ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the relationship between learning to find the way forward through the changing properties of materials, and the ways archaeologists refer to the experience of encountering a past underneath their feet. It expresses that novices learn to project their attention beyond what is immediately visible on the ground, accompanied by experts who support them by drawing their attention, through gestures, to what needs to be uncovered in the near future. The chapter explores how archaeologists develop a caring relationship with things that push them to follow their subtle trajectories, particularly those resulting from the gravitational requirements of the discipline's practice. It discusses the recent approaches in anthropology that tend to overemphasise the capacity of concepts for creating things. The notion of drawing gestures proposed here aims to challenge the widespread emphasis on individual hand movements in most gesture-centred approaches.
