ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how developments in the directions both within and outside archaeology are having an important impact. It focuses on how archaeologists are beginning to grant plants and animals a different role in the accounts of the past, and the relational theories they have used to do this. Processualists, of course, were really the first group of archaeologists to take plants and animals seriously. In many disciplines closely related to archaeology, scholars have become increasingly interested in the roles of plants and especially animals alongside humans in creating particular kinds of society, and particular kinds of worlds. Many different plants have enmeshed humans in their relations with the world, and just as humans have benefited from this, so have plants, allowing new forms of practices, like farming, to come into existence. Domestication here is an evolutionary process as much as a historical one, and one in which one cannot divide different changes into two opposed camps.
