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Things are in the saddle,And ride mankind.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ode to W. H. Channing

In Karain: A Memory, Joseph Conrad presents a character whom we recognize at once as typically, idiosyncratically human—a threatening local dynast in the Malay archipelago, stating the bounds of his territorial control from the deck of a schooner he has boarded in his waters: “Karain swept his hand over it. ‘All mine!’ He struck the deck with his long staff; the gold head flashed like a falling star . . . He was ornate and disturbing, for one could not imagine what depth of horrible void such an elaborate front could be wor-thy to hide. He was not masked—there was too much life in him and a mask is only a lifeless thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a human being aggressively disguised” (Conrad 1977:49). This description of the use of artifacts as symbols, words as claims, and appearance as multivalent and essen-tially ambiguous, shows the subtlety and complexity of cultural life as it is projected and perceived by active human agents. Even the absence of physical props, Karain’s masklessness is a positive statement in a cul-tural context where masks were frequently used to intimidate, invoke awe, and submerge identity in the projection of archetypal values.

For archaeologists the description must be daunt-ing. It is not possible to provide a description of equal depth concerning past cultural contexts, unless imag-ined. Yet we are keen to go beyond the typologies of gold-headed staffs, masks, ships, and the detritus of contact situations, to a more nuanced understanding, not just of what artifacts were in use at a particular time and place, but of what art, costume, and sym-bolism may have been designed to express. We seek insight into the constraints of physical things and their classifications on the possibility of thought in an alien context. But it is not clear at present whether we can even agree on the level or levels of interpretation at which secure engagement with such kinds of complex-

ity, through all the filters of time and chance, can be demonstrated or plausibly inferred.

Materiality is a style of inquiry that engages with the unavoidable qualities of a material, such as the particular type of stone found in the construction of a prehistoric tomb, or the way in which a corpse decomposes in a particular climate. An initial approxi-mation is to say that it asks not just why this stone was thought appropriate for creating Neolithic mortuary structures, or why a particular grade of remains was deposited, but how a Neolithic concept of a realm of the dead, and the Neolithic equivalent(s) of the modern concept(s) of death, may have arisen out of, and been sensorily and emotionally connected to, the temperature, color, feel, and durability of such stone, erected in such a location, and its analogies and con-trasts with warm flesh and cold bone.

MATERIALITY: HISTORY OF A CONCEPTMateriality encourages reconstruction of past catego-ries and classifications, allowing an appreciation of why the essential “thinginess” of things (including bodies) is not just good for thinking, in the sense of providing poetic or metaphorical resources, but un-derpins the ability to think, by providing the cultural framework of concrete exemplars from which meta-physical categories can be abstracted. Matter is itself a metaphysical term, not in the popular colloquial misunderstanding of metaphysics as something above or beyond nature (the supernatural), but by being a category defined in relation to a whole field of other fundamental concepts, including form, reality, mind, ideal, time, and space. A modern social or historical scientist, such as an archaeologist, will typically com-prehend a megalithic tomb in terms of such categories as intention, agency, cause, effect, energy and gravity. However, to its makers and original users, it may have embodied, asserted, and exemplified values that might be expressible as something like duty, auspiciousness, right conduct, divine blessing, or the evil pull of the underworld. Where a modern eye discerns a rural and romantic scene of ruins in a landscape, Neolithic

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people would, with the monument freshly raised, have been exposed to a vision akin to modernity.

Materiality does not signal a descent into mystical communion with old things. Tempered by disciplinary inputs from areas such as cognitive psychology, com-parative anthropology, and aesthetic theory, it aims to redefine and refine the importance of the texture and dimensions of material existence in the cultural con-texts that archaeology attempts to reconstruct. “The link between people and material culture . . . has not been adequately described by either those concerned with the body or those looking at material culture . . . Our senses attend to the formal qualities of objects—their appearance, weight, smell, taste or sound—giv-ing values to what is sensed” writes Chris Gosden (2004:37). He goes on to suggest that values are the crystallization of something in the object, which can be apprehended as much by us as archaeologists as by the original users; this idea contrasts with a more conventional philosophical understanding, post Kant, that values are ascribed via exercises of judgment. It has been claimed that the “synthetic capacity of actual material forms (rather than the interpretive tropes that have arisen around them) to combine perspec-tives and domains of knowledge has . . . constituted a new form, as opposed to subject, of enquiry . . . which highlights the importance of things in the making of social relationships and the fundamental importance of materiality for the reproduction of society” (Geis-mar and Horst 2004:6). It is a form of inquiry that is said to aim to “downplay an analytical separation between mind and matter, or ‘idealist’ versus ‘materi-alist’ approaches” (DeMarrais, Gosden, and Renfrew 2004b:1).

V. Gordon Childe’s famous definition of an ar-chaeological culture as a constantly recurring complex of objects and forms, “the material expression of what would today be called a ‘people’” (1929:vi), was pre-ceded by a more integrated understanding. The term “materiality” was in use in ethnographic contexts in the later nineteenth century (e.g., in Tyler; see below), and for many late-nineteenth-century and early-twen-tieth-century ethnographers, prehistorians, psycholo-gists, and sociologists, material culture was more than the “expression” implied by Childe—an almost passive imprint made by an already sufficiently defined com-munity. For late-nineteenth-century scholars such as Gustav Kossinna, cultural attributes such as pot shapes, settlement layouts, and symbolic repertoires were “bred in the bone,” arising from the perceived biological reality of clearly demarcated racial differ-

ence (Veit 1984). Cultural differences revealed differ-ences in “race memory” and were an external form of what Jung was later to term “collective unconscious” (in works from c. 1912 onward; see Jung 1969). This understanding of culture is in certain respects closer to a modern reflexive understanding, in that it pos-tulates a critical nexus between the material and the psychological.

These were potent ideas in both the social sciences and political philosophy. Thus Bourdieu’s habitus (the psycho-physical enculturation of a child into a par-ticular historical society, and the child’s concept for-mation and metaphysical education in that specific material context: Bourdieu 1977)—a key element in recent materiality theory—was to some degree al-ready present as an idea in the social engineering of Germany, China, and the Soviet Union. This is not surprising, given that habitus has a broad histori-cal currency. Bourdieu took it from the art historian Erwin Panofsky, who adopted it from medieval scho-lastic theologians (Bourdieu 2004; Panofsky 1957), themselves influenced by classical writers, extending back to Hippocrates and Herodotus, who, even if they did not have a single word for it, understood types of human life and society in intimate and critical con-nection to characteristic and formative environments (Lloyd 1978; Herodotus 1987).

The Nazis did not choose the swastika simply be-cause it appeared on early medieval German pots, Greek decoration of the Geometric period, and the temple schemes of northern India. Rather than being passively symbolic of the (supposed) timing and extent of the initial Indo-German empire of the “Aryans,” the swastika was believed to be actually, physically gal-vanic in recreating pure and original Germanness in latter-day Germans exposed to it. Similarly in Tibet, Mao’s cultural revolution ordered the destruction of people’s basic subsistence items and their replacement by “new socialist objects” only secondarily for reasons of economy or practicality (a wooden eating bowl has claims to pure utility that equal a new metal-al-loy replacement). The primary aim was to destroy memories, and thus the traditional values and ways of life that were connected to them. In a wholesale re-placement of habitus, even colors (perhaps especially colors, given their powers of nostalgic evocation) like yellow and maroon were banned, to be replaced by Chinese-army red and green (Gyatso 1997).

This unattractive history signals the fact that mate-riality picks up a baby once thrown out with some very dirty bathwater. It is a matter of disciplinary record

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that Gordon Childe’s necessary stripping of mate-rial culture from its racialist denotation was followed in a postwar recoil from all ideology, by a blanket rejection of social theory by the German school of typological archaeology. Add in the development of an equally ahistorical (though for different reasons) neoevolutionary approach to archaeology as anthro-pology, which understood material culture as a mere extrasomatic means of adaptation to objectively real environments in North America, and it is clear why a sense of the intricate cultural nexus between artifacts and persons was dimmed or lost. Curiously, the earlier use of materiality as a tool of political oppression gives it fresh legitimacy and importance. The Nazis and Maoists revolutionized material cultures not (just) as megalomaniac indulgence, but because they grasped the fact that thought really is constrained and created by the physical object world.

Within archaeology, materiality aims to redress a lack of proper emphasis on the tangible qualities of things (their “allowances,” in some terminologies) that characterized approaches both in new or proces-sual archaeology, from the mid-1960s onward, and in the contextual or post-processual movement which developed to run in parallel with it, from the later 1970s onward (see Shanks, chapter 9). Where New Archaeology presented cultural phenomena in terms of information codes, and was influenced by ideas from evolutionary biology (see Collard et al., chapter 13) concerning replication and a search for the basic unit of culture, post-processualists wrote and spoke in terms of symbolism to the point where, in Boivin’s words (2004:63), the “materiality of the world matters so little, proponents of the textual model tell us, that the relationship between a material signifier and the concept it signifies is arbitrary.” The profound power of materiality is now being reenvisioned, albeit (as we shall see) on foundations going back to Marx, Mauss, Vygotsky, and Collingwood (Marx 1954; Mauss 1990; Vygotsky 1978; 1986; Collingwood 1940, 1981, 1989, 1993). Recognizing materiality means not just asking why the message is expressed through particular me-dia, but assenting to Marshall McLuhan’s dictum “the medium is the message” (1964), as he entitled chapter 1 of Understanding Media.

PHILOSOPHICAL ANCESTRYAs an abstract noun whose basic denotation is the quality of being material, materiality is rather un-wieldy. Its definition presupposes some agreement over the understanding of a series of prior terms such

as “things” and “matter” which, as it turns out, is not always evident. Matter (thus materiality) can be un-derstood in a number of ways, according to how these other terms are understood.

