A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people's understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.
About the Author: Benjamin Alberti is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University and lectures in the post-graduate anthropology program at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. He has published on sex/gender, masculinitities, and anthropomorphism in both South American archaeology and Bronze Age Crete. He is the editor of a major collection of essays on ontologies in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2009) and Current Anthropology (2011). He has co-edited two volumes on South American archaeology, Latin American Archaeology (Routledge 1999) and Genéro y Etnicidad en la Arqueología Suramericana ( INCUAPA 2006), and has published research articles in World Archaeology, Intersecciones en Antropología, and in other books and journals. Currently he is researching anthropomorphism and notions of materiality in northwest Argentina.Andrew Meirion Jones is a Reader in archaeology at the University of Southampton and teaches in the MA program in Social Archaeology. He is the author of Archaeological Theory and Scientific Practice (Cambridge 2002) and Memory and Material Culture (Cambridge 2007) and editor or co-editor of Colouring the Past: The Significance of Colour in Archaeological Research (Berg 2002), Sculpture and Archaeology (Ashgate, 2011), Prehistoric Europe: Theory and Practice (Blackwell 2008), An Animate Landscape: rock art and the prehistory of Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland (Windgather 2011), Prehistoric Materialities (Oxford 2012), and Visualising the Neolithic (Oxbow 2012).Joshua Pollard is a Reader in archaeology at the University of Southampton and teaches in the MA program in Social Archaeology. He is the author with Mark Gillings of Avebury (Duckworth2005) and with Andrew Reynolds of Avebury: Biography of a Landscape (Tempus 1996), and editor or co-editor of Prehistoric Britain (Wiley-Blackwell 2008), Landscape of the Megaliths (Oxbow 2008), and Monuments and Material Culture (Hobnob Press 2004). Much of his research is focused on the British Neolithic, including work on depositional practices, materiality, aspects of monumentality, cultural perceptions of the environment and approaches to the study of Neolithic settlement and routine.