This paper asks whether archaeologists might profitably re-engage with the pre-Enlightenment doctrines of elemental philosophy and humoral theory as paradigms more relevant for archaeological interpretation in certain contexts than much of current theoretical discourse. These ancient cosmologies are here reconceptualized to suggest ways in which archaeologists might provide fairer representations of past cultures, through the readoption of ideas that they understood rather than through the imposition of more recent and thus anachronistic frames of analytical reference. In four brief case studies, the paper seeks to show how the foregrounding of elemental and humoral theories might lead to new ways of thinking about the study and interpretation of the landscape, material culture, consumption and the senses. Through them, the paper looks to encourage reflection on whether elemental and humoral theories represent the intellectual paradigms that archaeologists have been striving to invent since the discipline's creation.

Archaeologists often take stratigraphy for granted, using it for building chronologies, recognizing various natural and cultural formation processes, and understanding relations between features and settlements. But for the last few decades there has been a subtle shift in the way that we approach stratigraphy – in terms of both the kinds of techniques that can be applied (residue analyses, micromorphology, Harris matrices and so on) and the interpretive frameworks that can be employed. Perhaps it is not stratigraphy that we are talking about per se, but rather depositional practices – the many ways in which people make and alter archaeological deposits – in addition to the different interpretive frameworks that we apply to these physical accumulations.

In this essay I scrutinize the non-anthropocentric discourses used by the social sciences and humanities narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene. Although not always predominant within the academic Anthropocene debate, such discursive strands remain politically and ethically inspiring and influential in that debate and for the public discourse concerning the epoch. I stress that these discourses inherit the hope for human progress that characterizes critical theory of the Frankfurt school, i.e. ‘critical hope’, a type of hope that renders the non-anthropocentric discourses self-contradictory. Even when they manage to escape the hold of critical hope, these discourses, I argue, suffer from ethical and political failings due to their inherent lack of focus on human–human relations and largely ahistorical nature. I conclude the essay by advocating an Anthropocene archaeology that remains critical of and learns from the ethical and political shortcomings of non-anthropocentric perspectives and making a related call for a slow archaeology of the Anthropocene.

In 1999 the Irish Post-Medieval Archaeology Group (IPMAG) was established by a diverse group of Northern Ireland archaeologists and heritage professionals, drawn from the commercial, government, museum and university sectors. The aims of the organization, discussed at length at the group's inaugural conference held in Belfast in February of 2001, include (one) undertaking initiatives to raise the profile of post-medieval archaeology within the whole of Ireland, (two) fostering greater contacts between those individuals engaged in researching the archaeology, history and culture of post-1550 Ireland and (three) lobbying for increased academic attention to be paid to the period within Irish universities. That the organization has made progress in approaching these aims is clear, as acknowledged by Tadhg O'Keeffe: ‘the archaeological study of the “historical” (post-fifteenth-century) past is now a big deal in Ireland’. IPMAG conferences have been held in conjunction with academic institutions (Queen's University, Belfast, 2001; Trinity College, Dublin, 2002; University of Ulster, 2004; University College, Cork, 2006), public institutions (Ulster Museum, 2003), and commercial archaeology companies (Aegis Archaeology, Ltd, Limerick, 2005).

Steve Roskams (2001, 267–70) has challenged archaeologists to theorize excavation practices and Patricia McAnany and Ian Hodder have responded in a cogent manner. They draw the most fundamental of archaeology's field methods – stratigraphy – into the light of social theory. The product is ‘social stratigraphy’ and the authors offer an array of interpretive schemes and processes through which social stratigraphic approaches might be considered and developed. McAnany and Hodder want us to think beyond the geological facets of stratigraphy, including our section drawings, photographs, matrices, phase designations, chronologies, thin sections and artefacts. They suggest we strive to do more: to discern and interpret social meanings, patterns and practices in every deposit, cut, pit, erasure, concealment, return and episodic rebuilding. The great bulk of their discussion focuses on the study of past contexts, though in closing they address how strata and stratigraphy can be altered or used to influence present-day social and political contexts. It is here – that is, in their concluding comments – that their emphasis on memory (and forgetting), repeated like an incantation throughout the paper, comes full circle.

