Oliver J. T. Harris

This paper combines microwear analysis with new materialism to invigorate our understanding of past material worlds at multiple scales of analysis. Just as the development of new biomolecular approaches at scale has revealed an archive for research, so a combination of critical theoretical approaches and specific empirical analyses can do the same for objects, including those that would be considered to lack traditional ideas of ‘good context’. Through the development of concepts of multiplicity, event and assemblage and their application to the study of 431 copper-alloy, ground stone and flint objects from Later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain, we open new ways of understanding the stories objects can tell us about the role they played in past worlds. In turn, this allows us to develop an understanding of the animate properties of things, or what can be termed a life proper to matter.

Where are the missing long barrows of eastern England? Do they exist as the original earthwork form of cropmark long enclosures? Or do these represent a distinct tradition? To explore this, geophysical surveys were carried out on the region’s rare surviving long barrows. Comparable signals suggest that most long enclosures are indeed likely to have been long barrows. Other morphological factors, however, differ from long barrows elsewhere and, coupled with evidence from excavation, suggest different origins and histories. Ditches may have been markedly secondary rather than primary features, for example, and other elements hint at Continental connections. However it originated, the form appears to have subsequently emerged as a symbol in its own right and been expanded to cursus dimensions.

What happens to the worlds that almost, but didn’t, happen in archaeology? When we excavate sites or carry out analyses, potential worlds are always coming into existence: the moment radiocarbon dates get remodelled, and a site jumps through time or swells or contracts; the news that a body that was sexed as female turns out to be male; or when something bagged as pottery turns out to be stone. Our traditional archaeological stories of the past ignore the moments when these other worlds existed, cloaking them in shadow. They aren’t what archaeology is supposed to be interested in; they’re what didn’t happen. This paper shines a light on these ‘not-necessarily-true pasts’, worlds that Deleuze (drawing on Leibniz) would call ‘incompossible’. Looking at these worlds as places that existed, if only as potential, if only for a moment, opens up all sorts of questions for us as archaeologists. Not least, what if these worlds are more interesting, more challenging, or more important than others which actually did exist? Could we make space for a more nomadic wandering through worlds that didn’t exist, but might have? What would this mean for a different, and ever more creative, form of archaeology?

Beginning with the contemporary migrant crises, this chapter uses archaeological thinking to reconsider movement in the past, present, and future. It asks why certain forms of human movement are celebrated while others are condemned, feared, and even hated. It draws upon a range of case studies, including missions in Vanuatu, Vikings in the Atlantic, and Neolithic transitions in Europe. It engages heavily with Jason De León’s (2015) research along the US-Mexico border, focusing specifically on the non-human things that migrants bring with them when attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert. As De León’s work shows, these things, including black water bottles and dark-colored clothing, often hinder attempted crossings. The chapter thinks through this research with explicit reference to assemblage theory and to posthumanist critiques of humanist “Man.” Altogether, these archaeological patterns and theoretical concepts provide crucial new ways of thinking about why some people are allowed to move freely while others are not, highlighting the crucial roles that non-humans play in these processes.

In this final chapter, the authors review the major themes of the book, arguing that archaeology is at its most powerful when it acts to create new ways of thinking about the past and the present. This chapter summarizes the previous nine chapters, placing special attention on the objects and theories highlighted in Chapters 2 through 9 and the lessons that they offer. The final part of the chapter deals with two related topics. The first of these is the role of humanist Man and the importance of being not only post-dualist and posthumanist, but also post-anthropocentric. In turn, this leads to a discussion of decolonization and the place of Indigenous thought in the arguments explored throughout the book. The authors conclude that archaeology has much to offer the worlds of today and tomorrow, both as a challenge to the ways that people think and as a way of working with—and understanding—the material world.

