Is the ‘material’ or ‘ontological’ turn a major new paradigm in archaeological theory? Or is it another iteration of the cycle of piecemeal innovation which has created a very fragmented discipline? While there are insights from recent scholarship in this vein which are certainly important, this paper will err toward the latter view. Even though ‘symmetrical’ and other object-agency approaches are still growing in mainstream archaeological debate, much of the source literature upon which they draw has been around for several decades, and accumulated a fair amount of critique. At the very least, therefore, we need to learn from the way the materiality debate is playing out in other sub-fields. Beyond that, I will argue, we should go back to the turn before this one—the practice turn—and explore that road a bit more thoroughly, if we are to find the most useful approaches to develop in the future.

Posthumanist or new materialist tools, positions and conversations contain some useful ideas for archaeologists to think with, but others that I find deeply problematic. In this opinion piece, I organize my thoughts around three posthumanist ‘turns’ to objects and materials, relations and assemblages, and non-human animacy. I appreciate how some strands of Posthumanism can help us think more creatively and thoughtfully about relations between humans and non-humans, but I argue against non-anthropocentrism, flat ontology and symmetrical archaeology. Animacy and perspectivism can help remedy colonialist and late-stage capitalist destructive forces, but archaeologists should take care not simply to appropriate, patronize, or re-colonize non-western thinkers. Ultimately, I argue, we should not need continental philosophy to remind us to care about one other, all living creatures and the well-being of our shared planet. What is needed today are ethics, not convoluted turns toward objects.

In this paper, we analyse some of the issues associated with the posthumanist rejection of Humanism. First, we discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that New Materialism and the Ontological Turn have brought into archaeology in terms of understanding past ontologies and decolonizing archaeological thought. Then, focusing on the concept of agency, we reflect on how its use by some posthumanist authors risks turning it into an empty signifier, which can have ethical implications and limit archaeology's potential for social critique. The concept of things’ effectancy is presented as a valuable alternative to previous conceptualizations of ‘object agency’. While we acknowledge the heuristic potential of many posthumanist proposals, we believe that humanist perspectives should not be rejected altogether. Instead of creating rigid divides, we argue that elements of New Humanism, as recently defined by philosophical anthropology, can hold value when facing current societal challenges.

Domestic architecture played a central role in the identity of later prehistoric communities, particularly in creating lasting bonds between the living and the dead. Acting as a conduit of memory and legacy for successive generations of inhabitants, roundhouses straddled the divide between house and memorial. The exceptionally well preserved Late Iron Age settlement at Broxmouth in southeast Scotland demonstrates the potential of biographical approaches in understanding the central role that roundhouses played in fashioning the identity of successive households, and the role of objects in constructing genealogical narratives.

This article seeks to approach the famous tenth-century account of the burial of a chieftain of the Rus, narrated by the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan, in a new light. Placing focus on how gendered expectations have coloured the interpretation and subsequent archaeological use of this source, we argue that a new focus on the social agency of some of the central actors can open up alternative interpretations. Viewing the source in light of theories of human sacrifice in the Viking Age, we examine the promotion of culturally appropriate gendered roles, where women are often depicted as victims of male violence. In light of recent trends in theoretical approaches where gender is foregrounded, we perceive that a new focus on agency in such narratives can renew and rejuvenate important debates.

This paper examines the debate over whether Acheulean handaxe shape results from the intentional imposition of a priorly held mental template upon the lithic material substrate or, alternatively, whether a knapper's intentions related to shape ‘emerge’ through the engagement (in action) of human agency and material affordances. We suggest that imposition of form and emergence of form are not mutually exclusive, and use Lave and Wenger's concept of ‘communities of practice’ to knit these opposed views together to explain the consolidation of homogenous handaxe shape at Boxgrove, c. 500,000 years ago. Here we propose that the consistency in handaxe shape found at sites like Boxgrove is a consequence of the emergent actions of individual knappers being simultaneously constrained by the imposition of social norms. Social norms are referred to in action and are negotiated, understood, and adhered to at the wider group level. Therefore, we propose that contextualizing Acheulean handaxe manufacture within its wider social context will show that handaxe shape was both imposed and emergent, not one or the other.

