This paper discusses the concept of contemporaneity as it is used in archaeology. In particular, two general usages are examined. The first concerns the idea of contemporaneity in the context of archaeological dating and chronology, the second relates to the characterization of the archaeological record as a contemporary phenomenon. In both cases, related concepts are explored, namely synchronism and anachronism respectively. The paper offers a critique of these conventional usages of the idea of contemporaneity and argues for an alternative, linking this with the concept of consociation, a term coined by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz in the early 20th century.

Urban archaeology in Scandinavia has long been dominated by a processual understanding of medieval urban development. The author proposes that the concept of urbanity in the sense of ‘urban living’ should replace the processual and functionalist-oriented concept of ‘urbanization’, and that instead focus should be directed towards social processes, practices and materiality. He perceives the emergence of urbanity in the Middle Ages in the light of the formation of specific urban patterns of practice that can be analysed with the aid of theoretical tools from recent social-practice theory. Against this background, the potential of recent social-practice theory is examined as a possible analytical tool in an urban archaeological approach to medieval urban communities. Through concepts such as interaction, event, leakage and creativity, the medieval urban landscape can be reformulated as a dynamic social space in which diverse everyday routines were intertwined in patterns, bundles and complexes.

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?

I welcome Axel Christophersen's effort to offer a new approach to the study of Scandinavian medieval urban communities, and his outline of an ‘urban archaeology of social practice’. His presentation of a theoretical framework and language offers many insights as to how archaeologists can analyse the way people constructed their social lives through practice. It is exciting to see studies that grapple with the complexities of everyday life in urban settings. This article makes a significant contribution in its explicit approach to a theory of practice that archaeologists can use to explore and describe social change. Christophersen draws heavily on the work of Shove, Pantzar and Watson as detailed in their 2012 book The dynamics of social practice. Everyday life and how it changes; I was unfamiliar with this work until reading this essay and I am impressed with the way this framework offers a language and a concrete approach to understanding how practices emerge, evolve and disappear. My goal here is not to revisit the details of this argument, but rather to push on some select issues raised in the paper. I first discuss the way that Christophersen frames his arguments against a processual archaeological approach, suggesting that his effort to provide an alternative might be unintentionally minimizing a more critical approach to everyday life. Next, I discuss the role and place of unintended consequences in Christophersen's argument. And finally I examine the way that Christophersen's approach might be more fully operationalized with data, providing some examples from my own work in eastern Africa.

Any reader expecting yet another contribution on the urbanization of Scandinavia will be misguided reading Axel Christophersen's contribution on ‘performing towns’. As the author makes very clear, he focuses on urbanity in the sense of urban social practice rather than on urbanization itself. The latter concept is straightforwardly dismissed as belonging to processual archaeology, and was trying to understand the town as a being structure and neglecting the dynamic role of its individual inhabitants as a ‘crucial historical driving force’ (p. 110). Christophersen also omits the classic discussion – actually besides Christianization one of the two most prominent topics in early medieval archaeology – on the designation and character of the earliest towns in the north, where early towns are merely defined as population centres ‘larger than a village and smaller than a city’ (p. 112). Instead, with the adoption of practice theory, Christophersen picks one heuristic approach from modern social theory (mentalism (subjectivistic/objectivistic), intersubjectivism, textualism and practice theory itself) for the analysis of social phenomena as routinized body/knowledge/things complexes (Reckwitz 2002, 257–58).

I warmly welcome Gavin Lucas's discussion of time and contemporaneity. I view this as another component of a sustained (and much-needed) investigation of the ontological character of archaeology. Gavin Lucas is presently at the forefront of this line of enquiry. His analysis is much more than an exploration of the ontology of archaeology. It is also a radical rethinking of the basis of the discipline. His analysis takes us back to ‘first principles’ and reveals unexpected and thought-provoking conclusions. Excitingly, his discussion touches upon the very basis of archaeological chronologies and archaeological stratigraphies, and forces us to think about them afresh. Worsaae, Montelius, Childe: these figures stalk the pages of elementary textbooks on archaeology, yet Lucas's analysis allows us not only to appreciate their analytical skills, but also to rethink and question them.

