This contribution responds to recent calls to establish a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that will assign agency both to humans and to things. My case is that living and non-living things should be distinguished, and for archaeology to be particularly concerned with the ways different qualities of humanness have been constituted in the symbiotic relationships between Homo sapiens and other living and non-living things.

Ingold starts his critique with a claim to find recent writing and talking about material culture essentially obscure and orientated to fashion. If one reads Ingold's own writing you will find plenty of references to philosophical figures such as Heidegger and to phenomenology. I find such writing often incomprehensible and obscure, and much of its contemporary use pretentious. I would hope a reader would find that my own recent books, on the cell phone (Horst and Miller 2006), materiality (Miller 2005) and the sari (Banerjee and Miller 2003), are written in just as straightforward a style as those of Ingold, which I much admire, both eschewing unnecessary jargon. Clearly we happen to find very different theories more or less congenial and comprehensible. But I do not think the implication of his opening remarks is a fair one, and I would hope that readers would judge this for themselves.

The Atlantic era marks a turbulent period in the history of Senegambia, defined by dramatic reconfigurations in local socio-economic conditions. These ‘global encounters’ have often been equated with the subjection of African societies to the whims of an expanding capitalist economy. While the long-term effects of the Atlantic economy cannot be denied, conventional histories have often prioritized macro-trends and generalized process, thus glossing the complex mosaic of experiences that constituted the African Atlantic. By contrast, a closer look at how different categories of objects were consumed and circulated over time may provide more nuanced assessments of the impact of global forces on coastal societies. This article examines how these material entanglements took place in the Siin (Senegal), by following the social trajectories of several classes of objects in space and time, and charting their enmeshment in regimes of value, patterns of action, forms of power and historical experience. Combining these empirical insights with a broader theoretical reflection, the paper attempts to draw out the implications of rethinking the historical space of the African Atlantic through a more intimate engagement with the historicities, contingencies and materialities that fashioned African historical experiences. While this shift in conceptual priorities inevitably creates new silences, I suggest that it also re-establishes Africans as cultural and historical subjects, firmly grounded in world history, and that this perspective can provide a point of departure for the production of alternative historical imaginations and subjectivities.

In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective middle-range heuristic tool that bridges deep theory and the data available to archaeologists. Our framework foregrounds vibrant things as opposed to static objects, and sympathetically articulates the current concepts of entanglement, correspondence and assemblage. To us an assemblage of practice is a dynamic gathering of corresponding things entangled through situated daily and eventful human practice. Once reassembled by comprehensively and critically marshalling all the evidentiary lines available to archaeologists today, the assemblage of practice becomes a powerful analytical tool that illuminates changes, continuities and transformations in human–thing entanglements, and not only their impacts on local and short-term sociocultural developments, but also their repercussions on phenomena of much larger spatiotemporal scale. Our goal is to present archaeologists with a pluralistic, integrative and evolving middle-range framework that pays close attention to terminological precision and theoretical clarity and is conceptually accessible and widely applicable.

This paper commends some ideas that Torill Christine Lindstrøm presented in this journal on the subject of ‘object agency’ (2015) and contends, against Tim Flohr Sørensen's reaction paper (2016), that object agency subsists on philosophically questionable premises. I argue that Sørensen relies on a definition of ‘agency’ which is too labile and virtually indistinguishable from ‘cause’. Moreover, certain premises that Sørensen supports lead to some contradictions with regard to social responsibility. Finally, I argue that object agency is part of a larger intellectual trend which perceives agency as a dynamic global force – and that a return to a more constrained understanding of agency would be of more benefit to archaeology.

Modern and ancient historians have long been willing to engage in the comparative analysis of ancient and modern slave-owning societies, yet archaeologists of both the Greek and Roman worlds have been far less willing to do the same. To the extent that they study slavery at all, they do so almost entirely within Graeco-Roman spatial and temporal confines. Taking Roman slavery as its starting point, this contribution attempts to remove some of the hurdles that archaeologists have placed in the way of a comparative analysis of slavery, and offers some suggestions for new ways forward.

This article offers an interpretation of the structure and meaning of a mortuary ritual at Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria. Remains of this funeral have been uncovered in the ‘Burnt Village’, a late neolithic settlement largely destroyed by fire. The possibly intentional and ritual burning of the settlement is related to the mortuary ritual; it is suggested that here we have evidence for an extended ‘death ritual’ ending, but also transforming, human and material life. Death, fire and abandonment, then, seem to have been closely related. Some examples suggest that these relations also existed at other neolithic sites in the Near East.