This paper introduces a new art style, Singa Transitional, found painted onto a mountainside near the modern town of Singa in the north of Huánuco, Peru. This style was discovered during a recent regional survey of rock art in the Huánuco region that resulted in the documentation of paintings at more than 20 sites, the identification of their chronological contexts and an analysis of the resulting data for trends in changing social practices over nine millennia. I explore how the style emerged from both regional artistic trends in the medium and broader patterns evident in Andean material culture from multiple media at the time of its creation. I argue that the presence of Singa Transitional demonstrates that local peoples were engaged in broader social trends unfolding during the transition between the Early Horizon (800–200 bc) and the Early Intermediate Period (ad 0–800) in Peru. I propose that rock art placed in prominent places was considered saywa, a type of landscape feature that marked boundaries in and movement through landscapes. Singa Transitional saywas served to advertise the connection between local Andean people and their land and was a medium through which social changes were contested in the Andes.

This paper focuses on the new approach studying variations in city size and the impact that the Silk Road had on the structure of cities, demonstrated through the study of economic aspects of the Bukhara oasis. We use archaeological data, compare the ancient economy to modern ones, use modern economic theory and methods to understand ancient society, and use what we have learned about the ancient economy to understand modern economies better. In sum, we explore the past through the present and the latter through the former. Our main finding is the generation of models able to answer to the city-size distribution in different territories, comparing them between the past and the present. This study first revealed that, through Zipf's Law, we found similarities between modern post-Industrial Revolution and medieval economics. Secondly, we also found that in ancient times the structure of the city was linked with the local economic demand. We have demonstrated this through the study of cities along the Silk Road.

Based on the identification of modern dung remains on the TT123 tomb wall, I propose to think of TT123 in new ways, looking for other possible realities besides those produced by the processes of recognition, identification and categorization that dominate the archaeological interpretive process. The idea is to seek to understand TT123 from new traditions and new knowledge to produce something new. The idea is not to ask what TT123 means, but to understand how it works within the different possible encounters in which it is inserted. More than offering just another point of view in relation to those with epistemic privilege, I will try to demonstrate that other realities are possible and that such alternative realities can have political and material consequences. An alternative reality is not reality, it is only a potential reality.

This study proposes that monuments are technologies through which communities think. I draw on conceptual blending theory as articulated by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier to argue that monuments are material anchors for conceptual integration networks. The network model highlights that monuments are embedded in specific spatial and socio-historical contexts while also emphasizing that they function relationally by engaging the imaginations of communities. An enactivist understanding of these networks helps to explain the generative power of monuments as well as how they can become dynamic and polysemic. By proposing a cognitive scientific model for such relational qualities, this approach also has the advantage of making them more easily quantifiable. I present a test case of monumental installations from the Iron Age Levant (the ceremonial plaza of Karkamiš) to develop this approach and demonstrate its explanatory power. I contend that the theory and methods introduced here can make future accounts of monuments more precise while also opening up new avenues of research into monuments as a technology of motivated social cognition that is enacted on a community-scale.

Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult to resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale information that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided in supplementary information of aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns of ancestry change and genetic relatedness in the past by examining details relating to a >90 per cent shift in the genetic ancestry of populations who inhabited Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (c. 2450–1600 bc). While this outcome was certainly influenced by movements of communities carrying novel ancestries into Britain from continental Europe, it was unlikely to have been a simple, rapid process, potentially taking up to 16 generations, during which time there is evidence for the synchronous persistence of groups largely descended from the Neolithic populations. Insofar as genetic relationships can be assumed to have had social meaning, identification of genetic relatives in cemeteries suggests paternal relationships were important, but there is substantial variability in how genetic ties were referenced and little evidence for strict patrilocality or female exogamy.

Research on the social dimensions of climate change is increasingly focused on people's experiences, values and relations to the environment as a means to understand how people interpret and adapt to changes. However, a particular challenge has been making seemingly temporally and geographically distant climate change more immediate and local so as to prompt behavioural change. Environmental humanists, anthropologists and historians have tried to address the challenge through analysis of the experiences, philosophies and memories of weather. Archaeology, commonly preoccupied by hard science approaches to climate change, has largely been absent from this conversation. Nevertheless, with its insights into material outcomes of human experiences and relations, it can become integral to the discussion of ‘weathering’ climate change and historicizing weather. Here, drawing on the subtleties of responses by Ilchamus communities in Kenya and using a mix of historical and archaeological sources, we highlight their experiences of weather since the end of the Little Ice Age and explore the potential of building archaeologies of weather.

Despite growing strength in recent decades, an archaeology of childhood has often been overlooked by those studying prehistory. This is concerning because communities are enlivened by their children, and conversations with and about children often provide a critical arena for the discussion of aspects of societies which prehistorians are comfortable addressing, such as social structure, identity and personhood. Through an exploration of childhood as expressed in the Earlier Bronze Age burials from Ireland, this article demonstrates that neither written sources, artistic depictions nor toys are necessary to speak of children in the past. Indeed, an approach which tacks between scales reveals subtle trends in the treatment of children which speak to wider shared concerns and allows a reflection on the role of children in prehistory.

