Archaeology is often defined as the study of the past through material culture. As we enter the Anthropocene, however, the two parts of this definition increasingly diverge. In the Anthropocene the archaeological record ceases to be observed from a distance, but is something we exist within. It is not an assemblage of material culture, but a hyperobject of vast temporal and geographical scope, in which ecofacts increase in prominence and the role of artefacts recedes. This article examines the archaeological record as a hyperobject and argues for an expanded definition of archaeology for the future past. It argues for a shift from the study of objects towards a broader archaeology that includes immaterial Anthropocene culture.

This transversal and transilient thought-experiment explores the application and significance of Japanese animism for environmental education and environmental philosophy. Through the exploration of indigenous knowledge found in Japanese folklore and Japanese Buddhism, the thought-experiment offers a critique of a certain strand of contemporary fatalistic and nihilistic thinking regarding the Anthropocene. At its simplest it questions the trend toward mysticism and obfuscation in environmental education and demands a response to the environmental crisis precisely through reason and rationality. How shall this be undertaken? On one level, the hauntings of 妖怪 (Yōkai) and 幽霊 (Yūrei) in Japanese folklore shall act as a prism through which to understand the impact of the fantastical on the contemporary imagination, and on another level, I shall critique the fantastical as such to question the so-called inaccessibility of the hyperobject (Morton, 2014), which in the end leaves us despairingly passive and without the possibility of response. It is in the work of the Japanese philosopher 井上円了 (Inoue Enryō) and especially his defence of Western Enlightenment beliefs during Japan’s modernisation period (1868–1912) that a curious method and heuristic tool is found that may be used to address not only the problem of mystification in Japanese philosophy but also the obfuscation of the ecological object of recent Western thought. Seemingly sacrilegiously, it is through reason and at the limits of the rational that one may approach the hyperobject-in-itself, which is to say, the unfathomable as such.

The philosophical movement known as speculative realism (SR) has much in common with archaeology. As well as a shared concern with objects and with time, both have orientations towards an external reality that exists (or existed) outside the domain of human knowledge. This paper explores overlaps and commonalities in these two very different types of investigation. Proceeding from an archaeological perspective, it critically assesses the relevance of some of the key ideas of SR for archaeology, while also looking at ways in which these can be challenged, honed, adapted and transformed through encounters with archaeological objects. It asks the question, what can archaeology usefully contribute to the SR project?