Material things are not just passive recipients of human categories, meanings and values, nor mere subjects of human agency. Their particular characteristics and behaviours are formative of human–non-human relations. The common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts. Despite growing instrumentalism in human ‘management’ of the material world, and the emergence of new relational forms, these patterns persist.

This essay argues that Romanization revolves around understanding objects in motion and that Roman archaeologists should therefore focus on (1) globalization theory and (2) material-culture studies as important theoretical directions for the (near) future. The present state and scope of the Romanization debate, however, seem to prevent a fruitful development in that direction. The first part of this paper therefore briefly analyses the Romanization debate and argues that large parts of ‘Anglo-Saxon Roman archaeology’ have never been really post-colonial, but in fact from the mid-1990s onwards developed a theoretical position that should be characterized as anti-colonial. This ideologically motivated development has resulted in several unhealthy divides within the field, as well as in an uncomfortable ending of the Romanization debate. The present consensus within English-speaking Roman archaeology ‘to do away with Romanization’ does not seem to get us at all ‘beyond Romans and Natives’, and, moreover, has effectively halted most of the discussion about how to understand and conceptualize ‘Rome’. The second part of the article presents two propositions outlining how to move forward: globalization theory and material-culture studies. Through this focus we will be able to better understand ‘Rome’ as (indicating) objects in motion and the human–thing entanglements resulting from a remarkable punctuation of connectivity. This focus is important as an alternative perspective to all existing narratives about Romanization because these remain fundamentally historical, in the sense that they reduce objects to expressions (of identity) alone. It is time for our discussions about ‘Rome’ to move ‘beyond representation’ and to become genuinely archaeological at last, by making material culture, with its agency and materiality, central to the analyses.

Michael Pollan recently published an essay in the New Yorker (December 2013) introducing the notion of ‘plant intelligence’ and how plants have evolved by virtue of their lack of mobility to cultivate and attract the resources they require. Although not using the humanistic language identified with ‘agency’, a widely used term most frequently associated with human motivation, action and accomplishment, Pollan lends his implicit support for the communicative ‘behaviours’ of plants and their own brand of agency in effecting change in the world. Veronica Strang champions this view for the role of the non-human organic world, but moves a step or two further in suggesting that the inorganic has its own sense of agency. And though she and those phenomenologists whom she cites attribute agency to all things, it is difficult for some of us to entirely accept such a premise.

I am very grateful to Miguel John Versluys for this paper, which raises several important issues that derive from current debates in Roman archaeology. I am aware of the context of Versluys's arguments as I am a contributor to the forthcoming volume Globalization and the Roman world (which Versluys has jointly edited; Pitts and Versluys 2014). I am pleased to be able to develop some of the themes outlined in my chapter for that volume (Hingley 2014b) through this reflection upon Versluys's contribution to the developing debate. The issues raised by Versluys are particularly timely since a number of younger colleagues have observed that the critical focus provided by what I shall term ‘post-colonial Roman archaeologies’ (PCRAs) is stifling innovative research. PCRA is the term I use to address the body of research and publication characterized by Versluys as ‘Anglo-Saxon Roman archaeology’ (for reasons given below). I did not attend the TRAC session at Frankfurt to which Versluys refers, but I recognize his observation that there is a genuine concern about the form and content of PCRAs arising from Roman archaeologists both in Britain and overseas. PCRAs have focused around two core themes: (1) critiquing the concept of Romanization and (2) the development of new ways of approaching the Roman Empire. Versluys suggests that this discussion has culminated in ‘an uncomfortable ending’ (p. 1) for the Romanization debate and his proposal includes the reintroduction of this concept. Taking a rather different perspective, I shall propose that a dynamic and transformative agenda is spreading across several continents and that PCRAs form an important aspect of this developing perspective.

