Archaeology after interpretation

This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The phrase ‘archaeology after interpretation’ denotes two things. First, it distinguishes contributions to the book from the intellectual outlook known as interpretative archaeology that characterized the early 1990s; in that sense, our phrase signifies ‘archaeology after interpretation’. Second, it highlights the elusive and changeable nature of archaeological interpretation. Archaeologists were introduced at a stroke to a diversity of approaches including neo-Marxism, structuralism, feminism, and a variety of post-structuralist positions. The modernist substance ontology of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ gives way to relational ontologies; essentialist ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ give way to relational identities, persons, and entities, in which dividing lines are not pre-drawn. The notion of material symbols reproduces a philosophical distinction between material and ideal, despite several attempts to overcome this distinction whether through Daniel Miller’s adoption of Hegel.