Museums are changing fast, yet they still need to respond to the challenges posed by a society that changes at an even faster pace. Human mobility, multi‐culturalism and increasing economic assymetries create an environment, in which the role of museums as public spaces emerges as particularly complex. In this paper, we discuss issues of social inclusion in heritage museums from a conceptual point of view. In particular, we examine the conceptual barriers posed to accessibility and participation by current spatial, communicative, social and sensorial approaches in museum practice and suggest possible ways to shift such obstacles. Some of these ways may necessitate paradigmatic changes in museum policies. The paper draws on various aspects of social and communication theory.

In this article, the authors use the question of whether the Neolithic should be maintained as an analytic category to argue that such a paradigmatic view of history is possible and useful only when we drastically redefine the role that technics play in archaeological narratives of the past. Using Simondon’s and Leroi-Gourhan’s theories of technology, they argue that analysis should move away from categorizations based on concrete objects and instead frame itself through the exploration of technical ensembles. They suggest that the operational solidarity of pottery-, bread- and mudbrick-making constructs the Neolithic as a technical interface in which a complex network of synergies and radial properties is played out, allowing the mapping of the Neolithic, not by object appearances and/or densities, but by points of convergence between technical regimes that redefine the modes of being in the world by providing the conditions under which new ‘objects’ become possible.

Until recently, the dominant management model of archaeological sites in Greece largely drew upon a logic of enframing (Thomas 2004: 79; see also Díaz-Andreu & Champion 1996; Dietler 1994; Olsen 2012), which understood the past as "gone" and "completed", a temporal entity in other words, whose closure and finitude needed to be guaranteed through physical demarcation (Olsen, 2012: 215). We shall call this "the enclosure model", for in essence, it sought to isolate monuments from the sphere of the everyday. The tendency to spatially distinguish the past from the present has its roots in modernity, particularly the 19 th century: at the time, prominent archaeological sites across the Mediterranean were marked out (and henceforth rendered "visible") as loci of exclusive membership (i.e. products of archaeological activity, arenas of intellectual/ scientific discourse) but above all, as representational spaces of collective appeal, accommodating both nationalist and colonialist narratives (cf.

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