Matthew Johnson's essay is somewhat more conservative than I had anticipated and I am happy about that. He promotes a scientific archaeology in the sense that he promotes the kind of knowledge that can be established through verifiability. Then he takes what I see to be an increasingly frequent approach to the use of the phenomenological and hermeneutic position in archaeology. His positions are relatively gentle on these matters and are an attempt to seek out a way to utilize archaeology as a superior political tool when it is needed, as it most assuredly is, from place to place in the world. He remains attuned to the established fact that the definitions of many facts are themselves a function of political contexts. I am not sure yet that Matthew Johnson's brief essay succeeds with all the links he intends to make, but I think that a number of scholars are headed in this direction.

Harris and Sørensen's critique of the archaeological inattention to emotion and their recognition of the material mediation of affect bring to the fore perennial epistemological problems defining the broader archaeological enterprise. The immediate citation of the long-discredited Hawkesian ladder of inference challenges the assumption that past emotional states are unrecoverable from archaeological contexts, just as an earlier generation of archaeologists rejected processual theory that meaning, conceptual schemas and symbolism fell beyond the pale of scientific inference. Of course, Hawkes was not a materialist in the strict sense of the term, and he recognized that value systems transcended the epiphenomenal and played a vital role in structuring social practice and shaping historical process. It was his contention, however, that conceptual and symbolic schemes and their role in social reproduction were simply too complex to be read satisfactorily from material remains (Hawkes 1954; see Fogelin 2008, 129–30). He wrote that ‘there is nothing in North American ecology . . . to compel either Iroquois institutions . . . or the constitution of the United States’ (Hawkes 1954, 163). To be sure, Hawkes probably would not have denied that moved to move is intrinsic to the human condition and that affective dispositions were a force in individual experiences and the collective fortunes and self-representations of past communities. At the same time, he probably gave little consideration to the dialectical interdependence of the material world and emotion, a relationship that has captured the imagination of recent scholars. Hawkes would no doubt have scoffed at the notion that emotion as ontological problem, cultural construct or variable of social interaction is amenable to archaeological interpretation.

I thank the respondents for their quite diverse reactions to my paper. Gutmann begins by noting that any engagement with feminist theory in archaeology needs to reassure the world of gender studies that there is no intention of undermining the ‘foundational premises’ of a feminist archaeology; by so doing we would jeopardize its explanatory power and damage its political potential to critique gender inequality. Throughout my paper, I was at pains to emphasize the feminist underpinnings of masculinist theory, and at the same time to note that we must ensure that ‘reactionary masculinities’ like those of Iron John must be differentiated from the concept of masculinity as understood by sociologists, sociocultural anthropologists, psychologists and others. Gutmann succinctly expands but equally makes my point by noting that the contemporary study of men and masculinities reveals a ‘nuanced attempt to cope with structural and ideological contradictions involved with masculinity through time and space’, and that notions of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities have been used very effectively ‘in studying various contradictions relating to ethnicity, race, sexual preferences, and even platonic friendship as they manifest themselves in male-male relations.’ These are not masculinist reactions against feminist theory or a feminist archeology but rather responses to them, intended to expand the dialogue and engage all archaeologists in the pursuit of a gendered archaeology.

Suggesting that archaeological theory both exists and does not at the same time is a wise move, so long as it opens the possibility for a range of answers and dialogue. In that respect I find myself in an agreement with Johnson, given that he takes up a piece of the theoretical minefield, and leaves plenty for others to engage with. Rather than debate his argument per se, therefore, I will endeavour to enlarge his essay in ways that will both contrast my position with his and further a greater conversation.

Van Wijngaarden offers an important and instructive attempt to re-situate the study of Bronze Age ‘imports’ away from the dominance of prestige commodity studies, using the particularly thorny example of Mycenaean ceramics. Traditional approaches, as van Wijngaarden points out, have tended to assign a uniformity of value and unchallenged prestige status to all Mycenaean imports. The reason for this reflexive recourse to prestige in the presence of Mycenaean pottery has more perhaps to do with the evolution of the discipline of archaeology in the East Mediterranean and a desire to find a precursor to the highly evolved city states of the Classical world than to any objective assessment of the objects themselves. Analytical frameworks which contextualize imports and exotica into the greater scheme of a robust and diverse material culture are critical steps in the development of the theoretical evolution of the study of the Late Bonze Age. However, van Wijngaarden's efforts also illustrate the methodological challenges encountered when isolating a single subcategory of artefact for examination. The blame lies not so much with van Wijngaarden's analysis as with the problem of what can be said to constitute value in a prehistoric context and how value, once defined, can be kept separate from other interrelated concepts.

