This article considers the application of the New Materialisms within archaeology, primarily in response to Witmore’s influential discussion article: Archaeology and the New Materialisms (2014), specifically his emphasis on things. This, the authors demonstrate, is peripheral to the main thrust of the New Materialisms discourse. They unravel complexities in the terminology and consider the etymological and epistemological framework of concepts such as matter and thing. This leads them to consider some important issues that arise applying Deleuzian assemblages to the archaeological record and the potential of employing Barad’s agential realist theory instead. Barad’s concept of phenomena moves beyond the notion of things as separate, bounded entities, emphasizing entanglements of matter and illustrates how matter (including humans) co-create the material world. The authors’ aim is to demonstrate how engaging with matter rather than things enables us to better make sense of the material world and our place within it.

Philosopher and physicist Karen Barad (2003; 2007; 2012) has brought a new understanding of causality to the academic discourse (agential realism theory). Inspired by this new take on causality, I problematize the argument that archaeologists ‘follow’ materials. I begin by challenging the act of ‘following’ on two counts (causality and universalism), and then consider the work of Malafouris (2008a) – a thinker whose ideas have the potential to remediate this issue through his examination of the ‘in-between’ humans and matter. I argue that, despite offering an inspirational approach to mind–matter relationships, the dialectical relationship he evokes remains problematic from a Baradian perspective as it is still rooted in ‘following’. I suggest that Barad’s agential realism offers a valuable conceptual framework for researchers who are weary of ‘unilateral’ linear causality and keen to move beyond dialectical thinking (Barad 2007, 214).

The rise of Symmetrical Archaeology has subtly recast archaeology as the study of things and not the study of the past or past peoples. This new description of the archaeological endeavour is often met with criticism. This paper continues in the critical vein but embraces a different strategy of engagement. Here, second-wave Symmetrical Archaeology is brought to the fore: its historical development explored, its methodology outlined, its current theoretical basis assessed. Part critique, part defence, I consider the logical underpinning of the second-wave, focusing on ontology and agency. Utilizing Levi Bryant’s ontic principle, I attend to these two issues and frame this style of archaeology as Pre-critical Archaeology. A caveat seems necessary: whilst I spend time with Symmetrical Archaeology in this paper, that does not mean I am a convert. Rather, my ambition here is to see things from the point of view of a Symmetrical archaeologist.

Can we theorize the relationship between discourses that antagonize each other? In a recent article, Arponen et al. demonstrate the tension between two different research models, and spotlight the compelling impact these methods have on archaeological interpretation. In response to their observations, this paper theorizes how we can understand the position of the researcher in relation to the events they analyse. Using Michel Foucault’s approach to the ‘discursive formation’ and Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, in this reaction I argue that focusing on a single and most important point (the crux) is problematic, and theoretically outline how creating conceptual space for polymorphous causality can aid the analysis of a ‘dispersion of events’.

No abstract