ABSTRACT
The sole human figure included, about one-third life size and complete only from midbody down, was found with a separately modeled effigy of the kind of bag that would have contained resin to burn. The challenge for archaeologists is to maintain a simultaneous focus on traces as evidence of pragmatic engagement in the world, and of meaningful links among human actors, without reducing things to sketchy outlines without weight or sensory qualities. Memory—social, cultural, or individual—has thus come to be figured as a rich topic in contemporary archaeology of materiality, where materialities are understood as forms through which memory work may take place. Archaeological traces and the things whose histories they point to form part of assemblages that are distributed across space and time, connecting persons and things in networks across which the ability to act is distributed.
