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?

Richard Bradley was critical of the hesitation he saw in British archaeology towards the use of the interpretive category ‘votive deposit’. The artefacts were instead interpreted in practical terms, as lost things or hidden treasures. This was published in 1990 in The passage of arms. Since then, or – as Garrow shows – since the mid-1980s, much has happened. Garrow has reacted against what he calls the hyperinterpretive turn in archaeology, where almost every patterning of material culture is regarded as intentional and symbolic. Instead, or as a complement, he wants to see a more developed discussion about material culture patterning as a result of everyday practices that just happen, without an attached symbolic meaning, but still varied and variable. So, is it time for the pendulum to swing back?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I should start by saying how refreshing it is to see Mycenaean pottery, a body of material discussed usually in terms of ever more refined and accurately dated typological sequences, being examined in its context and in the light of a sophisticated theoretical approach.

I would like to thank Michel Christol, John Creighton, Louise Revell and Peter Wells for their stimulating comments on the two articles under discussion by Greg Woolf and myself. Since Christol and Wells mainly confine themselves to remarks on the cultural changes in Interior Gaul, my reply will focus on Revell and Creighton's critical comments on my paper. The most provoking of these, to me, was the term ‘story-telling’, as used by Revell. It is not, on first thoughts, a desirable designation for articles with a certain theoretical ambition. After all, the term evokes associations with the narrative traditions of the ‘pre-theoretical’ phase of Roman archaeology (Laurence 2001). This kind of story-telling does not belong in a theoretical journal such as Archaeological dialogues.

This article explores the concept of authenticity of rock, place and stone tools in the Mesolithic. It uses results from a recent pXRF analysis on a selection of greenstone adzes predominantly originating from a delimited area on the western coast of south Norway as its point of departure. The results show that, although the majority of the 80 analysed adzes were made of greenstone from one specific source, eight clearly stemmed from local outcrops away from this one source area. The quantitative geochemical data are not presented in detail. Instead, the focus is on the social significance of these stone objects and their sources as indicated by the results. I argue that the anomalies demonstrate an acknowledged social value placed on stone from a dedicated source area; they represent deliberate attempts to manipulate perception and thus replicate a specific social affinity. Emphasizing perception and appearance, I consider adzes of green stone as assemblages of knowledge, skill, place and social memory – as desirable objects that enhanced a feeling of belonging and social identity – and I question whether this means that people in the Mesolithic recognized and acknowledged something as authentic.

I am happy to see that my essay has generated a lively discussion, and am most grateful to the respondents for their insightful contributions. Their comments express varying levels of agreement regarding the agency of things. Vernon Scarborough revisits anxieties about whether agency implies intentionality. Using the term ‘agency’ is indeed problematic if we assume that it entails sentience or intentionality (and I do not), but if we define it more precisely as a capacity to act (upon), it is possible to excise intentionality from the equation. This simultaneously allows us to acknowledge the agentive capacities of things without proposing or implying a form of faux animism. Anthropology has indeed drawn imaginatively on specifically cultural beliefs and knowledges, for example in composing more relational visions of human–other interactions than Western science tends to allow (see Strang 2006a), but this is not tantamount to assuming that things contain spiritual presence, or have ‘their own sense of agency’.

It is always intriguing, and occasionally horrifying, to see what one has written refracted through another person's eyes. This is all the more so in academic writing, in which people often become identified with (or even fashion themselves into icons of) a given idea, and the act of refraction adds a political or positional hue. Meditating on this fact gives us a starting point for a brief exemplary consideration of agency.

The retraction of the archaeological research perspective away from big questions and its fragmentation into national, local or even site-specific perspectives, as documented by Kristian Kristiansen, is by no means inexplicable. However, this closing of the archaeological mind can only be adequately understood and countered by viewing it in its wider historical context.

We thank the four commentators – Åsa Berggren, Barbara Helwing, Barbara Mills, and Allan Maca – for their thoughtfully critical comments and cannot help but feel encouraged by the passion displayed in their comments. To an extent underrealized in our initial formulation, the recording and interpretation of stratigraphy forms the jugular vein of archaeological practice. Although accused by some of the commentators of not offering anything new, creating a straw man, or ignoring artefacts, we note that our discussion of social stratigraphy encouraged reflexivity about archaeological practice in all four commentaries. Our initial pulling together of social practices that might be expressed in patterns of depositing and cutting also sparked extremely productive and creative dialogue regarding the documentation and interpretation of stratigraphy, a virtual (and highly successful) simulation that employed our proposed ‘toolkit’, and worrisome questions regarding the lack of fit between social theory and archaeological technique within the Americanist tradition. We address these topics, particularly in light of commentators' demonstration of the importance of reflexive practices within archaeology.

Mark Pluciennik has presented us with an excellent and original piece of research. His conclusion that the current categorisation of pre-industrial societies into hunter-gatherers and farmers is, effectively, a modern invention represents a continuation of his earlier investigations into this subject (1998; 2001). He supports this conclusion with very convincing arguments, and offers a historically contingent explanation in terms of the coalescence of several ideological and economic ‘currents’ which, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, led to the establishment of a categorical distinction between ‘savage hunter-gatherers’ and ‘civilised farmers’. In my comment, I would like to focus on two issues, broadly following the structure of his paper: (1) in general terms, are we really dealing with yet another ‘invented tradition’, spawned by the need for an ideological justification for the supremacy of western capitalist ideology and economic order? (2) How do we categorise early farming, fishing, hunting and gathering communities in the past, if at all?

