Despite growing strength in recent decades, an archaeology of childhood has often been overlooked by those studying prehistory. This is concerning because communities are enlivened by their children, and conversations with and about children often provide a critical arena for the discussion of aspects of societies which prehistorians are comfortable addressing, such as social structure, identity and personhood. Through an exploration of childhood as expressed in the Earlier Bronze Age burials from Ireland, this article demonstrates that neither written sources, artistic depictions nor toys are necessary to speak of children in the past. Indeed, an approach which tacks between scales reveals subtle trends in the treatment of children which speak to wider shared concerns and allows a reflection on the role of children in prehistory.

Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult to resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale information that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided in supplementary information of aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns of ancestry change and genetic relatedness in the past by examining details relating to a >90 per cent shift in the genetic ancestry of populations who inhabited Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (c. 2450–1600 bc). While this outcome was certainly influenced by movements of communities carrying novel ancestries into Britain from continental Europe, it was unlikely to have been a simple, rapid process, potentially taking up to 16 generations, during which time there is evidence for the synchronous persistence of groups largely descended from the Neolithic populations. Insofar as genetic relationships can be assumed to have had social meaning, identification of genetic relatives in cemeteries suggests paternal relationships were important, but there is substantial variability in how genetic ties were referenced and little evidence for strict patrilocality or female exogamy.

This study proposes that monuments are technologies through which communities think. I draw on conceptual blending theory as articulated by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier to argue that monuments are material anchors for conceptual integration networks. The network model highlights that monuments are embedded in specific spatial and socio-historical contexts while also emphasizing that they function relationally by engaging the imaginations of communities. An enactivist understanding of these networks helps to explain the generative power of monuments as well as how they can become dynamic and polysemic. By proposing a cognitive scientific model for such relational qualities, this approach also has the advantage of making them more easily quantifiable. I present a test case of monumental installations from the Iron Age Levant (the ceremonial plaza of Karkamiš) to develop this approach and demonstrate its explanatory power. I contend that the theory and methods introduced here can make future accounts of monuments more precise while also opening up new avenues of research into monuments as a technology of motivated social cognition that is enacted on a community-scale.

The primitive race of Soay sheep from the St Kilda archipelago in northwest Scotland has played an important role in narratives of the history of domestic sheep. The Soays, apparently a ‘Bronze Age’ race of sheep, were probably confined to the precipitous isle of Soay as soon as ‘Iron Age’ sheep were introduced to Hirta, St Kilda's main island, owing to the competitive edge of the ferocious Soay rams over the new arrivals. In the 1880s, Pitt-Rivers, following his archaeozoological interests, was the first to keep Soays in his park, their epic journey from the edge of the Atlantic to southern England enabled by his acquaintance with their owner. In the early twentieth century, Soays featured in animal bone reports for archaeological sites, were kept in parks and involved in breeding experiments, particularly around Horsham, Sussex (where their owner lived), and in Edinburgh. The transfer of 107 Soays to Hirta in 1934 and 1935, after humans had evacuated St Kilda, was a remarkable feat, enabling the important long-running Soay Sheep Project. The historical exploitation of ‘feral’ Soay sheep by the islanders of St Kilda has significant cultural ramifications.

Research on the social dimensions of climate change is increasingly focused on people's experiences, values and relations to the environment as a means to understand how people interpret and adapt to changes. However, a particular challenge has been making seemingly temporally and geographically distant climate change more immediate and local so as to prompt behavioural change. Environmental humanists, anthropologists and historians have tried to address the challenge through analysis of the experiences, philosophies and memories of weather. Archaeology, commonly preoccupied by hard science approaches to climate change, has largely been absent from this conversation. Nevertheless, with its insights into material outcomes of human experiences and relations, it can become integral to the discussion of ‘weathering’ climate change and historicizing weather. Here, drawing on the subtleties of responses by Ilchamus communities in Kenya and using a mix of historical and archaeological sources, we highlight their experiences of weather since the end of the Little Ice Age and explore the potential of building archaeologies of weather.