There can be little doubt that the entangled forces of capitalism and anthropocentrism have led the world into the climate crisis and extinction processes. The separation and elevation of our species above the rest of the world has allowed us to develop a dangerous and damaging relationship with planet Earth where humans exploit the natural world as a resource for their own ends. In this chapter, the authors explore how we can build a post-anthropocentric critique of the Anthropocene while still recognizing the key role some humans play in the climate crisis. The chapter argues for a reconceptualization of the natural world by drawing upon feminist and Indigenous thinking that seeks to address the long-standing association between women, nature, and the wild. Touching on debates about rewilding and a return to older ways of life, the authors argue for the importance of reconceptualizing humans as embedded in complex interspecies relationships situated in ecologies. The chapter explores the kinds of evidence and examples that archaeology can provide to help this process of reconceptualization. Instead of pinning hopes on technology, or a return to past lives, this chapter argues for the importance of attending to the world as archaeologists, specifically, by thinking about affect, and future relations with the world in a posthumanist manner. These approaches result in an ethics of care that might sustain the human species and others into the future. The chapter explores these orientations through a case study on waste, nuclear and otherwise.

Violence occupies a strange terrain in archaeology. It forms the celebrated heart of accounts of certain periods, while in other time periods, it is underplayed or ignored. Some authors worry that archaeologists romanticise history by ignoring violence, while others argue that an obsession with aggressive masculinity drives singular accounts of antiquity. In this chapter, the authors consider how alternative theoretical approaches open new ways of thinking about the causes and effects of violence in the past and what this might mean for today and tomorrow. How does violence emerge in specific historical ways? How does it work with and against non-humans? How is violence both structural and interpersonal? How does violence react to and draw upon potential as much as actual realities? To think through these challenges, the authors introduce the philosophical concepts of the virtual and the actual and consider case studies from European medieval iconoclasm, Indigenous critiques of archaeology, and nineteenth-century California. The chapter explores whether extending our understanding of violence to include non-humans risks undermining our ability to find specific humans culpable for their actions, proposing that archaeologists need to clearly distinguish between historical explanation, on the one hand, and blame, on the other.

How do archaeologists know that a burial dates to a particular period or that a certain group of people built a pyramid? This chapter looks at how archaeologists produce truths by working with multiple incomplete data sets and by weighing different possibilities against one another. The authors argue that these forms of archaeological reasoning have relevance in present-day concerns involving “post-truth” and “fake news” situations where there are multiple different sources and narratives on a given topic or where the authority of experts is called into question. Beginning with discussions and debates over the sex of a burial on the Isle of Man, the authors draw on studies of power, science and technology studies, and feminist and Indigenous approaches to truth, to argue that objectivity is never a straightforward concept. They show that archaeologists build their truths through multiple lines of evidence to create more secure ideas about the past than is possible through simple calls to authority and objectivity. For the authors, truth is always relational—emerging with the power-riven relations between people, concepts, events, and non-humans. They explore relational truth further through two case studies: one considers how forensic scientists use fingerprints, and the other considers debates about the age of the Sphinx. They conclude that the emergent relational truths that archaeologists build have under-explored value in the worlds of today and tomorrow.

Archaeology, as a discipline, was founded on its ability to group classes of artifacts together and to use these classifications to create notions of culture, development, and progress. This chapter explores how the archaeological obsession with typology has its roots in specific philosophical assumptions and simultaneously has helped constitute forms of thinking that also divide people into different types—for example, along lines of gender, sexuality, and race. These types tie us in knots, whether it is attempting to identify types of people in the past or wondering how types of artifacts change. Employing posthumanist and new materialist thinking about difference, and reframing it as a positive force in the world, this chapter rethinks the notion of typology. Drawing on case studies considering neurodiversity in human evolution and figurine production in Teotihuacan, the chapter highlights the potential of rethinking difference altogether. The chapter concludes by exploring how moving our typological thinking away from ideas of identity and essence towards the celebration of difference offers new ways of understanding contemporary issues in the present and future.

This chapter sets the stage for the book, outlining and contextualizing the key components of a theoretically engaged and future-oriented archaeology. It begins by emphasizing the role of politics and theory in this project, arguing that archaeological thought has something useful to contribute to the broader world. Although often relegated to the ivory tower and sometimes treated as an afterthought to the “real stuff” of archaeology, the authors argue that theory is ubiquitous, albeit often ignored, in all forms and phases of the archaeological process. In the second part of the chapter, the authors identify five different existing forms of future-oriented archaeology before outlining their theoretical inspirations: relational thinking, posthumanism, post-anthropocentrism, new materialism, and assemblage theory. The chapter concludes by setting out the structure for the rest of the book.