To add to the potential confusion, many who have positively focused on the quality of being material in scholarly discourse have been called materialists, yet materialism in social and economic studies is a move-ment that most “materiality-ists” disagree with. Mat-ter, materialism, and materiality form a complex web of meanings and distinctions encompassing a number of definitional problems and contradictions. Before attempting a prospectus of the current range of think-ing, it will be useful to look at the history of the term “materiality” in relation to the ranges of denotation and breadth of connotation of the cognate terms and key contrastive and associated ones.

Materiality is provided with four core definitions by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1989:1047), beginning with “that which constitutes the matter of something as opposed to its form” (its formality, in an obsolete sense of this term). The second definition is the neutral “quality of being material,” and the third is an extension of the meaning of the first, denoting “mere outwardness or externality.” (The quotation supporting this is from Samuel Johnson, prefacing an edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1765: “It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible.”) Finally there is a legal definition of “being important for the purpose being contemplated” (thus in law, materiality means information that is pertinent and whose omission may lead to accusations of deception or fraudulence).

In an anthropological context, materiality seems to have first been used by E. B. Tyler: “Wuttke says, the ghosts of the dead have to him a misty and evanescent materiality” (1871:1:412). Where material ends and the soul begins is a recurring question in religion. John Locke, whose writings on the metaphysics of qualities, appearances, and essences have been very influential in Western philosophy, wrote, “He . . . will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly for or against the soul’s materiality” (Locke 1977:281). Nevertheless, Tyler is not the source of the term materiality in current archaeological scholarship. Archaeologists picked it up in the mid-1990s from material culture studies and so-cial and aesthetic theory, its appeal lying especially in its direct connection to physical things, both those created by human agency that are termed artifacts (Gosden 1994; Graves-Brown 2000), and those natural things

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cognized or resolved into categories so as to become objects to which value and meaning can attach (Brown 2001). Materiality thinking is a cross-discipline project, with vibrant activity in anthropology, material culture studies and sociology (Miller 2005; Dant 2005).

In Western thought (see Koerner and Price, chapter 21), matter as a category was first formally distin-guished by Thales (c. 624–546 b.c.) in the term hylê (Algra 1999), and the category was developed by Ar-istotle in contrast to form, the two being necessary in combination to create a determinately existent thing. (This metaphysical analysis conditions the OED’s first definition of materiality in contrast to formality, given above.) Aristotle’s “prime matter” was a kind of inver-sion of Plato’s earlier belief in the ultimate reality of pure form (extreme idealism), and in a formulation preliminary to the idea of chemical elements, he rec-ognized matter as coming in certain basic varieties (homoiomere—entities having parts like the whole; Graham 1999:164). Since Democritus, many thinkers have considered the formless form of matter to consist of atoms, uniform elementary particles, variations in whose organization gave rise to variations in the phe-nomenal world. This focus on differences in organiza-tional pattern among essentially equal units giving rise to differences at the level of appearance or behavior (in contrast to the idea that outward differences arose on the basis of fundamental differences in essence) was to profoundly influence Marx in his materialist con-ceptualization of society as a pattern of equal units, rather than a complex of shifting contracts between incarnate souls and their various and potentially dis-sonant value beliefs.

Matter is often defined contrastively. Aristotle ex-cluded form, and in 1570 Dee wrote that “Neither number, nor magnitude, have any materialitie” (OED 1989:1047); but less than a hundred years later Des-cartes was to argue that matter was magnitude (or extension), emptiness being impossible (Williams 1978). Form is often contrasted in spiritual terms with substance (formalists in religion are thought to put on an outward show bearing no necessary resemblance to the substance of their beliefs).

Matter is most simply understood as something that can be touched, and thus experienced in a consistent way, and is an important term in those philosophical movements that come under the umbrella of empiri-cism, which, beginning with Locke, gives primacy to actual experience in constructing human knowledge. As humans we are tasked to observe neutrally and dispassionately, allowing our minds to be written on

by the sense data of the real world so that a coherent picture may be drawn there. In its most extreme form, empiricism views the outer world as no more than an inner mental construct, tyrannized by experiences whose ultimate causes must forever remain beyond our apprehension. Both Kant and Wittgenstein were instrumental in attacking empiricism by presenting a heavily cultural understanding of the world: objective empiricism is undermined fundamentally by human culture which is understood. In Ernest Gellner’s termi-nology, as “a system of signs” (Gellner 1989; Wittgen-stein 1967; for Kant’s impact, see Cassirer 1968).

This provides a very useful starting point for the re-cent development of theories of materiality. Wittgen-stein argued that language is misrepresented when it is thought to be a vehicle for communicating thoughts that are ultimately language-independent: “Speak-ing is not a matter of translating wordless thoughts into language, and understanding is not a matter of interpreting—transforming dead signs into living thoughts. The limits of thought are determined by the limits of the expression of thoughts. The possession of a language not only expands the intellect, but also extends the will. A dog can want a bone, but only a language-user can now want something next week. It is not thought that breathes life into the signs of a lan-guage, but the use of signs in the stream of human life” (Hacker 1995:915). We might similarly say that arti-facts are misrepresented as tools designed to complete tasks. The possession of material culture also extends the will—a dog can want to attack someone, but only a material culture-user can want to shoot someone with a machine gun rather than an arrow.

MATERIALISMMaterialists, in common parlance at least, are people who are driven by the acquisition of money and the things, both goods and services, that money can buy. The urge to acquire material wealth implies dispro-portionate access to it, as the majority of goods and services are the product of human labor, products that we are often prepared to live and die for, or send others to their deaths to obtain. (As the novelist Thomas Pyn-chon puts it, “The true war is a celebration of markets” [1973:105].) The inequalities of material acquisition formed the basis of Karl Marx’s critique of capital and gave rise to the theory of historical materialism. What-ever one’s views of the historical project termed Marx-ism, Marx’s impact on thinking about materialism has been immense, and requires summary treatment here (Marx 1954; McLellan 1995; Morrison 1995).

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Marx’s idea of historical materialism is ultimately (possibly ironically) a materialist argument used against a materialistic society. His argument, while not primarily moralistic, idealistic, or utopian, relates to intellectual, moral, and social activity. “Marx’s criti-que . . . accepted the physical explanations of the origin of nature and of life but rejected the derived forms of social and moral argument, describing the whole tendency as mechanical materialism . . . [which] had isolated objects and had neglected or ignored subjects and especially human activity as subjective. Hence his distinction between a received mechanical material-ism and a new historical materialism, which would include human activity as a primary force” (Williams 1976:166). Marx’s view of the reality of subjects was, however, rooted in tangible objects; thus he viewed cul-tural, social, moral, and (perhaps) aesthetic activities as derived from economic activity. His understanding of such activity was based on Aristotle’s definition of oeconomia as material self-sufficiency; that is, produc-tion for use to satisfy legitimate need, as opposed to activities geared to satisfy greed (chrematistike, from chrema, a coin; Seaford 2004:141).

Marx had originally adopted, and later adapted, the collocation “mechanical materialism” from an ear-lier intersect of meanings traceable back to Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, who did not use the word “ma-terialism,” the world was made up of physical bod-ies in motion, governed by mechanical laws. Human thoughts and feelings were understood as forms of motion, and the interplay of humans within a society was seen equally mechanistically. Societies could be considered, like machines, as either well or poorly regulated, and idea of free will was understood in a rather limited sense, compatible with both material-istic determinism and God’s omnipotence (Gauthier 1969). With God removed or sidelined, this kind of materialist understanding led to the Marxian dialectic as described by Engels: “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought” (cited in McLellan 1995:527). Engels, and also Hegel, replaced the essentially contingent “historical” with a universal or “dialectical” material-ism (although neither Hegel nor Marx used this col-location, and Marx later characterized Hegel’s method as idealist). The machine metaphor proved powerful beyond and after Marx, leading in particular to the ap-plication of systems theory within the social sciences, evident in archaeology from the 1960s onward.

Marxism (see McGuire, chapter 6) appears to em-phasize things, and is strongly associated with materi-

alism, but the idea of concrete history is emphatically not about the prior importance of material things. Marx, for example, coined the term “fetishism of com-modities” to describe the tendency of people within capitalism to believe that value is a substance inherent to commodities. (“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is. In reality, a very queer thing, abound-ing in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” [Marx 1954:76].)

Commodity fetishism describes belief in the mysti-cal (thus, for Marx, fictitious or unreal) power of com-modities, leading to relations among people taking the form of relations among things, so that humans confront one another as agents of economic categories and possessors of commodities. By contrast, Marx was concerned with the equitable distribution of powers over things among people who should be emancipated from thinghood in its commodity aspect (slavery and its institutional successors under feudal and capital-ist systems). The ultimate reduction of exchange to a neutral algebra, operationalized as a fiscal system, was a thing some Marxists aimed to destroy: money could become unnecessary as true communism emerged. What was critical in Marxism was the ethical relation-ship or mode of existence for people with a particular means of production. The production of things was indeed seen as an objective, scientific, advance, but its purpose was not production so much as problem solving as a step in the creation of a harmonious and happy social organism. Too great a focus on the formal attributes of things as objects in themselves could be viewed as suspect, something that Soviet archaeolo-gists discovered in the 1920s when Ravdonikas revised the disciplinary name to the history of material culture (Trigger 1989), and scholars closely associated with formal and typological studies found themselves ac-cused of naked “artifactology” (Klejn in Taylor 1993).

