Chapter 1 introduces the fundamental tenets of perspectivism, its main characteristics and principles and the problems and challenges it poses for archaeology. A brief account of the genesis of perspectivism as a theory is provided, drawing principally on Viveiros de Castro’s writings and comparing it to other ontologies, particularly animism. The key perspectivist characteristics shared by many Amerindian populations are detailed. These include the quality internal to many entities of possessing a human soul, the importance of the body as the distinctive mark of subjects, seeing the world from a human point of view and predation as the model for human relationships. These fundamental cosmological premises derive from a set of underlying metaphysical principles with consequences for social practices, all of which are relevant for thinking about the archaeological record.

Chapter 7 takes up themes developed throughout the book and summarizes how focusing on the logic of perspectivism, an Amerindian ontology, enables the archaeological record to be read differently. Perspectivism, or any other ontology taken seriously as a theory, can challenge our conceptions of objects, things and human agency. Finally, having argued that the principal challenge presented by Perspectivism in Archaeology is to find ways to understand and think about particular archaeological records in the light of a local ontology, the chapter explores how perspectivism as theory can ultimately be seen as an experiment in decolonizing archaeological thinking and situating its practices.

Chapter 3 describes perspectivism’s world of objects and its concept of materiality, including the material implications of its notion of reality and the practices in which the material plays a key role. Assumptions about materiality in archaeology are revised by taking the conception of matter in perspectivism and putting it in dialogue with theories of matter in material culture studies. The critical question of material agency in perspectivism, including the possibility of object agency, is taken up. Objects and materiality, under certain circumstances and in specific relational contexts in perspectivism, affect humans and non-humans through a capacity that belongs to them. Two other agencies concerning objects can be identified: the first, proper to objects as things, is their capacity as intermediaries between humans and non-humans; the second is the agency of things as non-human objects rather than as inert things. Lacking a native concept of materiality proper to a case of study in the southern Andes, perspectivism provides a stand-in; its concept of objects as possessing their qualities, and instances in which they are in active relations with humans and other non-humans, enables the analysis of the ontological status of objects in the past.

Perspectivism as an anthropological theory on a par with academic theories is the subject of Chapter 2. The implications for archaeologyn are developed through a type of ‘thought experiment’, conceived as the thoughtful access to the experience of others. This thought experiment starts from a different way of encountering things: objects, after all, may be subjects, according to perspectivism. The consequences of such an experiment for understanding and interpreting the archaeological record are played through.

The chapter provides an overview of the manifestation of perspectivism in areas beyond the Amazon and archaeological cases from various times and places of the world, which exemplify how research has used perspectivism – from understanding it as a native ontology to using only some of its principles to understand the archaeological record or applying it as an anthropological theory to interpret the past from a locally situated approach. Two methodological issues become apparent in the chapter, how to translate other ontologies into our terms and how such a thought experiment can be put into practice when interpreting the archaeological record, whether perspectivist, animist, totemic or other.

Chapter 4 tests the theory through a perspectivist approach to the archaeological record of an Andean society of northern Argentina, the Aguada culture (600–1100 CE). The analysis focuses on the relationships of humans with animals, both domestic and wild, and with a particular class of ceramic objects from Aguada society. The evidence points to modes of relationship that bring into play constructions of otherness and an understanding of the world that accords with a perspectivist ontology. The capacity for transformation of animals and people expressed in ambiguous figures of wild felines and humans reinforces the idea of an unstable world where all is subject to movement, change and metamorphosis. In particular, the relationship between humans and domestic animals, especially the llama, is analysed in domestic contexts and cave paintings. An object-centred case study analyses ceramic models of human and animal heads and bodies made analogously; again, they are treated equally and include human attributes as if they were all entities of the same class. The ceramic evidence further supports the possibility that other species may also have been considered endowed with subjectivity, that is, non-human persons.