2,500 words). As Archaeological dialogues continues to be a journal for debating archaeology, we very much welcome your comments.

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.

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.

As expected, Adam Smith has written a provocative, intellectually stimulating and demanding article critiquing the re-inscription of ‘an essential archaeological subject’ as archaeology becomes more explicitly aware of its inevitable political dimensions. I find myself in broad, though not perfect, agreement with his overall argument and concur completely with his concluding sentiments that archaeologists should become ‘analysts of the naturalizers rather than analytical naturalizers’ and that they should expose the strategic practices at play in the assertion of all such essentialist claims, past and present. My concern is that his prescription for achieving this result may be too mild (i.e. indirect and subtle, if not opaque) to cure the ills of the nationalists who habitually distort archaeological evidence to achieve their often dubious political agendas. In a certain sense, his laudable insistence on focusing on change and the plasticity of markers of identity in relation to specific and always shifting sociopolitical contexts eviscerates the political nature of archaeological enquiry. His recommendation is to go back to interpreting the past on its own terms, void of ‘essential subjects’. All right, but not many people will listen and those interested in using the past for contemporary purposes will not be directly confronted. As critical ‘analysts of the naturalizers’ we perform an essentially negative, though indispensable, role; we point out why the accounts of the naturalizers are ambiguous, distort the record, are untenable and dangerous, and so on. This admittedly negative role is extremely important and should not now be abandoned after so many years of denying it or not recognizing it. It is necessary to add that there is also a positive political approach for interpreting archaeological evidence that Childe (1933) long ago recognized: demonstrate the continuous intercourse and diffusion of ideas and technologies from one culture and people to another throughout prehistoric times and insist that no single group was responsible for this constantly growing and shared history of cultural development.

What scholars are committed to in principle is not always what they are likely to uphold in practice. Adam T. Smith examines – and deplores – the striking discrepancy between the centrality of the constructivist idiom in a variety of disciplines and the tendency of archaeologists to continue to treat archaeological subjects (be they ethnic groups, classes, nations, races, cultures or any other kind of identity group) as given entities and stable units of analysis. Smith's concern is not merely about the consistency of the discipline's theoretical underpinnings. In fact, his greatest worry turns out to be political: an archaeology that reconstitutes, rather than deconstructs, the essential subject may be wrongly used as a foundation for contemporary political action (such as nationalism). Thus he invites archaeologists to revise the relationship between scholarly analysis and political practice. Smith not only suggests taking into full account the malleability of identity groups in relation to changing sociopolitical contexts, but he also incites scholars to bend their minds to the sociopolitical circumstances within which seemingly stable categories of identity are produced. Archaeologists should be careful not to ‘essentialize’ identities, he concludes, but instead shift their attention to exposing the strategic practices deployed by those who do ‘essentialize’ identities.

‘Theoretical archaeology’ as it exists today is – as we all know – primarily a product of anglophone archaeology. It developed as a challenge to traditional archaeological thinking in the 1960s under the label ‘New Archaeology’ and it flourished in the late 1970s and 1980s with the productive confrontation of ‘processual’ and ‘postprocessual’ approaches. In these ‘wonderful years’ theoretical archaeology gained reputation and influence far beyond its early centres. All over Europe and beyond mainly younger archaeologists found it useful and fascinating to join these debates (Hodder 1991).

I recently attended a lecture here in Chicago given by Mkrtich Zardaryan, a colleague of mine from Armenia who specializes in the archaeology of early Armenian kingdoms during the post-Urartian 1st millennium B.C. During the question-and-answer period, a member of the audience posed the following question, which I paraphrase: ‘I recognize that we were defeated by the Urartians but what I want to know is where we came from before that? How did we come to that region and when?’ Zardaryan paused only briefly before asking, ‘Who do you mean by “we”?’ The audience member responded, ‘We Armenians, I am Armenian.” To which Zardaryan replied “So am I, but I wasn't there.”

It is always intriguing, and occasionally horrifying, to see what one has written refracted through another person's eyes. This is all the more so in academic writing, in which people often become identified with (or even fashion themselves into icons of) a given idea, and the act of refraction adds a political or positional hue. Meditating on this fact gives us a starting point for a brief exemplary consideration of agency.

Kristiansen's paper represents a typically stimulating and thoughtful response to some of the recent theoretical trends in archaeology, and it is equally characteristic of his now long-established ‘public intellectual’ role in European archaeology that he should want to bring his concerns into the arena of open debate and to explore common ground between different perspectives. I find myself in agreement with many of his conclusions, of course without accepting his view that they are largely incompatible with the Darwinian view that he criticizes. In what follows I want to respond to some of his criticisms and address what I see as some of his misconceptions about the nature of evolutionary approaches and their implications for understanding the human past.

This article examines the role of red deer antler ‘masks’ recovered from the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr in northern England. It explores the agency of animals and the type of agency attributable to objects made from parts of animals at the site. When humans use or wear objects that are made from animal parts, I argue that there are also important implications for the way in which the human body is conceived. This article goes on to explore the types of body produced from the taking on of objects made from animal remains and the implications that this has for the ways both humans and animals were perceived during the Mesolithic.

Is it possible to enter a dialogue across discursive boundaries? Some comments suggest that agents engaged in defining the discourse, or some section of it, tend to guard the gates of their discourse against hostile intrusions (critique). They therefore do not engage in dialogue. The comments by John Robb provide an example of the power of discursive constraints, while Stephen Shennan is willing to open the gates enough for a good discussion. Ulrich Veit provides a critical overview that situates my critique within a wider postprocessual/postmodern framework.

The grand houses and gardens of William of Orange (1650–1702) and his courtiers in Britain and the Netherlands are strongly influenced by the French style, itself associated with Louis XIV, who was actually William’s arch-rival. This paper explores that paradox by probing ideas of power and friendship in 17th-century court culture.

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.

This paper is an attempt to understand how people, in the daily practice of interacting with material culture, created, dealt with and interpreted complex and socially stressful historical processes. A 16th-century timber-framed burgher house, the Reformation and industrialization are the focus of attention. Today the house stands in a museum of cultural history in the south Scandinavian town of Lund, but it once was built in the nearby city of Malmö. Through studies of architecture and spatial analysis, as well as studies of alterations to the house and its surroundings, the biography of the house is followed back to its physical and mental origins. The architecture as well as changes in its appearance can be understood by the use of space as well as the concept of topophilia. The paper ends by relating results to contemporary sociological theories. It is argued that humans structure society through material culture, history (remembrance) and space.