Of course, the way Marxist-Leninism mytholo-gized society as a higher-order entity, with mecha-nisms and structural faults to be remedied, owed much to the Industrial Revolution and the machine as pervasive metaphor: “Marx looked forward to a society which would abolish the division between mental and manual work . . . seeing the division as the source of philosophical mystification. In such a society, social relations would become transparent” (McLellan 1995:527; Sperber 1992). Plekhanov, who popularized Kautsky’s term “dialectical materialism” (Plekhanov 1940), followed Kant in assuming that things cannot be known in themselves, but that our

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thoughts and feelings in relation to them were hi-eroglyphic—corresponding to reality without resem-bling or reproducing it. “Matter” was demoted from the status of a primary metaphysical substance, as Engels had conceived it, to a logic concept. The fact of correspondence with the world’s externality was proved through the effective interventions that peo-ple made in relation to reality, broadly understood as the rise of science (Jordan 1967).

Obviously we can question whether all informa-tion is ultimately specifically material in nature. If so, then the distinctiveness of material dissolves for purposes of practical reasoning; or, as Dan Sperber puts it, “empty materialism consists in stating that everything is material, including socio-cultural phe-nomena, and leaving it at that” (Sperber 1992:57). In materialist views of psychology, such as that of Daniel Dennett, imagined forms are fundamentally real, be-ing constructed physical-mental analogues or proto-types, existing as electrically or otherwise coded, but ultimately material, models for real-world inventions or interventions (Dennett 1991).

MATERIAL CULTURE: THINGS AND WORDS“Material culture” is a term made up of two words each with its own complexities of meaning. “Material” is derived from the Latin materia—building material, timber, and hence stuff of which a thing is made. Ac-cording to the Oxford English Dictionary, materia is thought to derive from Doric Greek dmateria. In turn based on the hypothetical Indo-European root dem, dom, whence Latin domus (house), English timber, and Portuguese madeira (wood; and by extension wood-matured wine). Therefore, as “culture” is originally from the Latin root word colere—to attend to, culti-vate, respect (thus cultura, cultivating, and cultus, wor-ship; Williams 1976:77), the term “material culture” can be thought of, in a highly appropriate poetic ety-mology, as purposively attending to nature in order to derive an insulation against it. In the history of ideas, especially in the early nineteenth century, culture and material development were contrasted, the former as human and the latter as mechanical and inhuman; thus the values of folk culture were valorized in op-position to the mechanical forces of industrial civili-zation. Williams also notes the complication that “the same kind of distinction, especially between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ development, was made by von Hum-boldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual” (Williams 1976:79). For archaeology, mate-

rial culture appears as a distinct term as early as 1882. In the work of the Swede Hans Hildebrand, in differ-entiating the new field of medieval archaeology, Hil-debrand wanted to contrast andlig kultur—culture of the mind or spirit (geistliches Kultur, the agreed subject of medieval history in Germanic scholarship)—with something everyday and physical (Andrén, personal communication).

However, by prefixing “culture” with “material,” archaeology adopted a qualifier which is, if not in terms of history of use, then at least in terms of its metaphysical definition, even more complex. Gordon Childe altered his original definition of a culture in 1933, when he wrote that prehistoric archaeology had a concept of a culture in which “groups of distinc-tive traits, mostly peculiarities in material culture (dress, armament, ornaments, domestic architecture), but also more spiritual characteristics such as burial rites and artistic styles, tend to hang together and be associated in a given continuous region at a given period. Such a group of associated traits is what the archaeologist terms a culture” (Childe 1933:197f.). As has been previously remarked (McNairn 1980:51), Childe seems to define “material” in two different senses, in the latter case treating material culture as a subcomponent of an overall archaeological culture. This culture was in itself recovered from the surviv-ing subset (the “durable expressions,” to use Childe’s 1949 phraseology) of a past culture’s (or past cultural) behavior.

The least durable manifestations of material cul-ture are things like ice cubes and ice sculptures, whose existence has either to be ascertained from experienc-ing an instance of occurrence or indirectly inferred from a plastic ice cube tray or a photograph from a sculptor’s portfolio (and functionally understood within the contexts of transitory recreational and aesthetic activities). By virtue of the timescale with which archaeologists typically work, the discipline has focussed on material items of high durability, regard-less of whether this was an originally intended quality or not. The iconic archaeological museum objects are stone tools, potsherds, and ancient bronzes. The first formal recognition of such durable artifacts was made in the late sixteenth century by the John Tradescants, father and son, whose exhibition of “curiosities” was to grow into the world’s first public museum, the Ash-molean Museum in Oxford. Their catalog of collected materials principally distinguished Naturalls from Ar-tificialls, ordered into categories by type (Ashmolean Museum 2002).

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ARTIFACTS AS UNITS OF CULTUREThe division of artifacts into a cultural equivalent of species became known as typology. Because typol-ogy gives names to types of artifacts, it is easy to as-sume that the types have as much reality as, or more reality than, the individual examples of them. The assumption is attractive, as it seems reasonable that when we want to make a chair, we have a chair idea in mind that must transcend any actual example, and embody the idea of chairness in a Platonically pure form. In turn, such thinking has led to a development of the biological analogy, with artifact archetypes be-ing viewed as similar in some ways to genes in what some have termed gene culture coevolution. Thus the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson in Consilience (1998) considers the search for “the basic unit of culture” and the biologist Richard Dawkins has proposed memes as “units of cultural transmission,” a counterpart code to genes (Dawkins 1989:189–201; see Gabora, chapter 17; Bentley et al., chapter 8).

Dawkins’s memes apparently include “tunes,” “catchphrases,” “ways of making pots,” “stiletto heels,” and “the idea of God.” The American realist philoso-pher Daniel Dennett lists “deconstructionism” and “wearing clothes” as cultural units, “the smallest ele-ments that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity.”(Dennett 1995). How these entities, of wildly varying type, can be thought of as more or less mechanical replicators puzzles many. There is a special difficulty in that genes are the often fuzzily defined sections of DNA believed to act as code for actual attributes as they influence organic growth in an environmental setting, thus producing a phenotype that is constrained but not wholly determined by its underlying genotype. In this context the British phi-losopher Mary Midgley comments, “If memes really correspond to genes of culture they cannot be its units . . . Moreover, most of the concepts mentioned cannot possibly be treated as unchanging or even moderately solid” (Midgley 2003:chap. 10.3); thus customs and ways of thinking change and develop, typically due to our own directive efforts to change them. In this light, memes are revealed as more Lamarckian than Darwin-ian (something Dawkins recognizes in terms of design arising from, and thus postdating, genetic evolution; Dawkins 2005:9).

Materiality as an approach is not without its intel-lectual pitfalls and dangers. In a nod toward Richard Dawkins’s extended phenotype idea (Dawkins 1983), John Robb (2004) considers the extended artifact, rather than (as Gosden does) the extended intelli-

gence, where “artefacts are embedded in specific fields of action.” He continues, arguing that

while artefacts are physical things, they cannot be reduced to their physical existence (as normally hap-pens in decontextualized archaeological analyses). In institutionalized practices, artefacts are given mean-ings; they project fields of correct usage, they dictate future actions and they enmesh us into social rela-tions. To understand how material things are active—how their effective agency shapes human actions—we have to see not their naked skeleton, the thing itself, but the extended artefact, the artefact with its exten-sion into space and time. (Robb 2004:133; also Gard-ner, chapter 7)

What an unextended artifact is, is unclear. Philoso-phers with an interest in the nature of intention will perhaps raise an eyebrow at the idea of artifacts dictat-ing human actions, outside of the production of invol-untary responses (yelling when one’s finger is hit by a hammer, for example). To say that artifacts “project a field of correct usage” is problematic. In particular, treating objects as if they have active agency recalls a much earlier error made by the school of Aristotle in extending purposive reasoning from the sphere of human conduct out into the realm of inanimate objects—not just mysterious and distant ones like the moon and planets, but physically apprehensible ones, like crystals and water. In eliding the difference between people and things, we may end up with a parodic understanding of each. It is thus important not to overstate the case. As the English philosopher Mary Midgley would see it, taking on memes and the imputed social life of things, “stones do not have pur-poses, but neither do cultures have particles” (2003:chap. 10.1). To be sure, Robb, noting a distinction between primary agency and secondary agency made by Gell (1992), stresses that he is not saying that things have agency in the same way that people do; material culture does not have “some quasi-human quasi-in-tentionality.” Materiality draws attention to what ex-tends “between habitus and action . . . where material conventions are formulated”; thus “humans attempt an agency of why; material things provide an agency of how” (Robb 2004:133).

THE TAXONOMY OF THINGSWhen Don Quixote, in Cervantes’s eponymous novel, is challenged by Sancho Panza over his insistence on wearing a barber’s basin on his head under the illusion that it is part of the enchanted helmet of a Moorish

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king, Quixote replies, “What looks to you like a barber’s basin looks to me like Mambrino’s helmet and will look like something else to another person” (Cervantes 2003:209). The theoretical boundlessness of such sym-bolic (denotational or connotational) something else is, according to philosophers of history such as Robin Collingwood (1981, 1993), and, before him, Heinrich Rickert, an essential feature of empirical reality for humans, because humans can accord an essentially infinite range of socially and culturally understood values to objects (Rickert 1962). Thus the operation of selection must be central to an investigative process in the historical sciences. Midgley (2003:chap. 13, sec. 2) asks, “Should Victorian railway stations and modern skyscrapers be taken as further stages in the evolution of the cathedral? Or are they rather new species, life forms that have competed with it and taken its place? Do they occupy the same ecological niche or a differ-ent one? In such cases, the change in purpose quickly becomes the central issue.” As Weber (1947:94) put it, “Subjective understanding is the specific characteristic of sociological knowledge.” This in itself is sufficient to indicate why memes do not appeal to most social scientists (Taylor 2001; cf. Shennan 2002), but there are other reasons too.

