In their introduction to the discussion of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumstances under which we operate, conditioning our expectations of how to proceed. Things are often not conspicuously meaningful, but unobtrusive or ‘hiding in plain sight’ and bringing about unacknowledged effects (Alvis 2017, 212). This state of affairs has been recognized by both the phenomenological tradition and the more recent ‘new materialisms’, but what I want to suggest in this contribution is that these perspectives implicitly indicate that things can be ‘incidental’ in a variety of subtly different ways.

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.

There are some obvious differences between an archaeological and a historiographical approach to things. Put crudely, archaeologists study material ‘things’ while historians study texts. If historians are confronted with things, it is usually through descriptions of them (texts)—thus through the medium of the written word. In the introduction to this issue, the authors propose that the concept of Beiläufigkeit can help us ‘to discuss the conditions and processes that are responsible for the variable status of things in a world of objects’. They also propose that a way of approaching the subject is by studying things ‘that were made to be incidental’. One way of applying this to historical scholarship is to look at the way things appear—and disappear—in the historiographical narrative. If Beiläufigkeit is a fundamental phenomenon of socialization, as they suggest, then it is also a consequence of historical learning: we are taught when things are historically relevant and when they are not. It seems important to question this, especially if we think of historiography as part of a larger discourse that stabilizes and perpetuates hegemonic narratives—such as the narrative of the emergence of the modern West.

Archaeologists evince a strong tendency to impute significance to the material traces they study, a propensity that has been especially marked since the post-processual emphasis on meaning and that has taken on renewed vigour with the turn to materiality. But are there not situations in which things are rather incidental or insignificant? This set of essays emerged from a workshop held in Berlin in April 2018, in which a group of scholars was invited to discuss the place of the incidental in social life in general and in archaeology in particular. Rather than lengthy formal papers, we offer an introduction that presents a general set of reflections on the issue of the incidentalness of things, followed by essays that pursue particular directions raised by that introduction as well as our discussions in Berlin. It is our hope that these brief forays into a complex topic will stimulate further work on this subject.

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 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.

The site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey keeps fascinating archaeologists as it is being exposed. The excavation since 1995 has been accompanied by a lively discussion about the meaning and implications of its remarkable early Neolithic megalithic architecture, unprecedented in its monumentality, complexity and symbolic content. The building history and the chronological relations between the different structures (enclosures), however, remain in many ways a challenge and open to further analysis. The study presented here is an attempt to contribute in this direction by applying a preliminary architectural formal analysis in order to reconstruct aspects of the architectural design processes involved in the construction of the monumental enclosures. This is done under the premise that such investigation would shed light on the chaîne opératoire of the enclosures' construction and their history, thus enabling a fresh look as well as an evaluation of past suggestions regarding these structures and the people who built them. Indeed, the results of the analysis brought to light an underlying geometric pattern which offers a new understanding of the assemblage of architectural remains indicating that three of the stone-built large enclosures were planned and initially built as a single project.

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

The global distribution of cowrie shells (Monetaria annulus and Monetaria moneta) attests to their exchange over long distances and their value in diverse cultural contexts. In addition to their commodification, cowries functioned as adornment, ritual, art and in the elaboration of both living and ancestral beings in many settings through time. Examining the circulation and usage of cowries in these different contexts facilitates an exploration of the ways in which a global commodity may carry, lose and acquire value. An ethnographic review of cowrie use in the hitherto overlooked context of southern Africa suggests that particular qualities of the shell imbued it with culturally specific value. It is suggested that cowries, as part of divination sets, were active in divination because of their white colour and their origin in the (maritime) ancestral realm that anchored divination in notions of ancestry, fertility and healing. Furthermore, in certain contexts, cowries were conceived of as animate objects, metonymically active in ‘cooling’ and healing. These observations, set within a broader discussion relating to archaeological approaches to the accumulation of value, indicate the importance of exploring alternative ontologies in the biographies of global commodities, and reveal the potential of a biographical ontology of the ‘ancestral’.

This article explores the archaeology of place and memory from the standpoint of research on large cemeteries of chamber tombs cut out of the rock in southern Sicily. Burials of this kind were integral to the configuration of major settlements dating from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age (c. 2200–600 bc) and are a distinctive feature of Sicilian cultural landscapes. Rock-cut tombs at the four key sites of Castelluccio, Thapsos, Pantalica and Cassibile, representing successive phases of the Bronze and Iron Ages, are discussed in relation to terrain and layout. One aim is to identify recurrent principles of spatial organization, while drawing attention to settlements as structured environments with complex ritual geographies. Changes in tomb form are discussed with reference to variations in funerary practices over time. I conclude that cultural traditions in this region were sustained in part by the prominence of funerary architecture and by re-engagement with older sites in later periods through acts of re-use and remembrance.