Miguel John Versluys has produced a stimulating and thought-provoking agenda to reinvigorate study of the Roman world, with its myriad social, political and economic connections between Rome and the diverse cultures and communities that fell within and beyond the boundaries of its empire. He teases out the explicitly anti-colonial nature in recent decades of specifically Anglo-Saxon discussions of Rome and its empire in response to Romanization. He also sets these particular understandings of what it meant to live within that empire in a comparative context with other scholarly traditions that engage with Roman studies. He advocates both globalization theories and material-culture perspectives to reconsider aspects addressed by Romanization as a means of pushing the discussion beyond Romans and Natives, where ultimately it still lingers in the guise of much more recent perspectives, which emphasize imperialism. The critical evaluation of Romanization of the 1990s in the Anglo-Saxon tradition was not a unique process for Anglo-Saxon scholarship engaged in study of colonizing cultures, however. Parallels can be seen in contemporary Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the Greek world as well. Does this mean that the potential Versluys sees for Roman studies in the marriage of globalization and material-culture approaches can apply to Greek studies too?

As an archaeologist who ‘works’ with water, my experience has largely focused on the historical ecology of water management within agricultural landscapes (particularly in Eastern Africa) and I have only just begun to think about the broader materiality of water itself, but in this context I find Strang's essay thought-provoking and extremely useful with a great deal to commend. If I read it correctly, Strang's key premise is that water is ‘good to think with’ since it permeates all aspects of human and biophysical processes – thinking through water thus allows us to think across scales, from the molecular to the global, and to explore recursive relations at each level. At the same time, as an element integral to the physical/biological sustenance of all life, and also a core symbolic or cognitive referent, tracing relationalities of water within and between communities therefore also forces us to bridge common disciplinary boundaries and theoretical approaches. Thus at the same time as using water to ‘think through’ human–material relations, Strang also uses water to think through and reconcile different approaches within social theory. Finally, Strang's focus on materiality argues that water's immutable physical properties determine certain ‘universal’ and ‘non-arbitrary’ approaches to water – both physically in the sense of its management (capture, storage, irrigation, drainage) and symbolically and cognitively in terms of water's various positions in ideological regimes and its consequent uses in ceremonial and ritual life. Overall, Strang argues that the immutable physical properties of water induce physical and cognitive responses such that we should think of water as possessing a certain material agency.

Veronica Strang has written an excellent account of the fluid relationships between humans and the non-human materiality of water. The very idea of anthropology of water challenges our commonly held assumptions about water being just a material or economic resource (or, conversely, about anthropology being just the study of people). It holds that water is socially, politically and ritually constituted, while acknowledging at the same time that water also has an existence outside the human domain. There is much to agree with and to be inspired by in the paper, which is especially strong on ‘fluidity and consistency at every level of human–non-human engagement’ (p. 133). By virtue of the emphasis on that specific aspect, however, there are some aspects which are underemphasized, and it is these which I focus on in my comments.

Viewed from the perspective of early Roman Italy, Versluys's stimulating proposal is extremely thought-provoking, both with regard to the framework proposed and with regard to what we might call an ‘ahistorical’ approach that explicitly places a material-culture studies perspective at the centre of analysis. This proposed approach interacts in a variety of fascinating ways with the direction that study of the early Roman expansion and Roman Italy has taken over the last two decades, both in terms of research topics and questions, and also in terms of the academic and disciplinary setting within which they have developed. In order to stimulate the debate from the perspective of ‘the beginnings’ of the expanding Roman world, I would like to reflect briefly here on some of these potential interactions as I see them. Below, I will sketch the development of the discussion for early Roman Italy and raise two main, interrelated points.

The St Anthony's Day procession was caught in a bitter, driving rainstorm, accompanied by thunder and lightning. We elected to carry on to the church, despite the weather and the sense of threat. By the time we reached our destination we were soaked through. Locals were happy for the rain and all it implied, students and faculty to have shared the powerful experience which appeared to close an affective gap with our hosts.

Miguel John Versluys offers a richly textured essay in an attempt to resuscitate the concept of Romanization, which he has found to have been nearly flogged to death, to paraphrase an oft-quoted characterization of the Romanization debate in recent years. To be more precise, he argues that certain quarters of Romanist academia have ‘ganged up’ on the concept over the last decade or so and that others – the implicitly silent majority – have begun to stage a comeback in recent years. Versluys's self-imposed mission is to shore up the Roman resurgence with freshly cut intellectual joists.

It would be churlish (as well as difficult), when my own work is treated so generously in this article, to object to its thrust too strongly. But agreement does not make for much of a dialogue! Let me state my agreements briefly, then.

