ABSTRACT
Our understanding of archaeological evidence has been constituted by the notion that matter is a dead substance that bears qualities, and that artefacts are matter that has been given form by human action. However, I want to emphasise that this should not be seen as an entirely negative outcome. For while our modern understanding of matter encourages us to think about the traces of the past in ways that are anachronistic and objectifying, if we were not inclined to think of those traces as evidence, there might be no archaeology at all. So this is a double bind, but it is one that is enabling as well as constraining. The existence of archaeology is grounded in a modern attitude to the physical world, and it must be an open question whether the adoption of a radically different engagement with materiality would be compatible with anything that we could still recognise as archaeology. This is a theme that we will return to in the concluding chapter.