How did people feed themselves in the past? Archaeologists have been asking this question since the early years of the discipline and it remains an important topic to the present day. Perhaps not surprisingly, eating and drinking are among the most essential activities for human survival. Moreover, even though we do not frequently excavate food in a strict sense of the term, a great deal of the artefacts that we find are directly or indirectly related to food, its procurement and production, preparation and consumption and its waste products. In recent years, archaeologists increasingly recognise the cultural and social significance of food (and the animals and plant from which it stems). In this introduction to a special section on the archaeology of food and foodways I would like to reflect briefly on the potential of food archaeologies for studying diverse aspects of life as well as social processes in past societies.

Knapp's paper deserves recognition not only for its contribution to the burgeoning discourse on gender archaeology, but for enriching discussion with a masculinist vocabulary drawn from wider sources within and outside the academy. Despite the well-intentioned and sympathetic discussion, however, one must ask whether we are any better informed from the paper as to what a masculinist approach to archaeology might look like.

I was trained as a processual archaeologist in the 1960s, and as a result my interests and research, along with the vocabulary I have used to express these, have followed a different trajectory from those paths that have emerged out of what we once called postprocessual archaeology. This is not to say that we do not have common beacons. I believe we certainly do. To this end, I am writing this dialogue with Harrison's piece to rename the ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ as ‘archaeology in and of the present’ and ‘for the future’. I like the new name for contemporary past archaeology, but archaeologists in and of the present should not forget about their own past.

The discussion of coin finds in the European periphery and the light they throw on the nature of the Roman socio-economic complex is the most interesting part of this paper for me, because it is somewhat analogous to the relations of western Europe with west Africa in the 19th and early colonial 20th centuries. But this commentary steps over into the vast field of classical archaeology that is unfamiliar to me and instead of pursuing this analogy I find it more comfortable to make a few more general remarks on the use of social anthropological ideas and questions of method.

Hofmann and Stockhammer provide an exhaustive and informative overview of German-speaking archaeology (GSA) seen through a set of theoretical lenses that, as they readily admit, may leave other equally important trends in the dark. I shall therefore provide a slightly different perspective, and highlight some interpretive trends that received less coverage in their exposition. Again, it is based on my selective reading of German archaeology, which includes only part of the bibliography of Hofmann and Stockhammer, but then some other works as well. In conclusion I shall discuss what I consider one of the major obstacles for GSA to reach theoretical maturity and a wider international impact.

In this wonderfully rich and thought-provoking article, Gavin Lucas exhorts us to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary. This is to attend to the shifting interplay between past, present and future, undertaken through a focus on the relations between objects, in contrast to the impoverished concern with succession and order that a notion of chronological contemporaneity imposes. His paper undertakes the useful task of disentangling concepts around time and contemporaneity, and raises a number of interesting questions. Here, I would like to discuss two of the most compelling contributions of Lucas's paper: the foregrounding of modes of persistence and of consociality, both of which I would like to explore by reflecting on my experiences of historical narrative and alternate temporalities in the history of highland Madagascar. The issue of persistence introduces the question of historical privilege – that is, how do some things persist while others fall to dust? And how is that persistence recognized and maintained? This same question of recognition (and misrecognition) is also at the heart of consociality; how are consociates acknowledged as contemporaneous, and what room is there for refusal?

Veronica Strang's ‘Fluid consistences. Material relationality in human engagements with water’ is a highly welcome theoretical discussion regarding the role of water in society and social theories. As a discussion article, Strang's piece opens up a number of fields of enquiry where water empirically and theoretically challenges current theories, but given the limitations of an article there are still other spheres where water may contest dominant theories, and I will briefly address some of these aspects with an emphasis on holy water.