Posthumanism is a growing field of interdisciplinary study that has emerged, principally in the last 20 years, as a broad church which seeks to reconceptualize human beings’ relationships with the world. At its heart, Posthumanism seeks to destabilize and question the category of ‘human’, which it sees as having previously been treated as transcendent and ahistorical. In its place, the figure of the posthuman aims to capture the complex and situated nature of our species’ existence, outside traditional dichotomies like culture and nature, mind and body, person and environment, and so on. From animal studies (e.g. Despret 2016; Wolfe 2009), via a rekindled attention to the material world (Coole & Frost 2010) to the cutting edge of quantum physics (Barad 2007), Posthumanism draws on a diverse range of inspiration (Ferrando 2019). This diversity also covers a significant internal dissonance and difference, with some posthumanists taking relational approaches, others arguing for the essential qualities of things, some focusing primarily on material things without humans and others calling for explicitly feminist investigations.

The ‘ontological turn’ is currently being touted in anthropology and other social sciences as a way of providing new insights into the global ecological crisis. This move encompasses a variety of posthumanist and New Materialist approaches including assemblage theory, vibrant matter, perspectivism and object-oriented ontology. Although distinctive, these approaches share an interest in animating things. Not surprisingly, archaeologists have taken notice of this new-found fascination with things and are participating in the ontological debates on our own terms. One can distinguish three main approaches: symmetrical archaeology, assemblage thinking and relational archaeologies. This paper will examine the nature of the ontological turn and offer a critical review of its use in archaeology.

In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of agency within Posthumanism and suggest that we may be better off thinking about affect. Third, we explore how the approach we advocate treats difference in new ways, not as a question of lack, or as difference ‘from’, but rather as a productive force in the world. Finally, we explore how Posthumanism allows us to re-position the role of the human in archaeology,

Well before the turn of the century, it had become clear that archaeology's aspiration to study the past was, true to the modern project, a pretext for a deeper desire to fabricate its objects. Material culture, materiality, the material past, material residues, heritage—the objects of interpretive (post-processual) archaeology could only be characterized as a continuation of this modern project. While finding symmetry was tied to an upheaval from this mode of disciplinary production, it may now be characterized as one cue among others in more agile archaeological theory. After briefly contrasting archaeological thought before and after the turn of the century, this article sketches out some of the core features of an object-oriented approach to things, including symmetry, irreduction, emergent causality, and strangeness, among others. It then outlines how, by finding our way alongside things, we might aspire to ever more creative work with archaeological objects and their pasts. Finally, it closes with a few words on Posthumanism.

Posthumanist or new materialist tools, positions and conversations contain some useful ideas for archaeologists to think with, but others that I find deeply problematic. In this opinion piece, I organize my thoughts around three posthumanist ‘turns’ to objects and materials, relations and assemblages, and non-human animacy. I appreciate how some strands of Posthumanism can help us think more creatively and thoughtfully about relations between humans and non-humans, but I argue against non-anthropocentrism, flat ontology and symmetrical archaeology. Animacy and perspectivism can help remedy colonialist and late-stage capitalist destructive forces, but archaeologists should take care not simply to appropriate, patronize, or re-colonize non-western thinkers. Ultimately, I argue, we should not need continental philosophy to remind us to care about one other, all living creatures and the well-being of our shared planet. What is needed today are ethics, not convoluted turns toward objects.

In archaeology, a Posthumanism has arisen from the ashes of post-modernism and declared that Marxism is dead in archaeology. Archaeological advocates of the posthumanist theory of Symmetrical Archaeology cherry-pick ideas to dismiss Marxism out of hand without considering the depth and nuances of different Marxist theories. They misrepresent the relational dialectic as oppositional thinking and ignore the fundamental dualism of their own polemic. They equate humans and things by arguing that they share a common ontology. A relational Marxism resolves the dualistic nature of their polemic and shows that things, animals and people may be studied relationally while still recognizing ontological differences. Marxism lives.

Is the ‘material’ or ‘ontological’ turn a major new paradigm in archaeological theory? Or is it another iteration of the cycle of piecemeal innovation which has created a very fragmented discipline? While there are insights from recent scholarship in this vein which are certainly important, this paper will err toward the latter view. Even though ‘symmetrical’ and other object-agency approaches are still growing in mainstream archaeological debate, much of the source literature upon which they draw has been around for several decades, and accumulated a fair amount of critique. At the very least, therefore, we need to learn from the way the materiality debate is playing out in other sub-fields. Beyond that, I will argue, we should go back to the turn before this one—the practice turn—and explore that road a bit more thoroughly, if we are to find the most useful approaches to develop in the future.

