With the emergence of modern techniques of environmental analysis and widespread availability of accessible tools and quantitative data, the question of environmental determinism is once again on the agenda. This paper is theoretical in character, attempting, for the benefit of drawing up research designs, to understand and evaluate the character of environmental determinism. We reach three main conclusions: (1) in a typical pattern of research design, studies seek to detect simultaneous shifts in the environmental and archaeological records, variously positing the former to have influenced, triggered or caused the latter; (2) the question of determinism involves uncertainty about the justification for the above research design in particular in what comes to biologism and the concept of environmental thresholds on the one hand and the externality of the drivers of transformation in human groups and societies on the other; (3) adapting the concepts of the social production of vulnerability and the social basis of hazards from anthropology may help to clarify the available research design choices at hand.

A general interest in centralized institutions, state formation and prestige objects has dominated research on social organization and dynamics in Scandinavia from the Late Iron Age to the Middle Ages. Accordingly, a focus on kingly power, aristocratic influence, hierarchies and warrior might has dominated archaeological research designs for the last forty years. Subsequently, other perspectives have been evaded and their significance has been diminished. In this article, I use anarchistic principles as an analytic perspective and present examples of anarchistic actions – network organization, justified leaders and decentralization – drawing on well-known but ambiguous phenomena such as thing sites, the southern Danish defence system Danevirke, and migration and mobility. I suggest a perspective that recognizes resistance, authority and decentralization as well as centralization and institutionalization, allowing a broad spectrum of social engagement and interrelations to influence social organization. I will argue that human intentionality has been overlooked in favour of structures and institutions, and that the power of network organization and decentralization is influential in shaping social organization and dynamics.

In a recent intervention, Romanian philosopher and essayist Andrei Pleşu (2018) writes on the topic of destiny,

Arponen et al.’s paper is a timely discussion paper which raises basic issues about the relationship between environmental science and archaeology, and thus about the relationship between science and archaeology more broadly. My comments will therefore begin with a discussion of the nature of interdisciplinary research, as a background for re-evaluating the question of determinism in environmental research. Thus more recently we have seen a critical concern or even anxiety emerge over how to reconcile science-based and humanistic traditions of interpretation in a period of expanding importance of science-based knowledge in aDNA studies (Callaway 2018; Sørensen 2017; Kristiansen 2017). It raises the question of their relationship and of what provides good practice.

The discussion by Arponen et al. inserts itself into long-standing debates about the place of causality and determinism in archaeological interpretation. While some of the discussion might feel like retreading familiar ground in those debates, the authors bring a refreshing clarity of exposition to the problem, and more importantly they propose several promising directions for future research. For example, their exhortation to ‘see the human–environment relationship as always already sociocultural’ (p. 8) should be firmly established by now, but I agree with their assertion that this perspective ‘seems underdeveloped in archaeology’ (p. 8) and that looking to anthropology is one especially productive route for developing such a sensibility. In the following I wish to extend and respond to their arguments by (1) addressing how anthropological approaches might best be incorporated into archaeological research on palaeo-environments and coupled human–environment systems, and (2) highlighting the ethical and moral dimensions of this process as integral to it.

When first asked to comment upon the contribution of Arponen et al. on environmental determinism in archaeology – a red flag to many – I became excited that the topic is receiving attention again and, not least, that this attention is translating into printed debate. I commend the authors on their effort, also for bringing together multiple voices in their article. All too rarely do theoretical contributions translate into multiple authorship. I cannot in any way disagree with their key conclusions, namely that investigations of deep-time relations between humans and the environment are not just timely but important, and that archaeology should make full use of its rich array of data, cases and dissemination possibilities to investigate them and make them relevant in the present.

In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective middle-range heuristic tool that bridges deep theory and the data available to archaeologists. Our framework foregrounds vibrant things as opposed to static objects, and sympathetically articulates the current concepts of entanglement, correspondence and assemblage. To us an assemblage of practice is a dynamic gathering of corresponding things entangled through situated daily and eventful human practice. Once reassembled by comprehensively and critically marshalling all the evidentiary lines available to archaeologists today, the assemblage of practice becomes a powerful analytical tool that illuminates changes, continuities and transformations in human–thing entanglements, and not only their impacts on local and short-term sociocultural developments, but also their repercussions on phenomena of much larger spatiotemporal scale. Our goal is to present archaeologists with a pluralistic, integrative and evolving middle-range framework that pays close attention to terminological precision and theoretical clarity and is conceptually accessible and widely applicable.

