ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Latour's work in a little more depth to consider the background of symmetrical archaeology. It then explores symmetrical archaeology itself and look in more detail at the arguments it has put forward, including a Latourian case study focusing on whaling in the Arctic in the first millennium ad. The chapter focuses on new materialism, examining the ways in which it is both similar to but also different from symmetrical archaeology. It considers a case study applying these approaches to the past, looking at new understandings of materials from Palaeolithic Europe. Agency here does not belong to objects. Instead, agency is a quality of a relationship, meaning that the agency of the gun–human relationship is qualitatively different to the agency of the human-without-a-gun. Alongside the turn to symmetry has come another set of posthumanist approaches also interested in bringing out the role material things, and especially matter itself, have to play in our understandings of the past.