The impetus given by the Tradescants to the organi-zation of human fabrications as if they were botanical or zoological specimens, formative at the time for the nascent archaeology of the antiquarians, embodied a key mistake in classification that was not noticed until 1968 in David Clarke’s seminal Analytical Archaeology. Clarke, in refining his system of hierarchical archaeo-logical “entities” (attribute, artifact, type, assemblage, culture, culture group, technocomplex), noted that biological taxonomy was incorrect for artifacts which did not, like natural species, form monothetic groups in which possession of a specific set of attributes defined group membership. Rather, types of sword, pot, grave mound, and hill fort had to be more fuzzily grouped into polythetic sets where many attributes were common but, critically, no single attribute was at once sufficient and necessary for group membership. Thus it was necessary that an all-over-corded (AOC) beaker should be a vessel, but being a vessel was not sufficient to define it. The range of individual varia-tion, from elaborately decorated to simple, pygmy-size to robust, with a more or less marked neck, and so on, meant that the type was only properly representable through a matrix analysis.

As in biological taxonomy, Clarke’s scheme ran from real individuals through a series of higher-level

and nonexistent groupings. That is to say, “animal spe-cies” is no more material than “artifact type,” both be-ing intellectual abstractions with arguable degrees of historico-genetic truth underpinning their coherence as individualizable phenomena. Higher taxa become more abstract. Thus genera, phyla, and kingdoms have progressively thinner (if not always looser) logical co-herence, just as did assemblage, culture, culture group, and technocomplex. But Clarke considered that arti-facts were identifiable in terms of an analysis of their constituent attributes: the measurable, countable, test-able material qualities which eventually determined their group membership, echoing Aristotle’s contrast of matter with form which presented material as the substratum for form and thus for attributes. Skeuo-morphism, the transfer of features from one medium or technology to another for a variety of reasons (including emulation, the creation of proxies, and de-ception) was not examined by Clarke. However, from coverage in more recent scholarship (notably Vickers and Gill 1994; see also Knappett 2002), it is clear that it increases the conceptual complexity of attribute pos-session and further undermines simpler classificatory proposals.

TEXTUALITY AND AGENCYIf Clarke demonstrated that from an etic (or external objective) classificatory viewpoint, artifact types were polythetic, he did not sufficiently address the problem that the naming of them involves monothetic criteria in contexts of human actions and desires (the emic, or internal subjective standpoint). That is, if I want a mug to drink coffee out of, I know what it is I want, notwithstanding the formal impossibility of precisely defining this object. Should it be Styrofoam and lack handles, or ceramic and have a handle? Whether it is, and whether I mind, will depend on practical and so-cial considerations in a specific historical context; that is, although my idea of a mug might seem superficially memic, in reformulating it for each unique occasion, I exercise sophisticated judgments.

I might (although I do not) have a gift mug with “This mug belongs to Tim” written on it, thus conjoin-ing artifact and textual denotation in a concrete way. As the historical archaeologist Anders Andrén points out, “A special form of closeness exists when the writ-ing is found directly on buildings or objects. ‘Speak-ing’ objects are typical of nascent literacy; they bear reflexive inscriptions such as ‘I am a comb’ . . . inscrip-tions of this kind can be important for classification. An example is a special form of painted Maya pottery

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that has been classified as a vessel for drinking cacao, since the Maya hieroglyph for ‘cacao’ is painted on one example” (Andrén 1998:161; Postgate 1994).

Andrén goes no to insist that “As objects . . . artifacts and texts are identical, since all texts are artifacts. [This] object perspective may . . . explain why there are great similarities between historical and archaeologi-cal source criticism . . . From a social and economic perspective too, the materiality of the text is impor-tant. Writing is a form of technology and, like other technology, its meaning depends on who masters [it], for what purposes it is used, and how it can be learned” (Andrén 1998:147). Like Yoffee before him (1979), Andrén notes that the shared problem for all historical archaeologies is the encounter of material culture and writing and the complex issues surrounding whether artifacts and texts are fundamentally the same or dif-ferent, and if different, how or to what extent they may be translatable from one to another. The Egyptologist Barry Kemp has argued that the boundary between artifact and text is not always decisive. Formalized and nonformalized objects differ, with art, architecture, and text in one category and tools and food refuse in another (Kemp 1989; architecture itself being divided into preformal and formal).

The ultimate collapse of words and things is to view words as things and artifacts as texts. The idea of reading material culture has been popular since the 1980s (Hodder 1986, 1989) but, as Andrén points out (1998:145), most scholars admit or promote an essen-tial difference between words and things in terms of concept (Wainwright 1962:164ff.), category (McNeal 1972), surface (Klejn 1977), analogy or trace (Andrén 1998:145, with further references), event (Snodgrass 1985), communication (Shanks and Tilley 1987:85), culture and process (Leone and Crosby 1987), tradi-tions of abstraction (Netherly 1988), or echo (Murray, and Walker 1988). Andrén concludes that “in each of these perspectives the relations can be defined differ-ently. The definitions of material culture and writing are thus contextual, and at least some of the conflict-ing stances are due to the fact that scholars are arguing from different perspectives” (1998:146).

Andrén’s conclusion, although itself contextual, points up an inherent weakness which materiality the-ory exposes in many contextualist and post-processual interpretations. Trigger writes that “basic to contextu-alism is Hodder’s ethnographically well-documented claim that material culture is not merely a reflection of ecological adaptation or sociopolitical organization but also an active element in group relations that can

be used to disguise as well as to reflect social relations” (Trigger 1989:348; also see Hodder 1987). One way of understanding this would be to say that Hodder opens the way for us to see artifacts, like words, as having a capacity for misrepresentation and deception.

In general, post-processualism tended to use a tex-tual model for understanding material culture, and tended to reinforce the discrepancy between the mate-rial and the ideal: “Far from being given an active role . . . the material world [was] reduced to a mere substra-tum to which concepts emerging from a higher plane may be attached. Objects [were] pawns in a more important game where what really matters are con-cepts, symbols, ideologies and human agents” writes Boivin (2004:63). The reality, as Andrén understands it, is that “the strengths and weaknesses of material culture and writing are due to their different refer-ences and hence their different structure . . . since all oral presentation is linear in both time and space, the text must also preserve this linearity . . . Artifacts, in contrast, are the world in a wholly different way from texts. The strength of material culture is in fact the very materiality of artifacts, or their form and position in space . . . it is rarely possible to decipher artifacts in the same semantic way as texts” (Andrén 1998:148ff.). This observation suggests that we may face special ter-minological problems in formulating interpretations of artifacts as somewhere between words and things (e.g., as engraved mnemonic devices serving a non- or preliterate society; Lillios 2003).

THE INFLUENCE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGYWords are the proper extensions of objects as appre-hended in a cultural domain, as they ground the clas-sification systems without which judgments of value could not be made. But, just as there are many types of word, so there are many types of cultural objects, and many subtypes among the material subsection of cultural objects we term artifacts. Childe paid par-ticular attention to the distinction between functional tools that, due to their utility, could diffuse relatively easily between cultures at the level of the techno-com-plex, and local traditions in ornamentation and dec-oration that expressed ethnicity (Childe 1933:197f.; see also Jones, chapter 19). Childe later nuanced this idea as he came to realize the extent to which envi-ronmental adaptation was adaptation to both a pro-jected idea and a negotiation with rival social entities (Childe 1949:22; 1951:176). Other approaches have distinguished expressive artifacts from passive ones or

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have used Peirce’s semiotic classifications of symbolic, iconic, and index, and Panofsky’s distinctions between the icongraphic and iconological, to distinguish levels of meaning that artifacts may synchronously project (Taylor 1987, 1994; cf. Peirce 1955; Panofsky 1939).

What is at issue here is how different modes of apprehension come into existence at once, or in a contrary order to the one which we claim a posteri-ori. Lev Vygotsky argued that thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them (Vygotsky 1978, 1986). Before him, the anthro-pologist R. R. Marett wrote that religion was “not so much thought out as danced out” (Marett 1914; Taylor 2002:307). In a recent paper and a subsequent contri-bution to his coedited volume on materiality theory, Colin Renfrew develops a comparable line of thinking around the slogan “symbol before concept” (Renfrew 2001; 2004). To this way of thinking, “the efficacity of the knowingly-utilized artefact in the engagement process was seen as prior to the purely mental ration-alization or conceptualization of that utility” (Renfrew 2004:23).

What this points to is the ‘situated cognition’ theory of the experimental psychologist J. J. Gibson (1979); an example of what this entails in practice is the way in which, as Matthew Johnson argues, changes in English houses preceded and partly created Puri-tanism as a conscious, text-based ideology (Johnson 1993:78ff). Knappett provides a useful discussion of how Gibson’s concept counters essentially Cartesian, representationalist views of cognition (such as that of Peirce), noting that “the connections between mind and matter must be viewed in relational terms” (Knap-pett 2004:45) and Malafouris talks of the “constitu-tive intertwining of cognition with material culture” (Malafouris 2004:57).

This brings us to a very delicate point. In terms of the causal entities we are now considering, and the ways in which agency might be understood. It is usually thought that our idea of ourselves as agents is acquired experientially. Collingwood (so far the only significant philosopher who was also a practis-ing archaeologist) argued that primitive understand-ings of causality arose from the experience of agency (Collingwood 1940). That is, causation in nature was understood either as the will of powerful gods, or of the animistic properties of things themselves (amber wanting to flicker with static sparks, mountains decid-ing to unleash rock falls). It is possible to see that even if archaeologists do not attribute agency to things, those who made the things may well have done so, and

an emic understanding of intention and response in relation to the artifact world must take this on board.