I would like to thank all four of my interlocutors for taking the trouble to comment on my text, and for the clarity and cogency of their contributions. They have forced me to think long and hard, and indeed to question my own conclusions. For me at least, and I hope also for readers of Archaeological dialogues, this has been a debate worth having, and it has been going on as much in my own mind as between myself and my critics.

Performative engagements with specific, culturally significant places were among the primary means of configuring landscapes in the ancient world. Ancient states often appropriated symbolic or ritual landscapes through commemorative ceremonies and building operations. These commemorative sites became event-places where state spectacles encountered and merged with local cult practices. The Early Iron Age inscriptions and reliefs carved on the cave walls of the Dibni Su sources at the site of Birkleyn in Eastern Turkey, known as the ‘Source of the Tigris’ monuments, present a compelling paradigm for such spatial practices. Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) carved ‘images of kingship’ and accompanying royal inscriptions at this impressive site in a remote but politically contested region. This important commemorative event was represented in detail on Shalmaneser III's bronze repoussé bands from Imgul-Enlil (Tell Balawat) as well as in his annalistic texts, rearticulating the performance of the place on public monuments in Assyrian urban contexts. This paper approaches the making of the Source of the Tigris monuments as a complex performative place-event. The effect was to reconfigure a socially significant, mytho-poetic landscape into a landscape of commemoration and cult practice, illustrating Assyrian rhetorics of kingship. These rhetorics were maintained by articulate gestures of inscription that appropriated an already symbolically charged landscape in a liminal territory and made it durable through site-specific spatial practices and narrative representations.

In August 1992, the American multinational Coca Cola launched a n ew advertising campaign in Italy. The advertisement used, showed the Greek Parthenon. The commercial artist had replaced the temple's original fluted baseless columns with columns resembling the world's most famous bottle. Whereas it took the Greeks almost 180 years to launch a protest against the theft of the sculptures of the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, their reaction was now of another order. The tasteless representation infuriated the national archaeological authorities. As these were preparing to sue, Coca Cola offered its excuses to the Greek government.

How ‘progressive’ have archaeologists been in the progress made on gender studies during the 1990s? All archaeologists, male and female, must accept the need to theorize gender, and to rethink accordingly their traditional research priorities. Feminist theory is essential for the study of gender in archaeology because it has paid closer attention to gender as an analytical category than any other body of theory, and at the same time made important links within and between disciplines. Most male archaeologists have been recalcitrant if not loathe to focus on gender as a key concept in archaeological theory, even though writers treating ‘masculinity’ in the social sciences and literary theory have been active in this field for over a decade. This study discusses masculinist reactions to feminism and suggests that ‘masculinist’ approaches are derivative of feminist scholarship. Perhaps the most important contribution of masculinist scholarship has been to insist upon the existence of divergent, multiple masculinities, and by extension femininities, as opposed to binary oppositions or ideal types. The study of men and masculinities, of women and femininities, involves consideration of social and gender issues that should not become the exclusive domain of either women or men – the goal is an archaeology informed by feminism, one that looks critically at theories of human action and allows archaeological data to challenge existing social theory.

Is there anything coherently ‘European’ about a European archaeology – or rather, about the ‘archaeology of Europe’ – or is it simply a modern political construct with no meaning in the ancient past? This paper analyses European archaeology through a historical perspective, tracing developments in the areas of archaeological conservation (heritage), thinking (theory/interpretations) and publication and teaching. It critically examines a perceived trend in archaeology from a national towards a European framework, and concludes instead that local and regional frameworks have become stronger in all three areas. To move forward, we should use our understanding of the relationship between ideology, politics and archaeology to promote a research agenda that actively contributes to the formation of critical knowledge about the conditions for heritage and research in contemporary society. There is scope for an archaeology that addresses fundamental historical problems and long-term histories of the various geographically and culturally interlinked regions of Europe.

This essay explores the role of commensuration – the mechanisms that render equitable and negotiable different orders of value – in the production of society and history. While equilibration, standardization and conversion are implicated in most theories of money and commodification, their nature as social processes has not been adequately specified, above all in the construction of universalizing ideologies and modernist political and economic regimes. We pursue these processes in relation to one African theatre, examining the ways in which different regimes of value, brought up against one another in the encounter between the southern Tswana peoples and European colonizers, became the subject of both conflict and complex mediation. Cows, coin and contracts – which had the capacity to construct and negate difference – soon were invested here with magical qualities. But colonized peoples were also sensitive to the capacity of such currencies to enable or impede convertibility and the forms of abstraction and incorporation they permit. Which is why, in South Africa and elsewhere, those currencies often became metonymic of the contestations of value on which colonial struggles, tout court, were played out.

This paper explores the phenomenon of Iron Age bog bodies which are currently the subject of competing claims over the respectful treatment of the ancient dead. It reviews the problems associated with their discovery, identifies why they attract such attention, and critiques both traditional interpretations of bog bodies and methods of display. The paper defends their archaeological analysis, arguing that this process can radically transform our understanding of past communities: their lifeways and world views. Using British and Irish examples, it discusses how intimate emotions and social bonds are constructed between bog bodies, on the one hand, and, on the other, the professionals and public who engage with them. It contends that a more reflexive approach which foregrounds these complex relationships might help address concerns about the public display of human remains in general. It concludes by advocating broad processes of consultation as well as a contextual approach to the interpretation and display of future bog bodies.

An increasing number of individual archaeologists, archaeological organizations and institutions are using social media platforms for professional discussion and networking, research, public outreach and community archaeology. Proponents of social media have particularly pointed towards their potential for transforming the means of networking and communication in archaeology, and challenging traditional disciplinary expertise as archaeologists engage with more diverse and active online publics. This article provides a theoretically informed critical discussion, pointing towards the complex barriers to equal Internet access and usage, which challenge the ability of archaeologists to use social media as a tool to democratize the discipline. It concludes that, in many cases, social media appear to have reinforced archaeological authority at the expense of genuinely decentred engagement or collaboration. The article acts as a challenge to encourage further debate and empirically informed research in this emerging area of archaeological practice.

Time, Culture and Identity is a book which attempts to write about prehistory while at the same time meditating on what that writing involves. It is composed of two sections, one of which addresses a number of philosophical issues, while the other presents a series of case studies. This structure might easily give the impression that I first formulated a theoretical position and then proceeded to impose it onto particular sets of evidence. In practice, the book was written in a much less linear fashion, tacking back and forth between conceptual problems which were set up by the evidence and onslaughts upon the material which were suggested by the developing fabric of ideas. In a sense it represents a very personal (and perhaps rather indulgent) piece of work, since it is the outcome of my own process of working through a series of problems which appeared to me to be unresolved when I had finished my first book, Rethinking the Neolithic (Thomas 1991). Writing is thinking, and my hope is that others will find this record of my own learning process instructive.

This paper presents a dialogue about the question of symmetry and asymmetry in human–thing relations, and the links between such asymmetries and those encountered in power relations amongst humans. The conversation discusses various issues, such as whether symmetry is possible in any kind of relation, how one defines asymmetry, whether there are different kinds of asymmetry, and how inequality between humans is related to the asymmetries in human–thing entanglements. The last issue is considered especially important in light of the various critiques that have been levelled at actor networks and other relational materialisms for their weakened political stance insofar as sources of inequality and injustice are so widely distributed that they become, in effect, apolitical.

Mortuary practices could vary almost indefinitely in the Viking Age. Within a theoretical framework of ritualization and architectural philosophy, this article explores how doors and thresholds were used in mortuary practice and ritual behaviour. The door is a deep metaphor for transition, transformation and liminality. It is argued that Viking Age people built ‘doors to the dead’ of various types, such as freestanding portals, causewayed ring-ditches or thresholds to grave mounds; or on occasion even buried their dead in the doorway. The paper proposes that the ritualized doors functioned in three ways: they created connections between the dead and the living; they constituted boundaries and thresholds that could possibly be controlled; and they formed between-spaces, expressing liminality and, conceivably, deviance. Ultimately, the paper underlines the profound impact of domestic architecture on mortuary practice and ritual behaviour in the Viking Age.

Archaeologists’ excavation practices vary significantly from country to country and site to site. But variation in the most fundamental, ‘common-sense’ excavation practices is ‘black-boxed’ - it is not discussed outside casual, informal contexts, and is treated as having no effect on higher-level interpretation. These practices can, however, be a source of conflict when archaeologists from different communities of practice work together. In this paper, I explore what variation in excavation methodology reveals about the nature of archaeological knowledge itself. By comparing methodologies and the organization of labour on British and Andean excavations, I argue that archaeologists in different communities of practice have divergent understandings of what the object of archaeological investigation is, and of how it can be known, and by whom. This results in contrasting understandings of the nature of material/archaeological objects, as well as contrasting conceptualizations of excavation as an ‘expert’ practice – one requiring skills, knowledge and bodily practices that are specific to trained archaeologists. Situating these concerns in historical and ethnographic context, this paper suggests that archaeological excavation is, in fact, a far more complex, nuanced and variable practice than the lack of attention paid to it implies.