We would like to begin by thanking the journal and the commentators for their time and attention.

On 13 November 2017, Yannis Hamilakis, Felipe Rojas, and several other archaeologists at Brown University engaged in a conversation with Alain Schnapp about his life and career. Hamilakis and Rojas were interested in learning about how Schnapp’s early academic and political interests intersected with the history of Classics and classical archaeology in France, Europe and elsewhere in the world, and also about the origins and current aims of Schnapp’s work on the history of archaeology and antiquarianism and the cross-cultural history of ruins. Schnapp and his interlocutors began by discussing Schnapp’s formative years and the intersections between archaeology and politics in mid-20th-century France. Their conversation turns to the role of individual scholars, specifically classicists and archaeologists, in the momentous social events in Paris in 1968. The final part of the dialogue concerns Schnapp’s contributions to the history of archaeology and the possibilities of engaging in the comparison of antiquarian traditions.

As in most European countries and elsewhere, Spanish commercial archaeology is a business model based on the theoretical and technical principles of safeguarding heritage that thrived during the 1990s and 2000s. However, nearly half of the Spanish archaeological companies closed by 2014, stressing the drama associated with the redundancy of its workforce in a mere five-year period and the threat to heritage protection and management. The current context of global crisis has impacted this sector, which is on the brink of extinction. This emphasizes the need for a new paradigm of archaeological heritage management in the 21st century. This breakdown calls into question the extent to which archaeology can generate initiatives of sustainable heritage management. By analysing data derived from an empirical study of Spanish archaeological companies between 2009 and 2017, this paper explores the underlying factors behind the collapse of commercial archaeology. In doing so, it contributes to the current global debate about the future possibilities of heritage management in a post-industrial context.

This paper expands upon some of the arguments and issues surrounding object agency that have been discussed in this journal (Lindstrøm 2015; 2017; Ribeiro 2016a; 2016b; Sørensen 2016; 2018). More specifically, it challenges Sørensen’s support of object agency in his latest discussion on the topic (2018). The paper is divided into three parts: first, it questions the relevance of replacing the conventional usage of ‘agency’, generally attached to sociological studies and reserved to describe human action, with one supported by the New Materialists; second, it identifies a series of contradictions in how agency is defined according to the New Materialisms, namely how it can be very labile and scalable yet simultaneously universal and applicable across all cultures and time periods; and lastly, it questions the quality of the philosophical ideas supporting the New Materialist conception of agency, and its disadvantages in light of the current re-emergence and repopularization of processual archaeology.

Scholars writing within symmetrical archaeology, or speculative realism, have lately claimed that archaeology should strive to grasp the thing-in-itself. This paper questions the rationale of this claim. It presents the philosophical definition of the concept of a thing-in-itself and a short presentation of its reception. The author argues that the concept of the thing-in-itself has nothing to offer archaeology, and questions why contemporary theoretical archaeologists show such an interest in this term.

Philosopher and physicist Karen Barad (2003; 2007; 2012) has brought a new understanding of causality to the academic discourse (agential realism theory). Inspired by this new take on causality, I problematize the argument that archaeologists ‘follow’ materials. I begin by challenging the act of ‘following’ on two counts (causality and universalism), and then consider the work of Malafouris (2008a) – a thinker whose ideas have the potential to remediate this issue through his examination of the ‘in-between’ humans and matter. I argue that, despite offering an inspirational approach to mind–matter relationships, the dialectical relationship he evokes remains problematic from a Baradian perspective as it is still rooted in ‘following’. I suggest that Barad’s agential realism offers a valuable conceptual framework for researchers who are weary of ‘unilateral’ linear causality and keen to move beyond dialectical thinking (Barad 2007, 214).