SUBJECTS, OBJECTS, AND AGENTSAs we have already seen, there is a strand of material-ity thinking that does indeed ascribe a kind of agency to things, in what might easily be misunderstood as a philosophically retrograde step. Significant here is the recent work of the anthropological aestheticist Alfred Gell (1992), who has distinguished primary from sec-ondary agency, ascribable to people and things respec-tively. Chris Gosden, for example, in a study of Maori meeting houses in the Marquesas, presents a view of materiality in which the relationship between individ-uals and artifacts brings into being an “extended intel-ligence” of “distributed personhood.” Gosden argues that “a Maori meeting house is a materialization of the group’s power and intentions to affect others.” He goes on to say that “the idea of distributed personhood, where individual or group agency exists through the things that people have made and which are active in the social world, extends the embodied self out through a network of material culture. Distributed personhood has been partly used to critique western views of the individual, but also gives an active role to material culture in the shaping of the social world” (Gosden 2004:36f).

Gosden cites (via Damasio 2000) Spinoza’s con-cept of the mind as the idea of the body to justify the concept of the extended mind through artifacts and hence the concept of distributed people, but dissent from this view is possible. Collectivist perceptions are not definitionally non-Western (consider medieval guilds with their emblemata, or Russian soviets, or Nazi Gauen); neither does the West have a monopoly on recognizing the primacy of individual experience (when the British formally introduced the concept of collective punishment in the 1950s to postimperial Malaya, it met with great hostility among the Chi-nese population—the section that might perhaps have been thought of as most collectivized—because it den-igrated individual rights and duties).

It is an a priori truth that personhood must be individually experienced, however distributed its ma-terial symbols may seem to be. That does not mean accepting the concept of the solitary Hobbesian (and implicitly male) individual: Wittgenstein’s assertion that there can be no such thing as a private language (Canfield 1996; Wittgenstein 1967), Sartre’s formula-tion of the person as group member (the mediating third, distinguished from both individual praxis and

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the practico-inert; Sartre 1976; see below), and the development of an ethics of care within, especially feminist philosophy, all develop the idea of commu-nity without reduction to the cipher of collective con-sciousness.

It is reasonable to assume that becoming a human subject, while culturally mediated, is a universal pro-cess that typically entails becoming aware of oneself as a discrete entity and a locus of consciousness and sensation. Of course, it is possible to argue that such a claim is ethnocentric and conditioned by a tradition of Western individualism, and Gosden is surely right to remark that “various cultures make different use of our common bodily apparatus, so that it must. In some way, render up a slightly different world” (Gos-den 2004:37; Strang 2005). But the qualifier “slightly” must be maintained. Certainly the espousal of strongly collectivist models of agency, responsibility, and duty in, for example, a defense of the legitimacy and com-munal benefit of child sacrifice in modern South Africa (Ngubane 1986), run counter to most understandings of human rights and humane ethics, and are uncon-vincing in their own terms (Taylor 2002:8f).

In principle, there is no problem in pausing to re-flect on where loci of agency may be, or in considering whether these loci are hierarchized. On the other hand, it is hard to see that things in themselves can be active in the social world. Planting a national flag and leav-ing it or taking it down and burning it are both acts informed by intentions and, ultimately, by a complex mix of contingency and individual decision making. A flag cannot act, although with enough wind it will wave, and in a strict sense groups cannot have inten-tions, there being no locus of consciousness that can answer for them; they can, of course, act intentionally. Like (but perhaps not just like) the scent marking of a badger tunnel, a flag raising is an index of a particular kind of presence, perceivable in isolation as a state-ment of intent by active agents in relation to territory. These active agents may have acted in concert to raise a flag or make a tunnel, as a result of a significant co-incidence of intentions among a significant number of members.

MATERIALITY AND OBJECTIFICATIONWhat distributed personhood may legitimately draw our attention to is the distinction between multiplex and monoplex societies (rather than Western and non-Western ones). Monoplex relationships are single-stranded and typical of modern commodified and fiscally based societies, while multiplex relationships

predominate where customary duties exist in con-nection with tightly controlled kinship and residence patterns within subsistence societies. Marcel Mauss’s famous description of exchange within the kula ring system, where “objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them” (Mauss 1990:31), is germane here. Mauss describes a situation in which there is a deliberate hypostasation of individual iden-tity outward into possessions that are given, and where to present is also to request, and to accept is also to commit.

The “life histories” of artifacts in the kula system were well known, and some had more important ge-nealogies than others. Thus there is also an implica-tion of identity transfer from people to things, to the point where the inanimate (as they seem to us) mate-rial items are thought to harbor a form of soul and have a degree of human integrity and purposiveness to their circulation and the luck consequent on their, always temporary, stewardship (the spirit of the gift). On the other hand, it is possible to analyze the kula exchange in terms of the classic economic theories of the Vienna school of praxeology. Ludwig von Mises’s idea of catallactics, in which it is normal that people should desire each other’s possessions more than their own, and be prepared to swap them to improve their own satisfaction in a sequence of moves governed by a slow attenuation of desire (the rule of diminishing marginal utility; Mises 1978), could provide a fairly coherent etic description of Mauss’s case.

In an article called “Materialism and an Archaeol-ogy of Dissonance,” in a section entitled “The Mate-riality of Subjective Experience,” Christopher Tilley connects materiality to subjectivity, saying that “it is only through accepting the materiality of our social context, where we are at and where we are going, that any archaeology is possible” (Tilley 1991). He then gives an example of “working with our subjectivity to understand something outside it through a dialogic encounter” in the following terms: “the cross-cultural generalization of much ‘scientific’ archaeology rep-resents an idealism because it either does not respect context or selects from it in an unacceptable manner. If you take a series of foreign coins, grind them down, erase the valuations, faces, etc, they all become the same—pieces of metal. But what was important about them is, of course, lost. Abstracting in this manner ‘science’ in archaeology simply produces worthless base metal.”

Tilley’s logic here is hard to follow in terms of the agreed areas of materiality theory presented so far.

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What he seems to claim, under a materiality banner, is that the material from which coins are made is wholly unimportant and that their conventional symbolisms and textually-ascertained values—obverse and reverse iconography, dates, imprints of specific monetary value, and so on—are their only possible importance. Before or after defacement they could equally well be replaced by paper money or by a computer printout, the possession of which guaranteed access to the same range and extent of goods and services as the coin-based alternative. At the beginning of this chapter, I quoted Marshall McLuhan’s slogan “The medium is the message.” Coins clearly contribute to a habitus and, even when defaced, retain their materially distinctive “coininess.” Blanked, they might be placed in the eyes of the dead, or become tokens of types (pace Peirce 1955) in the pub/parlor game of Shove Ha’penny.

Beyond discrete form, coins remain metal, and the concept of metallic recasting and recycling without loss of prime material is a special metaphysical char-acteristic of the material world brought into being by the metal age. Renfrew’s comments on gold and its prime value (arising out of a complex of aesthetic, functional, and rarity value; Renfrew 1978) and later thinking on the Chalcolithic envaluation hypothesis (Taylor 1999, 2005b:193) are both relevant to this, as is Andy Jones’s recognition of the “spectacular visual nature” of metalwork that enabled it (he infers) to “replace the bones of the dead as mediums of transac-tion” (Jones 2004:175).

A CLASSICAL EXAMPLE: MONEY AND DEPERSONALIZATIONThe classicist Richard Seaford has recently examined the conceptual importance of the invention of money in the ancient Greek world (Seaford 2004). Although he does not use the term “materiality” at any point, his mode of argument and inference exemplifies many of the key aspects of this form of inquiry. Seaford begins by contrasting the customarily equal distribution of sacrificial meat to citizens and contrasts it with the distribution of precious metal booty, which was “inev-itably irregular, dependent on uncontrolled violence” (2004:40). He goes on to argue that coinage did not arise conceptually from the model provided by booty, but, perhaps surprisingly, “collective recognition of the symbolic value of standardized pieces distributed to all citizens is carried over from perishable meat to durable metal” (2004:146). From this point of depar-ture, coinage explodes on the scene: its convenience (as small durable pieces of standardized value) allowed it

quickly to reach a degree of acceptability as payment, and then become more and more generally acceptable (Seaford 2004:133, 140).

The intrinsic value of coinage as pieces of actual gold or silver was then overtaken by a more abstractly socially conferred value that arose from confidence based on quantity (thus negotiability) and the stamp and the state authority behind the stamp (thus implicit threat of sanction in cases of default) that combined to allow ease of disposal against the stated value: “the re-sult is the paradox that even coinage of unadulterated silver . . . may tend to become in effect fiduciary coin-age; although the silver contributes to confidence, it is not envisaged as a commodity” (Seaford 2004:145).

The “self-generating dynamic unleashed by coin-age” (Seaford 2004:135) involves the creation of a concomitant set of values. Money is homogeneous and impersonal, thus “money may even be seen to homogenise its users” by disembedding commercial exchange and making contracting parties identical from the perspective of wanting the best possible deal. Seaford sees that money was also a universal aim, a universal means, unlimited, a uniter of opposites (e.g., it can make a good person bad and bad person good), both concrete and abstract, and distinct from all else (Seaford 2004:chap. 8). He argues strongly that this manifold of novel values established ground condi-tions for absolutely fundamental developments both in philosophy and tragedy as an art form. For example, the fact of money leads to the metaphysical concepts of abstract being, as well as to the social idea of the in-dividual, for whom apparently happy self-sufficiency can turn to misery via a dual alienation from gods and kin (this is because money is both deritualizing and erosive of non–fiscally based commitments). At a less rarefied level, Seaford notes that “commercial prosti-tution is . . . an extreme case of the homogenisation and depersonalisation (rather than just the homoge-neity and impersonality) characteristic of money . . . It may also have been actually facilitated by the advent of money” (2004:156); such prostitution was often but one form of chattel slavery and, although less de-veloped in Seaford’s analysis, this general objectivized reduction of people to things under market conditions is a further facet of the changes he describes (cf. Taylor 2005a,c).

