This special issue has its roots in a research network known colloquially as the 'bones collective' that emerged in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and grew to encompass scholars, professionals and advocates located throughout the UK and beyond. Initiated by Jeanne Cannizzo, Joost Fontein and John Harries, this has grown into a network of two dozen individuals. Its central, uniting problematic has been to query what it is about human bones and bone that provokes emotional, political, visceral and intellectual responses from those who encounter them.The collective hosted a seminar series at the University of Edinburgh between January and March 2008, inviting a broad range of scholars whose work had already focused on encounters and interactions with human bones in a wide range of different ethnographic and political contexts. 1 This was followed in December 2008 by 'What lies beneath', a two-day workshop involving participants with backgrounds in museums, archaeology, social anthropology, fine art and reburial advocacy. 2 The aim of the workshop was to explore the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bone -an approach that has proved productive as we work both deductively and inductively to generate theoretical approaches that illuminate encounters with bones. Developing out of the fruitful discussions of the workshop, the collective organized a session for the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Bristol

This article is a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the possibility of 'touching the past'. Drawing on fieldwork from Newfoundland, Canada, and in conversation with Gell's Art and Agency (1998), it focuses on the process of abduction whereby, in their discovery and handling, pieces of stone become artefacts that index the presence of an absent other. It is argued that through this tactile process of becoming an artefactual index, the distinction between past and present is momentarily dissolved, enfolded into the fit between stone and hand, giving rise to the possibility of historical sensation and the feeling of pastness.

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