Medieval women are typically portrayed as secluded, passive agents within castle studies. Although the garden is regarded as associated with women there has been little exploration of this space within medieval archaeology. In this paper, a new methodological framework is used to demonstrate how female agency can be explored in the context of the lived experience of the medieval garden. In particular, this study adopts a novel approach by focusing on relict plants at some medieval castles in Britain and Ireland. Questions are asked about the curation of these plants and the associated social practices of elite women, including their expressions of material piety, during the later medieval period. This provides a way of questioning the ‘sacrality’ of medieval gardening which noblewomen arguably used as a devotional practice and as a means to further their own bodily agency through sympathetic medicine.

Signalling is a critical capacity in modern human cultures but it has often been difficult to identify and understand on lithic artefacts from pre-literate contexts. Often archaeologists have minimized the signalling role of lithic tools by arguing for strong form-function relationships that constrained signalling or else imposed ethnographic information on the archaeological patterns with the assumption they assist in defining the signalling carried out in prehistory. In this paper I present a case study for which it can be shown that function does not correlate with form and that the technology fell out of use 1000–1500 years ago. This means that neither presumptions of continuity in social practice nor reference to tool use provide strong explanations for the size, shape standardization and regional differentiation of Australian microliths. Sender-receiver signalling theory is harnessed to motivate a new synthesis of these microliths, and I demonstrate that not only were these artefacts probably key objects used in public signalling but also that sender-receiver frameworks enable us to infer details about the operation of the signalling system.

Indigenous hunter-gatherers view the world differently than do WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) societies. They depend—as in prehistoric times—on intimate relationships with elements such as animals, plants and stones for their successful adaptation and prosperity. The desire to maintain the perceived world-order and ensure the continued availability of whatever is necessary for human existence and well-being thus compelled equal efforts to please these other-than-human counterparts. Relationships of consumption and appreciation characterized human nature as early as the Lower Palaeolithic; the archaeological record reflects such ontological and cosmological conceptions to some extent. Central to my argument are elephants and handaxes, the two pre-eminent Lower Palaeolithic hallmarks of the Old World. I argue that proboscideans had a dual dietary and cosmological significance for early humans during Lower Paleolithic times. The persistent production and use of the ultimate megaherbivore processing tool, the handaxe, coupled with the conspicuous presence of handaxes made of elephant bones, serve as silent testimony for the elephant–handaxe ontological nexus. I will suggest that material culture is a product of people's relationships with the world. Early humans thus tailored their tool kits to the consumption and appreciation of specific animal taxa: in our case, the elephant in the handaxe.

Stories are important to all modern peoples, and this behaviour was no doubt also the case during the deep past. Consequently, it is important that archaeologists understand that artefacts made and discarded thousands of years ago were woven with stories by the peoples who produced them. In some regions of the world, these stories remain accessible by collaborating with the Traditional Owners of the lands from which they were recovered, while in others such an approach is impossible. Nevertheless, researchers need to remember that items carried meaning usually invisible to those outside communities—a principle often taught and cited, but possibly not fully appreciated. Here we tell the Yuin (coastal New South Wales, Australia) story of Gymea and her connection to fishing technologies. This story is told in order to demonstrate the depth of information that is not accessible to archaeologists if Indigenous collaborators are not sought out or available.

In this paper we discuss the universal selection of exceptional materials for tool making in prehistory. The interpretation suggested in the literature for these non-standard materials is usually limited to a general statement, considering possible aesthetic values or a general, mostly unexplained, symbolic meaning. We discuss the implications of viewing these materials as active agents and living vital beings in Palaeolithic archaeology as attested in indigenous hunter-gatherer communities all around the world. We suggest that the use of specific materials in the Palaeolithic was meaningful, and beyond its possible ‘symbolic’ meaning, it reflects deep familiarity and complex relations of early humans with the world surrounding them—humans and other-than-human persons (animals, plants, water and stones)—on which they were dependent. We discuss the perception of tools and the materials from which they are made as reflecting relationships, respectful behaviour and functionality from an ontological point of view. In this spirit, we suggest re-viewing materials as reflecting social, cosmological and ontological world-views of Palaeolithic humans, and looking beyond their economic, functional aspects, as did, perhaps, our ancestors themselves.