ECONOMICS VERSUS HABITUSWhat Seaford’s analysis does is to throw into a new light statements by, for example, Collingwood, who says of barter relations that a “real exchange is my

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giving up the eating of bread and getting the drink-ing of milk; and there is another exchange, that of his drinking against his eating, on the part of the person with whom I am said to exchange commodities. All exchange, in the only sense in which there can be a real exchange, is an exchange between one person and himself; and since exchange, understood as the relation between means and end, is the essence of economic action, all the essentials of economic theory can be worked out with reference to a single person” (Collingwood 1989:64). The issue, post-Seaford (and bearing in mind the different possible conceptualiza-tions of the individual which Gosden makes us aware of), concerns the extent to which we can accept a single person as an a priori economic actor. In a way, Mauss had already begun to nuance this in the kula.

Of course, conventional functionalist analyses of the kula, couched in terms of conflict reduction and economic lubrication between competing but interde-pendent island societies, continue to be possible, while it is often forgotten that Mauss also drew attention to the fact that, side by side with Melanesian ceremonial exchange and the creation of what we might term distributed individuals, a parallel institution called the wasi also existed, whose underlying rule was of repay-ment with interest (Mauss 1990:29; Godelier 1966; Küchler 2004). The values of the wasi look far more like the classic economics Marx described in the fetish-ism of commodities.

A central problem for all of us is to accurately gauge the discrepancy between our modern (and academic) material habitus and that of any particular target sub-ject of study in the cultural past. In a tersely critical comment on Tilley and Thomas’s interpretation of monuments in the Breton Neolithic (Tilley and Tho-mas 1993), John Barrett writes, “Who else would com-pare the ground plan of Barnenez, the skeletal human rib cage and one of the rock engraved motifs from Les Pierres Plates, other than someone who has spent too long in a library?” (Barrett 1997:124). This may be right, but the instinct to try to break out into another way of thinking is surely correct. Elsewhere Tilley has written, “Palaeolithic and Neolithic peoples, we are told over and over again, behaved just like us, ration-ally exploiting their environments . . . [Therefore a] pan-human form of rationality has to be presupposed. A materialist position understands, by contrast, that human agency is always constituted and this process of the formation of subjects and their desires alters according to time, space and circumstance” (Tilley 1991). Countering this strongly contrasted position,

one challenge of materiality theory is to examine whether interpretations of material patterning predi-cated on basic ideas of rational exploitation, whether in the Paleolithic or not, might indeed hold to some degree, taking account of the effects of material con-ditions, material life, habitus, and the tangibly real yet culturally classified worlds into which we are born.

THE ALLOWANCES OF BODIES: SEX AND GENDER After being born into the world we become new sub-jects, but we are also, from the outset, both new and old objects. New because we represent another mouth to feed; old because we conform to physical templates seen many times before: we are infants and we typi-cally possess sexual organs of one of two main types. This distinction between male and female is, like the existence of money, a little questioned reality that gives rise to a whole set of metaphysical categories, and unc-ognized yet specific types of explanation.

Maurice Godelier has spoken of the idea that ob-jects are things without which one cannot actually be a man or a woman, a police officer or a priest (Godelier 1984), or, as Daniel Miller expresses it, “objects may not merely be used to refer to a given social group, but may themselves be constitutive of a certain social rela-tion” (1987:122). The act of making things establishes values which are later sustained by their durability. Al-though things cannot themselves experience remem-bering, and thus have no memory as agents, they can embody and extend memory (Rowlands 2004), and thus serve as prompts to maintain those values (words, qua things, are the clearest example of this when they encode ancient laws).

In his influential study of the Berber house, Pierre Bourdieu described how the outside was plastered over with a trowel by the men while the inside was made white and hand-decorated by the women, so as to create a fundamental opposition (Bourdieu 1970). His description of this activity involves an important identity issue, concerning sufficiency and necessity, as well—not least—as the translation of terms (from Berber to French to English) and the issue (of great interest for archaeologists) of the extent to which a Berber house or houses became “The Berber House,” representative of Berber North African culture. The identity issue is whether the Berber word concepts for men and women are each sufficiently and necessarily defined by the material activity of internal and exter-nal wall finishing. If so, then we are presented with a classic situationalist view of gender where being, say, a woman is underpinned by a series of performances

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that are arbitrary. If these are performed, the per-former is a woman, irrespective of biology. Further, a different culture could reverse the performances in its definition. In these conditions we would need to be aware that we could only translate into the terms “men” and “women” in a metaphorical way. If, on the other hand, there is something specific about being embodied materially in a body that has, as around half of all human bodies exclusively do have, a birth-giving and child-suckling potentiality, then there is a sensible universal definition for the category woman.

If this is assented to (and it is remarkable how lit-tle attention has been paid to this in gender studies), then both female and male materiality are centrally (though not exclusively) important ways of being. The extensions of material culture can seek to enhance and deepen the extant differences between these ways of being through systems of gender apartheid. A commu-nity may insist on separate realms of female and male objects and their fabrication processes. Alternatively, a community may seek to negate differences of various kinds through inclusive sex-blind institutional and professional codes. What will not be possible will be neutrality, because the material facts of reproduction as a social, verbal, tool-using species do not allow it. That is to say, to move on from Foucault and Irigaray, although biological sex is a cultural construct, it is so only insofar as it is a medicalized abstraction, and an abstraction has be abstracted from something. Under-lying the science of sex is a functional model that cor-responds with an underlying reality (in which X and Y chromosomes appear critical) that has cross-cultural and ahistorical validity (Taylor 2006, in press).

Gender systems add to the underlying physical po-tentialities and restrictions of being male or female with materially generated ones; thus for (upper-class) Victorians “men’s clothing not only signified that men were serious, active and aggressive, it also allowed them to be so, while the heavy, constricting and com-plex clothing worn by women not only symbolized their frivolousness, inactivity, and delicate and sub-missive nature, but also produced such behavioural attributes” (Boivin 2004:65; with reference to Con-nerton’s 1989 critique of purely semantic expositions of gender-coded clothing).

In many societies the clothed appearance overtakes biological reality; thus, as Walter Williams points out, lesbian or gay relationships were condoned in tradi-tional societies worldwide not because of an absence of homophobia but because as long as one partner dressed as the opposite sex, no transgression was in-

volved. They were heterogender rather than homosexual pairings (Williams 1986; Taylor 2006, in press). It is not surprising, therefore, that gendered clothing may be a powerful aid in the naturalization of class distinc-tion, with important implications for the development and maintenance of complex social hierarchies. This is because “gendered clothing lends clothing denoting other kinds of status something of the force of nature. . . . Gender rules are extended into sumptuary laws” (Taylor 1996:225; Norris 2004). It is easy to see how the “gender apartheid” now discernible in the diets of women and men in the early Neolithic village of Çatal-höyük (Richards et al. 2003) would have linked to sex-coded space and utensil use and provided a template for other forms of social segregation in the future, each normalized by an appeal to apparent natural order.

SARTREAN APPROACHESIn a continuation of this line of thinking, centered on a reassessment of the meaning of the Eurasian Up-per Palaeolithic Venus figurines (Taylor 1996; 2005a; 2006b; 2006, in press), I have focused on the way in which the creation of images of the naked or bound female form in highly durable and static material (typically stone and antler) must be understood to correspond with a deliberate vacuum in male repre-sentation on the same terms. Ice Age male figures are found only in active (i.e., movable) marionettes, and in theriomorphic (part-animal) form as parts of com-plex painted friezes. In terms of materiality, the small Venus statuettes, far from being suitable objects of higher veneration (mother goddesses), actually adum-brate a category of being and assert difference. With their typical facelessness and often carefully carved genitalia, they are a type of agitprop for the female form as a category, individual women depersonalized to woman. Such inference is congruent with other data on mid-Upper Palaeolithic communities, which, growing to sizes of more than a hundred individuals, required additional resources to bolster cohesion. The binding visible on some of these representations can be compared to later representations of submission and slavery (such as those from the Roman empire; Taylor 2005a:figs. 1–2), and may also be symbolically reflexive. After all, these are fixed and permanent im-ages that, unless deliberately destroyed, cannot escape their own iconicity. The material is as important as the form: the same shape made in the evanescent medium of ice (and there is no reason why ice carving would not have been a facet of Ice Age art) would not carry the same durable message.

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The way in which the material cultural world can thus cement and even fossilize social institutions through its coded emblemata was addressed in par-ticular by the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1976) . Sartre argued that human agency produces a new realm, termed the “practico-inert,” filled with material structures such as houses, doors, dressing tables, and roads. These “are inherently liable themselves to place further demands on people and. In some cases, to sub-vert the very purposes they were intended to promote.” People can create new social institutions in an attempt to overcome these unexpected constraints, but they fail as the institutions themselves “ossify and join the practico-inert” (Baldwin 1995:794).

It is may be useful here to provide an example of how the practico-inert and human society interact at the level of the materiality of individual bodies. In recent excavations my team recovered a human distal tibia with a squatting facet—a remodelling of the bone uncharacteristic of modern Western popula-tions and thus suggesting a prehistoric date (calibrated radiocarbon dates on associated material are early Neolithic; Taylor, O’Connor, and Lord, in prep.). The bone is relatively gracile, suggestive of a biological female, and its significance goes far beyond dating. Due to the prevalence of chairs, Westerners no longer squat, something that has implications for reproduc-tive health. In particular, chair use leads to slack pelvic floor musculature and a consequent increase in com-plications in childbirth.

