ABSTRACT
Materiality is a way of thinking about things/objects that recognizes that they aren't just tools used by people to achieve human ends. Things actively influence society and culture. Materiality isn't so much a theory' in the scientific sense as it is a frame of reference a different way of looking at a familiar subject. We may have noticed that the word thing' rather than the common archaeological term artifact' or material culture. For decades, archaeologists retreated into the reconstruction of historical events and processes and the creation of regional artifact typologies, chronologies, and other empirically based work. Materiality turned the question around, Chris Gosden famously asking, "What do objects want?" Now, things don't have intention of course, but they do function as actors in human social life. This distinction between things as members of groups of things and an object is the basis of something called Thing Theory.
