ABSTRACT
A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people’s understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|78 pages
Relational Ontologies
chapter Chapter Two|16 pages
Archaeology and Ontologies of Scale: The Case of Miniaturization in First-Millennium Northwest Argentina
chapter Chapter Three|20 pages
Transmorphic Being, Corresponding Affect: Ontology and Rock Art in South-Central California
chapter Chapter Four|17 pages
Carnival Times and the Semiopraxis of the Snake: Mining and the Politics of Knowledge
chapter Chapter Five|18 pages
Unstable Contexts: Relational Ontologies and Domestic Settings in Andean Northwest Argentina
part II|58 pages
Working with Materials
chapter Chapter Seven|16 pages
Designing with Living: A Contextual Archaeology of Dependent Architecture
chapter Chapter Eight|22 pages
Archaeological Complexity: Materials, Multiplicity, and the Transitions to Agriculture in Britain
part III|104 pages
Assembling the Social
chapter Chapter Nine|20 pages
From Ahu to Avebury: Monumentality, the Social, and Relational Ontologies
chapter Chapter Twelve|22 pages
Dynamic Assemblages, or the Past Is What Endures: Change and the Duration of Relations
chapter Chapter Thirteen|20 pages
Assembling Bodies, Making Worlds: An Archaeological Topology of Place
part IV|104 pages
Beyond Representation