I am sitting at my computer with a purring cat resting its head against the keyboard – a real animal–animal situation and a reciprocal relationship. For 15 years, my wife and I looked after horses that our children had left behind when they moved off into the world. The reason was that the horses belonged, in their own way, to the extended family. So I have no difficulty understanding what Overton and Hamilakis call ‘social zooarchaeology’. As a pet owner who has personally observed the individuality of animals – from hens to horses – I have no problem accepting their view that animals are individuals, something that my urban colleagues often question. When discussing with hunters who have specialized for many years in one type of hunting, they can describe how different individuals in flocks – for example, among red deer and moose – can behave. They spend many hours moving in the terrain and observe the different animal species, not to hunt them but to acquire further knowledge about the animals, sometimes to find out which animals should later be culled, but often only for the sheer pleasure of feeling a kind of relationship between themselves and the animals they follow.

I find myself largely in sympathy with what Rodney Harrison is trying to do. In applying an archaeological sensibility to the contemporary world, it becomes increasingly clear that the habitual tropes of archaeological practice either do not work, or need to be rethought and reconfigured. Equally, I think that this reassessment of archaeological theory and methodology can have a wider epistemological value for the discipline in general. The tropes of ruin and excavation are particularly salient in this context, in that they do not entirely work in the understanding of the contemporary. However, there are points at which I diverge from Harrison, particularly with respect to what we mean by modernity, and especially in terms of the limitations of his concern with surfaces.

Mark Pluciennik's paper offers an insightful review of those seventeenth-century philosophical issues that influence archaeological theory, even today. I am in broad agreement on the significance of the seventeenth century, though I prefer to see that century as a prelude to the eighteenth. To my mind, it is only in the eighteenth century that hunter-gatherers become ‘invented’ in a form that is fully recognisable in modern archaeological terms (Barnard 2002a). In this commentary I shall concentrate on that issue with reference to Pluciennik's ‘six inter-related factors’, commenting but briefly where appropriate on his attempt to ‘write across’ boundaries through his example of the interpretation of the mesolithic-neolithic transition.

Presumably it is because I work at Çatalhöyük, a site referred to in just about every publication on ritual in the prehistoric Near East, that I have been asked to respond to Verhoeven's stimulating and thoughtful paper. It is certainly welcome to see an approach to ritual practice in the prehistoric Near East from a comparative and anthropological perspective rather than one in thrall to the search for origins of much later religious practices - as the discoverer of Çatalhöyük, James Mellaart (1965a, 77) puts it, ‘a cult of the Mother Goddess, the basis of our civilization’. At Çatalhöyük the debate has been dominated by the discourse of the goddess to the extent that other interpretations have been excluded, often subconsciously, so strong is this metanarrative (Meskell 1995). For instance, recent virtual reality reconstructions still depict the buildings as austere, atmospheric shrines rather than busy, smoky, dirty places of domestic work and (often rather restricted) movement. In a paper cited by Verhoeven I suggested that in order to counter this we should concentrate less on the iconography of the Çatalhöyük images and more on the mode of their experience and consumption (Last 1998). It is the need for an explicitly contextual consideration of meaning that forms my main criticism of the present paper. While a lot of detail is presented about the deposits found in the Burnt Village, the citing of various parallels from sites not necessarily greatly connected in time and space ultimately leaves a sense of vagueness, particularly in attempting to assimilate the fascinating clay ‘monsters’ to a widespread Near Eastern ritual interest in horns. In this contribution I wish to discuss the problems of interpreting the unique, offer some thoughts on how to get at the meaning and significance of these objects, and conclude by mentioning a recently discovered deposit from Çatalhöyük which raises similar issues.

The rise of the nation state has had a major influence on the development of archaeology. Nation states today, however, differ from their 19th- and 20th-century equivalents, and they both impact upon and use archaeology in different ways. By looking outwards from an individual country within a collective nation state, I will explore the forms that this can take. From a Scotland-based perspective, I will look at how various borders and boundaries, and the aims and objectives of those responsible for them, affect archaeological work. As well as looking at institutional and administrative boundaries and their effect on archaeology, I will also explore how archaeological work, and the stories we produce, can either question or reinforce the nation state. Ultimately, archaeology can be used in a very different way now than in the 19th and 20th centuries: it is less about the specific stories and more about the process of uncovering them. Rather than telling a national story, archaeology can be used as an instrument to deliver on wider objectives.

An interview with Evžen Neustupný opens up a range of issues regarding the theory and history of archaeology and its development in Central Europe. His view of the discipline differs in many ways from that of current global trends. His ‘artefact archaeology’ inverts the concept of adaptation and highlights the role of artefacts in the creation of the human world. The interview also shows that post-war archaeology even to the east of the Iron Curtain followed the trajectory from culture-history paradigm to processualism and onwards. It also testifies to the situation in the social sciences under the Communist regime and the ambiguous role of Marxist philosophy.