Both psychological and infrastructural knock-ons follow from this effect of the practico-inert. Maternity hospitals are now required as an apparently self-evi-dently necessary part of the solution. As institutions, they then bolster a medical executive and contribute to a cultural outlook that may be described as viscer-ally insulated, with implications for everything from food to funerals (Taylor 2002:273ff). Maternity wards are rarely conceptualized as providing a solution to anything other than a wholly natural problem. How-ever, the limits and possibilities in what appears at first as a natural process merely managed by culture, reveals itself to be as much culturally as biologically constituted because the “affordance” (in Gibson’s ter-minology; see below) of the nonhabitually squatting body is different to that of a squatting one. Tim Ingold has made similar points, including some concerning the profound cultural dimensions of the apparently purely mechanical activity we call walking (Ingold 1998, 2000, 2001).

METAMORPHOSIS AND METAPHORIt is interesting that Sartre, who used the slogan usu-ally translated as “man makes himself” in 1946, was preceded by V. Gordon Childe who, in his Marxist-materialist inspired Man Makes Himself (1936), wrote that “a pickpocket must regard from his professional standpoint electric light, the telephone, and motor-cars (if used by the police) as signs of regression. He will sigh for the dark and narrow alleys of a previ-ous century” (Childe 1936:3), although this casting of technological advance under a negative sign was meant ironically. (A recent materiality treatment that could be read while reflecting on both Sartre and Childe is Skuse’s 2005 study “The Social Life, Death and Rebirth of Radio as Commodity in Afghanistan.”)

Childe was fascinated by material transformation, seeing in it the faint beginnings of materials science: “How is plastic clay the same substance as the hard but brittle earthenware? The pot you put into the fire has much the same shape as what you draw out, but the colour has changed and the texture is quite differ-ent” (Childe 1936:102). Whereas Childe’s view of this was thoroughly etic (he immediately continues “the discovery of pottery consisted essentially in finding out how to control and utilize the chemical change just mentioned”), the changing perception of the world that was one aspect of the cultural reorientation that Childe termed the Neolithic revolution was to lead. In due course, to the formulations of Thales and Aris-totle, and the form/substance dichotomy with which Childe is so familiar. Curiously, then, Childe fails to notice that pottery must have been revolutionary not only economically, but cognitively as well—as exem-plar for a new metaphysical understanding of reality in the transubstantiation of wet clay by fire to create the rigid aesthetic of ceramic that returns to earth in brittle sherds.

This type of understanding may have been similar to the kinds described ethnographically: “The draw-ing of analogues between technical processes in which materials such as clay or iron are transformed through firing and post-firing treatments and bodily changes (i.e. conception, gestation, sexual maturation, death) and cultural transformations (birth, initiation, mar-riage, funerals) have been widely reported in Africa and elsewhere” (Rowlands 2004:201). This neatly re-turns us to the philosophic heart of the materiality debate: for some theologians, the soul is the pattern which is carried in the material body and which can persist or subsist by patterning another, perhaps im-material substrate after physical death has occurred.

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This ability of material things to hold a pattern, more or less in perpetuity, making them available for emula-tion in other media, or repair or renewal, is central to what we mean, fundamentally, by material culture.

CREATING CONSCIOUSNESSBasing himself on the work of Appadurai (1986), Kopytoff (1986) and Donald (1991), Renfrew writes, “Material engagement theory is concerned with the relationships between humans and the material world and focuses upon the use and status of material ob-jects (mainly created objects or artifacts) which are employed to mediate in the interactions between human individuals, and between humans and their environment” (Renfrew 2004:23). Claiming material engagement theory as a part of cognitive-processual archaeology, Renfrew asserts that a major use will be in finding a solution to the sapient paradox—the ob-servation that anatomically modern humans, around for nearly a quarter of a million years, only started to become sedentary and develop routines such as reading and writing in the past 10,000 years: “The emphasis here is in part a material one, but this is a cognized or conceptualized materiality in which the physical and conceptual aspects emerge together. The notion of engagement thus holds what might be termed a unifying and hypostatic relationship towards the dualist concepts of mind or thought on the one hand and brute matter on the other, and towards such other dualities as symbol and referent or signifier and signified” (2004:23; this is the symbol before concept argument, previewed above).

By inserting into Merlin Donald’s hypothesized cog-nitive transition between mythic and theoretic stages (Donald 1991), a material-symbolic phase to cover the period after the emergence of sedentary farming socie-ties but preceding the invention of writing, Renfrew’s concept is developed in classic Vygotskian fashion. Vygotsky believed that the higher human functions were acquired through the internalization of social activity within a concrete material setting. Acquisition of these functions was mediated by systems of repre-sentation—language and symbolization (i.e., objects presented as tokens). Vygotsky therefore believed that children only attain consciousness as they become encultured (1978, 1986; Taylor 2006a).

In a sense, Renfrew’s argument recapitulates this ontogeny phylogenetically, and resonates with the once fashionable theory of Julian Jaynes. It was Jaynes’s contention, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976:75), that

man in Bronze Age societies had “no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to in-trospect upon.” In these ancient societies the mind was physically not linked across its hemispheres by a prop-erly functioning corpus colossum, and agency was me-diated by instructions that took the form of auditory hallucinations that were, in turn, conceptualized as originating in a world of the gods. This idea, although different in its details, has close similarities to Donald’s idea of a mythic stage which held that, in the palace societies of the eastern Mediterranean, the idol or the statue was literally the god and had to be provided with food and clothing as if it were a genuinely living entity: “the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control” (Jaynes 1976:144). This world only broke down, and the modern world emerged, due to a series of natural disasters which re-vealed the limitations of the idol-based authority.

In a different approach to the sapient paradox, George Cowgill, in ‘Thoughts about Rethinking Ma-teriality,” a closing reflection on the other works pre-sented in the DeMarrais et al. volume, suggests that “the reason that modern humans waited so long to do things that they had the cognitive capacities to have done much earlier is that, for a long time, they had no good reasons to do them” (2004:277). He suggests that in low-density nonsedentary societies “such inequal-ity as there is seems to be based almost entirely on sex, age, and individual differences in skills, tempera-ment, and charisma,” thus “there seems little need to bolster one’s standing by use of meaningful objects” (2004:277f). Cowgill believes that that it is only with social groups significantly above 50 individuals that “asymmetrical social relations begin to offer the op-portunity to extract large enough surpluses from oth-ers.” At this point, lack of intimate knowledge between people as they are really (there being too many people now) can be exploited so that it becomes worthwhile to bolster charisma or natural dominance by obtain-ing “spectacular material objects that can impress peo-ple” (2004:278).

LIVING IMAGES: MATERIALITY AND AESTHETICSThe prior division of a linguistic/codified/ symbolic knowledge from a practical/embodied/uncodified/pragmatic type of person-object interaction is sim-plistic and unlikely. Cowgill’s suggestion that there is an underlying people as they really are, devoid of arti-factual props (or even, remembering Conrad’s Karain, devoid of their absence), goes against what materiality theory seeks to investigate (Knappett 2004:49). As I

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have suggested in relation to the Venus figurines, there was clear capacity for the creation of complex affec-tive objects long before the advent of farming, and not primarily for bolstering individual standing as a commodity fetishist. Rather, the Venus figurines acted in the more distributed way (pace Gosden), at the level of defining supraindividual entities such as men and women, perhaps for the first time.

Thinking along related lines, the Egyptologist John Baines has argued that the Egyptian elite protected im-agery and decoration with demarcations and rules of access to enhance their legitimacy and authority; this was more than simply symbolic. Lower social echelons understood that they were denied access to icons which were believed in some way to be the gods, which was why they had lower status (Baines 1988:206; Baines and Yoffee 2000:16f.). Developing this in an explicitly materiality-focused treatment, Lynn Meskell describes statues of Egyptian deities as becoming perfect fetishes through a process of concretization, animation, con-flation, and ambiguity, resulting finally in a situation where “control of the object by the person and the person by the object is unclear . . . a type of animated entity [that] comes to dominate persons and decide their fate . . . Material objects, made by human hands, thus transcend their makers, albeit through human intentionality and artifice. It is not simply the power of the invisible hand to decide fate, since the tacit materiality of the object has a force in itself” (Meskell 2004:250, 253f.; see more generally Holtdorf 2002; Sansi-Roca 2005).

Renfrew speaks of material memory as perpetuated engagement, as in the life histories of things. Thus the communal effort physically involved and recalled in making a chambered tomb “can serve to bring into being such a community, whose prior existence may have been much more tenuous” (Renfrew 2004:29). Such monuments are then mnemonic devices in the persistent agreement of, for instance, property rights in land. Artifacts serve as implicit memory, their com-plex nexus in any particular place and time underpin-ning the cultural habitus (pace Bourdieu 1977; and see Connerton 1989).

As prehistoric archaeologists, we may distinguish a rough from a smooth stone, or rough and smooth stones alternating in a stone circle, and attribute a significance beyond any perceptions originally present among the circles’ makers or their audience. This is a central issue for materiality—examining the agency of the contrasting textual qualities of modified natural objects chosen to create a symbolic and clearly deliber-

ately expressive monument. One line of interpretation might postulate roughness and smoothness in stone as contrasting symbolizing elements, or even concret-ized and archetypal embodiments, of gender-linked aesthetic categories.

However, the guiding principles of the constructors might have been quite different. The alternation of rough and smooth might have been generated from implicitly understood abstract decorative principles and thus be. In information terms, essentially redun-dant. At the same time, a deeper significance might have been attributed to the fact that one of the rough stones, identified to initiates and by the initiated (but no longer recognizable by us), was said to come from another entity such as a previous and smaller circle (also no longer recognizable by us). This stone could be identified with, or in a sense be thought to be, a clan ancestor, whose placing in an otherwise decora-tive scheme allowed a charmed or occult existence, both visible and invisible in the heart of a cultural landscape. Such a scenario is imagined here, but it is plausible in comparative anthropological terms: what is valued is protected and thus often hidden. Social power is axiomatically unequally distributed (if only between the generations in the most egalitarian for-mations). As societies become more complex, sources of social power may be occluded to enhance the pro-tocols of initiation through which cohesion, hierarchy and aspiration are created.