1. 1. Versluys has nailed the terminological impasse: ‘Romanization’ is far worse than Romanization, because it has all the sins of the former without its conviction. But I have less sympathy for those TRAC speakers ‘ordered’ not to use the concept by their supervisors. If they can answer the many criticisms made of the concept, and make it work for them on their material, let them demonstrate this. If not, they need to find something better.

2. 2. Versluys also seems to me quite correct that some postcolonial approaches have often ended up in an unsatisfactory anti-colonialism. Yvon Thébert (1978) made a similar objection when he asked whether Bénabou (1976) had decolonized the history of Africa in the Roman period or simply turned it on its head. Denouncing ancient imperialism, colonialism and racial and sexual abuse might make us feel more comfortable, but it does not improve our analysis. I would add that it has also allowed British Romanists to return to a very traditional preoccupation: rewriting the Roman chapters of ‘our island's story’ in dialogue with contemporary imperial preoccupations.

3. 3. Versluys argues that we should ‘focus on “cultural transformation taking place in the context of empire” rather than on “imperialism and colonialism”’ (p. 8). This too makes very good sense. But I wonder what the word ‘cultural’ adds to this programme? Does it operate to exclude the study of other kinds of change (economic? technological? agricultural?). I doubt that this is what Versluys advocates and cannot see the advantage of arbitrarily demarcating one sphere of life as ‘cultural’ and excluding discussion of other changes. And I doubt that it would be possible to do this in any case. How would we talk about bathing without aqueducts, engineering and hydrology, as well as euergetism, notions of the body and foodways? Or about wine without thinking about techniques of agriculture, exchange systems and so on. If the abundant recent literature on entanglement – along with Hodder (2012) I am thinking particularly of Thomas (1991), Dietler (2010) and Garrow and Gosden (2012) – has taught us nothing else, it is that we cannot easily separate ‘the cultural’ from the rest of life. Or does ‘cultural’ give holistic accounts of change a particular flavour? Or does it designate some particular Schwerpunkte for study? I have more sympathy with this position, but I suspect that it now obstructs more than it illuminates our projects. Now that ‘culture’ is no longer the final chapter of a book which has already dealt with conquest, administration, politics, the army, agriculture, manufacture and trade, town and country, and late antique decline (the traditional format of volumes in the genre ‘provincial history’), perhaps we no longer need to signal so strongly that culture is all-encompassing and can simply study together the whole set of changes with which we are concerned?

Veronica Strang's ‘Fluid consistences. Material relationality in human engagements with water’ is a highly welcome theoretical discussion regarding the role of water in society and social theories. As a discussion article, Strang's piece opens up a number of fields of enquiry where water empirically and theoretically challenges current theories, but given the limitations of an article there are still other spheres where water may contest dominant theories, and I will briefly address some of these aspects with an emphasis on holy water.

My essay is intended as an archaeological dialogue on Romanization in the sense that it tries ‘to creatively discuss what we mean when we say “Rome”, across boundaries set by disciplines or scholarly traditions, fuelled by new developments in other fields, and especially in terms of material culture’ (p. 6). Therefore it is looking ahead on purpose, with the historiography of the field (only) serving as a means to an end and not so much as a point of discussion in its own right. Resuscitating, repairing or refitting the concept of Romanization itself is not at stake: on purpose I talked about ‘reinvigorating the Romanization debate’ while not discussing the feasibility of the concept in the present situation (‘When I use the term “reinvigorating” I explicitly do not mean to indicate that we should continue the debate as if Romanization were either good or bad, or to question whether or not we should use the term at all’) (p. 6). The essay, therefore, is not so much about Romanization 2.0 per se, but rather about triggering a debate to get us going again or, to paraphrase Woolf's conclusion, to get us out of the Romanization/‘Romanization’ comfort zone. The Romanization debate indeed seems to have brought us a new canon of reference works and key concerns, as Woolf rightly remarks. I argue that we should urgently try to refresh the canon by looking critically at what has become received wisdom and by simultaneously exploring what could become new key questions for our field. Canonization should be a dynamic and ongoing process.

