The post-processual archaeology that dominated the scholarship of Anglo-American academics in the 1980s and 1990s now lies moribund, done in by an ‘ontological turn’ in the study of anthropology that began some 15 or 20 years ago. Anthropos is no longer the sole focal point; human beings no longer occupy the central place in our understanding of cultures and societies. As contemporary anthropologists have noted, human actions and ideas are not the lone contributors to the creation of a civilization's structures and objects or the development of societal forms. Other kinds of ‘life’, a variety of other non-human organisms contribute to their creation as well. They most notably include places and what we generally refer to as things: objects, constructions and materials. In effect, they include all the organic and non-organic components of the world about us. These are the ‘beings’, both animate and inanimate, that ‘make’ the world. Moreover, ‘things’ are no longer regarded as pure inert ‘objects’, only created or transformed by the will of humans or the force of their technology. The present transformations of the Anthropocene, which is producing climatic changes at a global scale, are pushing us to consider that ‘natural’ events—such as floods or hurricanes—may be the direct result of human actions and material ‘things’—such as the earth and the oceans—may be active agents of change. In other words, they are also the subjects of history.

To begin with, I would like to express my gratitude to Susan, Reinhard, Lena, Anna and Stefan for inviting me to participate in their workshop around the puzzling theme of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology. Having worked lately with assemblages of objects that, though very much in the spotlight of media, have hitherto fallen into the blind spot of archaeology, I immediately found it inviting to think in terms of Beiläufigkeit, the incidental and the by-passed. And, to no surprise—also given the concept's reluctance to give in fully to either translation or definition—the seminar and discussions in Berlin in April 2018 turned out extremely stimulating, leaving many glitches for further speculation.

The essays in this theme section demonstrate clearly the diversity and complexity of a topic that seems negligible in practice but emerges as important upon further reflection—the incidentalness of things. In this brief afterword, we highlight three of the themes addressed by all or most of the contributions, which we suggest are of particular relevance when considering the place of the incidental in our archaeological engagements.