HISTORICISM AND PRAXEOLOGYUltimately we face a question of historicism versus praxeology, not something to begin to resolve into its constituent problem areas here (Collingwood 1981, 1993; Rickert 1962; Wylie 1989; Warnier 2001; Row-lands 2004; Koerner 2004). It is the old and still dif-ficult issue of whether there are limits to the kinds of desires that alter according to time, space, and circum-stance (if they are to be understood sensibly as human desires). “When people . . . speak (as . . . Montesquieu, for example, did) of the influence of geography or climate on history, they are mistaking the effect of a certain person’s or people’s conception of nature on their actions for an effect of nature itself. The fact that certain people live, for example, on an island has in itself no effect on their history; what has an effect is the way they conceive that insular position; whether for example they regard the sea as a barrier or as a highway to traffic. Had it been otherwise, their insular position, being a constant fact, would have produced a constant effect on their historical life; whereas it will

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produce one effect if they have not mastered the art of navigation, a different effect if they have mastered it better than their neighbours, a third if they have mastered it worse than their neighbours, and a fourth if every one uses aeroplanes” (Collingwood 1993:200). This is perhaps overly polemical and underestimates the degree of objective constraint some environments may place on human populations who choose, or are forced, to live in them; but the point has to be con-ceded to a degree. (It was also made by Childe when he said that societies inhabit not just physical worlds but “worlds of ideas, collective representations that differ not only in extent and content, but also in structure” [1949:22].)

However individual scholars attempt to resolve, avoid, or position themselves in relation to that central philosophical issue of archaeology (and whether or not we see archaeology as archaeology, anthropology, or history), what materiality as a movement can use-fully do in a disciplinary context is point to the fact that material embodiments of values have a particular importance. It is not just because all that archaeolo-gists have to work with is durable material items that they are important. The history of archaeology, from its antiquarian beginnings, is one of response to the evocative powers of objects and monuments. Deter-mining which responses are legitimate is problematic. The “affordances” of things (in J. J. Gibson’s 1979 terminology; see Knappett 2004) determined by us cannot constrain the range of values things may have, as Collingwood asserted. The issue may thus be what range of constraint on values may plausibly be ad-vanced. Thus coins will not easily become emblemata for the value of softness (although they could do so through a metaphorical extension of a term such as “economic cushioning”), and alternating rough and smooth stones arranged in an open-air circle are not likely to express the consumerist principles of a shop-ping mall (although aspects of conspicuous consump-tion of labor might be relevant).

CONCLUSIONThe development of materiality theory signals the resolution of some old problems and also indicates difficult terrain ahead. In terms of the future of the discipline, it is good to see old fault lines closing, for example, Renfrew’s recognition that it is time to move on from “the polemic and polarities implied in the confrontation of ‘post-processual’ and ‘processual’ ar-chaeology” (2004: 24; cf. Patrik 1985). But it is not at all clear whether, in its drive to dissolve dualism and

thus in Descola and Pálsson’s words, “account for the diversity of the processes of objectification” (1996:12), new fault lines will not open (Ingold 2001).

Common to many of the examples of materiality thinking briefly cited in this chapter are the conjoined ideas that the mind is extended through artifacts (con-crete memorialization in which things stand for ideas, reaching its most refined and abstract form in writing systems), and the importance of the secondary agency or social life of artifacts themselves. These ideas bring with them tricky philosophical problems. In classic Cartesian dualism, I will my legs to walk (mind-on-body) or I will my hands to move the wheels of a wheelchair (mind-on-body-on-artifact). Understand-ing mind/body in another way, as an approximate distinction hiding a nexus of allowances including free will (whose potential has variable genetic underpin-nings, and is developed, atrophied, envalued, and gen-erally culturally conditioned through habitus), we can attempt to understand the relationship between peo-ple and things in a more complex way. I say “attempt” because a significant challenge for materiality theory will be not to fall into a reductivist trap at the level of its own epistemology. Put another way, how, with those most rarified objects—words set in texts—are we to convey and apprehend insights of an enriched kind, especially those relating to materiality in nonlit-erate and perhaps nonverbal realms and contexts?

Bruno Latour, in his move beyond postmodernist conceptions, proposes that we “socialize . . . nonhumans to bear upon the human collective” (1999:296)—appar-ently to recreate society through a consciously reflexive molding (socialization) of materials. This, although construable as benevolently intentioned at a political level, depends on the same understanding of the situat-ing of the constraining powers of things that regimes of authoritarian type have (as I argued at the outset) im-plicitly understood. And, at a conceptual level, Latour’s proposal involves a kind of taming of Sartre’s practico-inert, robbing it of its distinctively “thingy” recalcitrance (the innate hostility of inanimate objects).

A pitfall here may be to dissolve what is special about human agency by taking the, at least partly, metaphorical idea of the “life history” of an object too literally. Nevertheless, the direction Latour takes in setting the society of materials on a par with that of the living dimension of humans’ natural history (people themselves), is one that allows archaeologists no longer to be quite so concerned about the fact that we study past and no longer existent societies on the basis of their material remains (a dualism requiring

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some kind of middle-range theory to decode dynam-ics back from statics, pace Binford 1983:19). In a materiality perspective, artifacts can be seen as social things that yet survive (incidentally eroding Clarke’s politely drawn yet never wholly convincing distinction between archaeology as a study of artifacts and prehis-tory as a form of history made possible by it).

Clearly materiality thinking has implications for ar-chaeology at several different theoretical and practical levels. At the analytical level (following Clarke 1973), the distinction noted by the Tradescants. In their cata-logue of what was to become the Ashmolean Museum, between objects that were Naturalls and those that were Artificialls, is again a focus of detailed scrutiny (Bradley 2000; Tilley 2000). In 1989, the third edition of Henry Hodges’s Artifacts (originally 1964), with its technological, scientific, “objective” descriptions of ar-chaeological materials, looked uncomfortable on the shelf alongside sociocultural anthropological works such as Daniel Miller’s Artifacts as Categories (1985). By the mid 1990s, change was taking place, with Gosden (1994) deploying the term “materiality” and archaeo-metallurgists like Dorothy Hosler producing studies that addressed the symbolicity of their materials (The Sounds and Colours of Power, 1994). The way in which materiality thinking, by being materials based, appears to be reintegrating some formerly (or at least since Childe) atheoretical zones of archaeological science into the heart of disciplinary debate is cause for opti-mism (Boivin 2005; Bray and Pollard 2005).

At the level of interpretive theory, materiality theory has implications of at least two types. At the contextual level, materiality theory revives old-style ancient and prehistoric art connoisseurship by emphasizing the importance of the tangible qualities of material and style in the creating of cultural life. By identifying the possibility of profound significance in small detail as well as in ephemerality, “consuming, vanishing, sacrificing” (Colloredo-Mansfield 2003), materiality thinking suggests new challenges in theoretically en-gaged field recovery, recording, and observing as in postexcavation recording and analyzing.

This means that materiality theory can impact di-rectly on field practice too. The philosopher Lester Embree has argued (1987) that archaeology was sec-ond only to philosophy in terms of the conceptual sophistication it requires for satisfactory work to be done—an observation which, if correct (as I think it is), has sat uneasily with a professional world of con-tract and salvage (rescue) excavation where a simplistic understanding of digging for evidence or uncovering

facts is still common (although see Cumberpatch and Blinkhorn 1997). The materials emphasis of material-ity theory lends it a practical appeal that other recent theoretical movements within the discipline have per-haps not had.

The second type of implication is, curiously enough, for the reestablishment of grand (or meta) narratives of a sort that the postmodern project, pace Lyotard (1984), decried. This is because the allowances of things must be constrained to have any sense. That is, how the material world creates and affects human subjects and communities of subjects, and how these work on the world, and themselves, is likely to involve regularities (Taylor 2006a). If this were (or is) not so then there could (or can) not be any such thing as a secure ar-chaeological inference. Yet identifying the constraints on allowances and selecting for relevance in a particu-lar archaeological context will not always be easy (pace Rickert 1962 and Collingwood 1981, 1993).

Finally, at a metaphysical level, the general impor-tance of materiality in archaeology can be seen from three aspects. First, issues of how matter is to be defined and thought about in its relationship to human actors have effected and been affected by the development of archaeology as a discipline. Second, the basic sorts of understandings of the material world on which philosophers have elaborated their metaphysical and moral positions can be claimed with some force to have arisen during the prehistoric period; information about them is thus obtainable only through archaeol-ogy. Third, given that archaeologists’ concepts concern-ing thingness and objectification are not independent of broader flows of intellectual thought, we can see that analyzing the archaeological encounter with material-ity involves a potentially acute reflexiveness. Thus our ability to discuss something called materiality has its ultimate roots not in Greek philosophy but in the first conceptualized encounters with physical material, that is, in the actual production of the first artifacts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSPart of the research for this chapter was done while I was visiting professor in the Department of Prehistory, University of Vienna in 2003, on study leave from the University of Bradford. I would like to thank both insti-tutions for their support and, individually, Carl Heron and Falko Daim. John Baines provided background on the use of the term “habitus,” and Anders Andrén pro-vided information on Hans Hildebrand. Both passed a critical eye over the text, as did Nigel Spicer in relation to Marxism, and both the patient editors and my wife,

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Sarah Wright. In relation to style, this thematic treat-ment embodies many prior debts of gratitude to teach-ers and colleagues over a considerable period. Here I would especially like to thank Christopher Chippin-dale, Ian Hodder, Colin Renfrew, and Michael Vickers. Errors of fact and theory are my own.

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