I am happy to see that my essay has generated a lively discussion, and am most grateful to the respondents for their insightful contributions. Their comments express varying levels of agreement regarding the agency of things. Vernon Scarborough revisits anxieties about whether agency implies intentionality. Using the term ‘agency’ is indeed problematic if we assume that it entails sentience or intentionality (and I do not), but if we define it more precisely as a capacity to act (upon), it is possible to excise intentionality from the equation. This simultaneously allows us to acknowledge the agentive capacities of things without proposing or implying a form of faux animism. Anthropology has indeed drawn imaginatively on specifically cultural beliefs and knowledges, for example in composing more relational visions of human–other interactions than Western science tends to allow (see Strang 2006a), but this is not tantamount to assuming that things contain spiritual presence, or have ‘their own sense of agency’.

Building upon the debate published in volume 19 of Archaeological dialogues, this contribution explores how, rather than seeing deposits as meaningful, we can move to explore the processes through which things and spaces become waste as well as the broader social effects of these processes in relation to elements of identity and sense of place. An extended case study of depositional practice in the early medieval settlement of Hamwic (Southampton, UK) is presented, to demonstrate how depositional practice caused waste, people and spaces to develop particular meaning in the emergence of an urban settlement, and served as a medium for the negotiation of continuity and change in the lives of the settlement and its inhabitants.

This contribution responds to recent calls to establish a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that will assign agency both to humans and to things. My case is that living and non-living things should be distinguished, and for archaeology to be particularly concerned with the ways different qualities of humanness have been constituted in the symbiotic relationships between Homo sapiens and other living and non-living things.

Exploring the relocation and reuse of fragments and whole artefacts, materials and monuments in contemporary commemorative memorials in the United Kingdom (UK), this paper focuses on the National Memorial Arboretum (Alrewas, Staffordshire, hereafter NMA). Within this unique assemblage of memorial gardens, reuse constitutes a distinctive range of material commemoration. Through a detailed investigation of the NMA's gardens, this paper shows how monument and material reuse, while used in very different memorial forms, tends to be reserved to commemorate specific historical subjects and themes. Monument and material reuse is identified as a form of commemorative rehabilitation for displaced memorials and provides powerful and direct mnemonic and emotional connections between past and present in the commemoration through peace memorials, of military disasters and defensive actions, the sufferings of prisoners of war, and atrocities inflicted upon civilian populations. In exploring monument and material reuse to create specific emotive and mnemonic fields and triggers, this paper engages with a hitherto neglected aspect of late 20th- and early 21st-century commemorative culture.

Drawing on relational theoretical perspectives in archaeological discourse, this paper considers how we can address the undervaluation of pedagogy and pedagogic research in archaeology. Through examining the relationships between fieldwork, teaching, and research, in light of Ingold's concept of the meshwork and DeLanda's assemblage theory, the division between teaching and research is undermined, and students and pedagogy are recentred as fundamental to the production of archaeological knowledge. This paper provides a theoretical grounding for resituating our current practices, suggests practical means for change, and highlights the benefit to the archaeological discipline arising from a revaluation of archaeological pedagogic research and an enmeshed understanding of archaeological practice.

The aim of this paper is to establish how visual narratives can be used in the social context of storytelling, enabling the remembrance of events and those who participated in them in prehistory around the White Sea in the northernmost part of Europe. One of the largest complexes of fisher-gatherer-hunter art is located here, dating from the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age (ca 6000–4000 B.P.). A number of methodological strands are brought together to aid in the interpretation of the art, combining Western art-historical and non-Western visual traditions that challenge our modern ways of seeing. The paper proposes an unconventional interpretation of this rock art, in which the prehistoric imagery is ‘translated’ via two short films creating the visual link between past and the present.

An increasing number of individual archaeologists, archaeological organizations and institutions are using social media platforms for professional discussion and networking, research, public outreach and community archaeology. Proponents of social media have particularly pointed towards their potential for transforming the means of networking and communication in archaeology, and challenging traditional disciplinary expertise as archaeologists engage with more diverse and active online publics. This article provides a theoretically informed critical discussion, pointing towards the complex barriers to equal Internet access and usage, which challenge the ability of archaeologists to use social media as a tool to democratize the discipline. It concludes that, in many cases, social media appear to have reinforced archaeological authority at the expense of genuinely decentred engagement or collaboration. The article acts as a challenge to encourage further debate and empirically informed research in this emerging area of archaeological practice.