This essay argues for the diversity and promise of posthuman approaches in archaeology by dispelling blanket critiques, by differentiating between distinct lines of post-anthropocentric thought and by pointing to parallels between Posthumanism and collaborative Indigenous archaeologies. It begins by arguing that symmetrical archaeology is but one part of the diverse body of thought labelled ‘posthuman’. Next, it explores broader posthuman engagements with political issues relevant for collaborative Indigenous archaeologies, particularly concerns regarding under-represented groups in the field. Finally, it identifies flat ontologies as key components of posthuman approaches, clarifying what this term means for different lines of post-anthropocentric thought and briefly considering how the concept of flatness compares with Indigenous metaphysics.

Drawn by their foundation in fundamentally ‘otherwise’ posthuman ethical and moral worlds, archaeologists have in recent years employed a number of indigenous theories to interpret archaeological materials. In this paper I consider the potential of New Zealand Maori whakapapa, loosely and reductively translatable as genealogy or ancestry, to become a strand of general theory in archaeology. The qualities of whakapapa which I feel have particular potential are its moral and ethical embeddedness and its insistence on multiple forms of relating. Importantly, whakapapa has an accessible indigenous voice. There is an extensive published literature, both Maori and non-Maori, academic and general, discussing, interpreting and applying Maori social theory, including whakapapa. In addition, whakapapa remains today fundamental to everyday and ceremonial Maori life. It is lived. Employing whakapapa as archaeological theory does not, then, depend on a having a specific authoritative interpreter. Here I have taken recent work by installation artist Maureen Lander as a forum to outline the key principles of whakapapa and to inform my discussion of whakapapa as archaeological theory.

Critical feminist Posthumanism provides novel ways of dealing with bodies as material-discursive phenomena. As such, bodies come about, change and dissolve by re-workings of entangled relations. Such relationships are making human bodies more-than-human. Bodies can be understood as full of excesses—that will not be captured by, for example, gender or age categories alone—albeit occasionally materially shaped by them. Examples of such excessive relations are captured by DNA analysis or various isotope analyses—where diet as well as geological habitat gets imprinted into the body and become a part of the personhood—and can be discussed as the landscape within. This paper deals with some misunderstandings around Posthumanism, but also with how critical posthumanist feminist theory can breathe new life into archaeological gender studies and thereby also forge new relationships with the archaeological sciences.

Posthumanist approaches in archaeology have given plenty of focus to things in the last decade. This focus on things is a reaction to the over-anthropocentric view of social life advanced by postprocessual archaeologists. Whereas agency of more than 10 years ago was about how individuals expressed purpose and identity, agency today is about how both humans and non-human objects affect one another in a symmetrical manner. It seems without doubt that Posthumanism has contributed greatly to new understandings of social reality, but in the process it has also forced archaeologists to sacrifice many topics of interest, namely those involving consciousness and purpose. But is this sacrifice really necessary? This is one of the central problems of Posthumanism: it disallows a compromise of ideas from more conventional social theory (e.g. norms, purpose, practice) with those of posthumanist theory. This paper revisits John Searle's ‘Chinese Room’ and reiterates what this thought-experiment meant to understanding consciousness and purpose. The thought-experiment highlighted the differences between humans and machines and demonstrated that, even if a machine could replicate human purpose, it would still not be considered human because, unlike mechanical processes, human purpose is based on ethics. The thought-experiment was the first step in debunking the computational theory of mind. In light of this thought-experiment, the paper argues that, in a world where things interact with humans, we should think of agency in terms of ethics and keep the focus on humans.

In this paper, we analyse some of the issues associated with the posthumanist rejection of Humanism. First, we discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that New Materialism and the Ontological Turn have brought into archaeology in terms of understanding past ontologies and decolonizing archaeological thought. Then, focusing on the concept of agency, we reflect on how its use by some posthumanist authors risks turning it into an empty signifier, which can have ethical implications and limit archaeology's potential for social critique. The concept of things’ effectancy is presented as a valuable alternative to previous conceptualizations of ‘object agency’. While we acknowledge the heuristic potential of many posthumanist proposals, we believe that humanist perspectives should not be rejected altogether. Instead of creating rigid divides, we argue that elements of New Humanism, as recently defined by philosophical anthropology, can hold value when facing current societal challenges.