This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the ‘meaning’ of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the world, which in turn provides new insights into the local mode of perceiving and engaging with the material world. The case of household spirits and human relationship with buildings is taken as an example. The archaeological material discussed in the article derives from the seventeenth-century town of Tornio in northern Finland.

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of the Andes are rich with descriptions of animated landscapes, substances and objects. It is widely held that these beliefs have deep roots in the pre-Columbian past, and archaeological literature on the Andes routinely draws upon these sources describing the religious importance of mountains, water, plants and animals. While this generalized sense of animism in prehistory is accepted, locating animism archaeologically presents more of a challenge, and like investigations into religion and ritual more broadly, often focuses on special object categories. Spectacular items of fine-quality, exotic materials, or restricted circulation are singled out as ‘special’ by archaeologists, while objects such as plain pots or tools are interpreted as mundanely functional. Further, animistic interpretations that lean heavily on ethnographic analogy run the risk of simply identifying traits in the past which match up with accounts from more recent times. Using materials from the Wari site of Conchopata in the central Andes of Peru, I take up the idea of animism as a ‘relational epistemology’ (Bird-David 1999). This view repositions animism as something that arises out of an ongoing engagement between humans and the world they inhabit rather than as a set of beliefs. This move begins to dissolve the categories of sacred and profane that are embedded in historical studies of religion. Recent shifts in archaeological approaches to ritual provide methodological frameworks for exploring how mundane objects may be transformed into sacred and further allow us to interrogate changes in practice and highlight variation in how animism was deployed in specific locales concurrent with larger social changes.

Despite great variability in archaeological and ethnographic material culture across North America, a handful of objects are ubiquitous in assemblages of different ages and geographies. These index objects are clues to ontological principles, such as animacy, that guide the interactions between Native Americans and the material world. The impact of relational ontologies on the formation of heterogeneous archaeological assemblages may be evaluated through analyses of index objects and contextual associations. To this effect, this article presents the outline of an assemblage-based relational taxonomy, where spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions are combined with object biographies, interactive roles, and social relations.

Both present academic theories and local native peoples' beliefs and practices are the result of complex colonial histories, and sometimes even evolved in curious interactions. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that scientific and local native theories are usually on opposite sides of the colonial border. In this article I explore the colonial and decolonizing potential of the ‘animistic turn’ in archaeology, focusing on my own trajectory of research. Following Latin American post-colonial writers on ‘border thinking’ (thinking from the border instead of about it), my account here can be described, in short, as a move from research on animism to research from animism.

In commenting on the preceding articles of the Special Section, this afterword elaborates on the methodological and analytical implications for archaeology of the ontological alterity of animist phenomena. If such phenomena are challenging because they transgress the conceptual coordinates of archaeologists' habitual interpretive repertoires (mind vs matter, materiality vs culture, etc.), then what might archaeology's response to such challenges be, what might be distinctively archaeological about it, and how might it compare to related concerns among socio-cultural anthropologists and philosophers?