What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human impact on orbital space and lunar surfaces – challenging the assumption that the Anthropocene is confined to Earth. Jeff Benjamin investigates the sounds of the Anthropocene. Paul Graves-Brown questions the idea that the epoch had its onset with the invention of the steam engine, while Mark Hudson uses Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects to imagine the dark artefacts of the future. Victor Paz doubts the practical relevance of the concept to archaeological chronologies, and Bruce Clarke warns archaeologists to steer clear of the Anthropocene altogether, on the grounds of the overbearing hubris of the very idea of the Age of Humans. Others like Jason Kelly and Ewa Domanska regard the Anthropocene debate as an opportunity to reach new forms of understanding of Earth systems. André Zarankin and Melisa Salerno ground significant issues in the archaeology of Antarctica. And Zoe Crossland explores the vital links between the known past and the imagined future. As a discipline orientated to the future and contemporary world as well as the past, Chris Witmore concludes, archaeology in the Anthropocene will have more work than it can handle.

In case readers are wondering whether this paper is written tongue in cheek -or with tongue sticking out -it is worth recalling that modern archaeology includes recent periods in its remit, and uses recent materiality to help understand more ancient times as well as a critique on modernity itself. Here the authors find graffiti left by a notorious group of popular musicians and probe it for social meaning as earnestly as students of cave art. Their archaeological study finds an underlying driver that is part political, part personal and therefore also part (anti-)heritage.

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This book is about archaeologies both in and of the present. Its aim is to identify the challenges and pitfalls of an archaeology of the contemporary world, but not to be an authorized manual. Archaeology has become a case limit for interdisciplinarity, as it is the one discipline that is so freely and exuberantly adopted, complicated, and transformed by other disciplines. In that they all study contemporary material culture, it is clear that other disciplines also do ‘archaeology’ in one way or another. The study of the present opens up issues of ownership not normally addressed by archaeologists. If it is an archaeology of us, who is the ‘us’ that we are concerned with? The archaeology of the contemporary is thus inevitably drawn into politics in terms of the extent to which work in the field constitutes or necessitates advocacy. Archaeologies of the contemporary extend our understanding of the mobility of matter, a mobility that suggests the operation of matter as media, and evokes the materiality of media. Here, the ephemeral event becomes a productive site for extending our understandings of matter, media, and mobility. Methodologically, archaeologies of the contemporary must overcome the banalization of everyday experience, studying people, places, and things in action. As such, archaeologists must see themselves as participants, and shape their participation to contemporary circumstances.