ABSTRACT
This conclusion chapter presents some closing thoughts on the concepts in the preceding chapters of the book. The book examines the current intellectual turn in archaeology, primarily in its prehistoric and classical branches, characterized by a return to the archaeological evidence. In particular, Julian Thomas's discussion about the recent claims that theory has failed because there has been no new big thing since post-processualism is highly provocative and reveals how one can be victims of their own historiographical narrative. The book explicitly attempts to grapple with how a broadly related wave of current social theory relates to the materiality of archaeological evidence. This wave includes Actor-Network-Theory, speculative realism and new materialism among others which the book collects under the term new empiricism or neo-empiricism or empiricism 2.0. The new ontology is certainly a platform from which one can re-think archaeological epistemology and ethics, but, in terms of ethics and epistemology, the debate about archaeological empiricism has surely barely begun.
