This paper takes the form of a dialogue between an archaeologist and a sociologist. In recent years, interdisciplinary working has become increasingly fashionable within academia. The aim of our exchange was to establish exactly what implications this way of working has for understandings of material culture. Our methodology was simple, involving the ‘archaeological’ and ‘sociological’ analysis of two different objects. In undertaking this work, we hoped to bring about new or different understandings of the objects under scrutiny. The process was indeed successful, but not necessarily in the ways we had expected. Ultimately, it revealed a complex set of questions about how the materials of culture are conceptualized and understood, and led us to a renewed appreciation of the theoretical and methodological qualities of what we do within our respective disciplines.

In the last two or three decades, material culture as a topic of scientific study has experienced a real boom. Focusing on everyday objects, their contexts and meanings, material culture studies offers important approaches for several disciplines within the humanities. The aim of this new wave of research is to improve the understanding of social practices in a wider sense and thereby contribute to the understanding of societies themselves. Given this ambitious goal, and the wide range of disciplines engaged in studying material culture, the new approach will only have a future if interdisciplinary debates are initiated and succeed in making reciprocal benefits. In particular, the complementarities of different disciplinary methodologies should result in useful synergies. If material culture studies is seen only as a domain within anthropology (or any other discipline) then we risk it coming to a dead end (Bertrand and Jewsiewicki 1999, 181; Hahn 2005, 12). This is the larger context in which I see the relevance of the present essay and, before going into details, I would like to express my support to the ideas expressed by Garrow and Shove.

As the authors situate the discussion in their offices, let me also begin in mine. On my way home from the office there will be many things around me. They will mostly be familiar and go largely unnoticed. I will take my keys off the desk and lock the door behind me. I will walk along the corridor, through the swing doors, down the stairs, unlock my bike, and so on. Desk, keys, door, carpet, windows, stairs, lock, bike – these are all objects with which I interact. But do I necessarily notice them? As long as there is ‘smooth coping’, as long as these objects are ready to hand (Wheeler 2005, 129), then they remain in the background. These are not objects that hold me in their gaze; I do not ‘encounter’ them, in the sense of encountering, meeting or bumping into a person.

Do good fences make good neighbours? According to their account, Duncan Garrow and Elizabeth Shove each inhabit ‘neighbouring territory’ (p. 127) and are undertaking an exercise in ‘intellectual tourism’ (p. 127). In the process, they find that they live in ‘substantially different worlds’ (p. 128). It is not for me to cast doubt on the veracity of their personal experience, but I do not think it is representative of the state of ‘interdisciplinary working’. Disciplines do inhabit different territories, some are quite distinct; physics and French probably share few boundaries. Others -- archaeology, sociology and anthropology – constantly rub up against each other. Boundedness can be emphatic where disciplines are more ‘urban’, clustered tightly around specific methodologies and data; others are more ‘rural’, with a diversity of topics, methods and theories which are likely to overlap with other disciplines (Becher 1989). Archaeology falls into the latter category; there are wide differences of approach between prehistory, classical archaeology, Egyptology, historical archaeology or archaeological science. My impression is that sociology would also fit the rural description.

Garrow and Shove use objects to reveal larger social and cultural patterns, in this case – most ambitiously – epistemological and methodological practices of their respective disciplines. I think it works and I agree with their support for future interdisciplinary object-swapping.

As is often the way, a ‘finished’ article disguises aspects of its own production and gives an overly orderly account of theoretical and methodological moves which were not especially planned. In responding to our commentators and in coming clean about our own working methods we have some confessions to make. In making these admissions we continue what has by now become a conversation about matters of interdisciplinarity and about our approach to the axe and the toothbrush.

Tim Murray has occupied a unique, and at times contentious, position within Australian archaeology. His primary interests in the history of archaeology and theory made him ‘a luxury no department could afford’ in the fieldwork-dominated atmosphere of 1980s Australian archaeology, though he has since gone on to establish himself as a leading figure in both Australia and the international community. The politics of archaeology has also been a central element of his thought through both his historical work on race and his engagment with indigenous communities in Tasmania. The breadth of Murray's interests and contributions to the discipline of archaeology emerges very clearly from this interview and highlights issues that remain of central importance to the discipline.

Performative engagements with specific, culturally significant places were among the primary means of configuring landscapes in the ancient world. Ancient states often appropriated symbolic or ritual landscapes through commemorative ceremonies and building operations. These commemorative sites became event-places where state spectacles encountered and merged with local cult practices. The Early Iron Age inscriptions and reliefs carved on the cave walls of the Dibni Su sources at the site of Birkleyn in Eastern Turkey, known as the ‘Source of the Tigris’ monuments, present a compelling paradigm for such spatial practices. Assyrian kings Tiglath-pileser I (1114–1076 B.C.) and Shalmaneser III (858–824 B.C.) carved ‘images of kingship’ and accompanying royal inscriptions at this impressive site in a remote but politically contested region. This important commemorative event was represented in detail on Shalmaneser III's bronze repoussé bands from Imgul-Enlil (Tell Balawat) as well as in his annalistic texts, rearticulating the performance of the place on public monuments in Assyrian urban contexts. This paper approaches the making of the Source of the Tigris monuments as a complex performative place-event. The effect was to reconfigure a socially significant, mytho-poetic landscape into a landscape of commemoration and cult practice, illustrating Assyrian rhetorics of kingship. These rhetorics were maintained by articulate gestures of inscription that appropriated an already symbolically charged landscape in a liminal territory and made it durable through site-specific spatial practices and narrative representations.