The contribution by Axel Christophersen aims to present new perspectives for the archaeology of medieval and post-medieval towns. In enlisting ‘social-practice theory’, the author would like to view the town as a dynamic, ever-changing network of social and cultural practices which is registered in the archaeological data. This perspective on the town lies, therefore, somewhere between structure-centred and agent-centred approaches. As such, Axel Christophersen's contribution can be seen as more comprehensive. I assess the piece also as a programmatic contribution to the development of theory in the apparently long-term conflict between ‘processual and postprocessual archaeology’. It should be said in advance that he was successful in this. At the same time, however, his contribution makes it clear that it is not easy to transfer or apply current cultural-studies concepts to historical periods and the materiality of archaeological data.

From my point of view, discussions of the content of the concept of time are always welcome in archaeology since the archaeological discourse on this topic has for many years been anchored in a quite simplified and axiomatic chronological approach. Discussions of other aspects of, and approaches towards, the concept of time have – with few exceptions – been neglected. It is therefore with pleasure that I have been presented with the opportunity to comment briefly on Gavin Lucas's article ‘Archaeology and contemporaneity’, which approaches the concept of contemporaneity in and of the archaeological record. I would like to start this comment in a rather unorthodox way with a brief quotation from the movie A Fish Called Wanda since I think this quotation encapsulates both my agreement with, and my critique of, the reasonings presented by Lucas:

In this paper, Axel Christophersen does three important things. First, he addresses the way in which the inhabitants of premodern cities created an urban ethos through their cumulative daily actions. Second, he provides the opportunity to address a long-standing definitional challenge in the study of cities by examining what it means to undergo a process of ‘urbanization’. Finally, he focuses our attention on medieval Scandinavia as a region that has had a considerable amount of archaeological research but with which many readers may not be familiar compared to other historical periods in Europe.

Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology. For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.

Lucas's discussion of contemporaneity makes an important contribution to archaeological understandings of chronology and dating and to broader debates about temporality. Extending his earlier work on time (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Lucas 2001; 2005), Lucas's central insight is that contemporaneity is not a function of a shared unit of time but of the specific relations through which objects are imbricated. The approach is likely to have profound implications for archaeological approaches to chronology. Whether or not it undermines the current preoccupation with absolute dating, it should certainly give renewed impetus to those branches of archaeology that make it possible to examine time as a matter of the specific material properties of artefacts. This is important, first, because it opens up the possibility of more nuanced empirical understanding of the very stuff of time (literally how it is materially manifest) and, second, because such empirical understandings enable conceptual refinement and extension of the categories through which time is understood. Of broader interest for non-archaeological readers are the ramifications of this discussion of contemporaneity for the ways in which time is investigated and conceptualized. Writing as an anthropologist, interested but with no expertise in archaeological dating, it is these latter considerations that I want to pursue in my comments, as these relate to contemporaneity and to the broader investigation of time.

In his illuminating article, Christophersen rethinks concepts in and approaches to the archaeological study of urban living, focusing especially on medieval urban towns in Scandinavia. He recruits various concepts – interaction, event, leakage and creativity – from a materially imbued social-practice theory to explore the urban landscapes as a complex of dynamic social spaces. Christophersen draws from scholars (Hodder 2012; Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 1996; Shove, Pantzar and Watson 2012) who emphasize that practice is routinized behaviour through which actions and events are performed, that practices are tied to a place and timescape, that social actors live with and interact with materials, and that materials may be the media of interaction with others. Following Hodder (2012), he emphasizes that the nature and quality of social and material relationships lead to the formation and stabilization of practices. In turn, this practice constitutes the town or city.

I would like to thank all my respondents for taking the time to read my paper and offer their critical and constructive feedback; in their varied responses, they have highlighted aspects which I had not considered, challenged me to elaborate on some of the less clear points I made and revealed ambiguities or even contradictions in how I have articulated the concept of contemporaneity. Rather than respond individually, I would like to try and answer what I see as the main points which collectively emerge from these comments.

I would like to thank the commenters for spending their time on critical and constructive responses to my paper ‘Performing towns’. The comments add valuable insights, knowledge, viewpoints and ideas, which significantly elucidate the possibilities as well as the limitations of approaching medieval urban communities from a social-practice theoretical perspective (SPT). The commenters have pointed at theoretical questions too superficially treated, the need for a more extensive knowledge base and, most importantly, the need for a broader discussion of the methodological and empirical consequences of an SPT approach in analysing everyday life in a Scandinavian urban community based on archaeological empirical data. Rather than giving individual feedback, I instead centre my reply around four topics that the commenters have raised and which relate closely to the paper's paramount issue and development potential.

The variability of Wessex hillfort form, use and development has long been noted, but not satisfactorily explained. This paper seeks to explain this variability and suggests that each hillfort may have had its own distinctive history of use, dependent upon the nature of the hillfort community – the people who visited, inhabited and used the hillfort. This paper starts by using grid–group analysis to define identities that can be found among modern communities – such as that of spectators of contemporary professional football clubs – which helps to frame our understanding of hillfort communities as constituted of households with differing motivations, loyalties and identification with the material environment. The variable trajectories of hillfort development are thus explained by the changing cultural relationships between Iron Age households and hillforts.

This interview discusses the comparison that Klejn draws between archaeology and forensic science. This is a comparison that has been made many times previously by many different archaeologists (and crime writers), but Klejn is unusual in that he explores the implications of their similarity. In his view it is archaeology rather than history that is most closely related to forensic science. The difference between archaeology and history is important because when this difference was ignored, in the Soviet Union, it was to the detriment of both disciplines. Hence Klejn's continued concern – that the difference between archaeology and history is still, to some extent, ignored. Other subjects discussed include Klejn's view of the role of theory in relation to practice, his criticisms of New Archaeology and postprocessual archaeology, typology, the underlying principles of archaeology, ethnogenesis and the history of archaeology. Of course, in an interview of this length not all of these subjects are covered in great depth but it is hoped that enough is said that the reader may appreciate something of the nature and originality of Klejn's views.

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.

This article responds to recent critiques of ‘symmetrical archaeology’. It addresses three common claims: (1) that symmetrical archaeology fails to see a difference between living and non-living entities, (2) that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for humans and other living things, (3) that symmetrical archaeology lacks any sincere ethical concern for things. This article demonstrates how these claims are based on common misunderstandings or misreadings, and offers further clarifications as to its perspective on ontology, ethics and things.

In her discussion article ‘Fluid consistencies. Material relationality in human engagements with water’, Veronica Strang argues that ‘water provides a useful focus for thinking about relationships between things and persons and between material properties and meanings’ (Strang 2014, 133, emphasis added). Water permeates organic things and flows and connects in a multi-scalar way. Therefore her article emphasizes ‘how material and social processes combine to provide both fluidity and consistency at every level of human–non-human engagement’ (ibid., 133). Ontologically speaking, the emphasis on fluid relations and processes makes her a relationist, i.e. objects emerge from their internal or external relations (Harman 2009). I will summarize my reactions to her article in three major points.

The cause of the Viking Age is one of our longest-lived debates. A combination of push and pull factors and a catalysing environment instigated the late 8th-century escalation in maritime activity that ultimately led to social, political and religious transformation. Recent discussions have focused on the macro level, with little consideration of the individual gains to be made by raiding. This paper argues that rewards consisted in more than portable wealth. In the flexible hierarchies of the Viking Age, those who took advantage of opportunities to enhance their social capital stood to gain significantly. The lure of the raid was thus more than booty; it was about winning and preserving power through the enchantment of travel and the doing of deeds. This provides an important correction to models that focus on the need for portable wealth; the act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself.