Amidst a high-profile ecoclimate crisis, archaeology is rightly revisiting its relationship with ecology and seeking to orient its work towards pressing environmental concerns. Compelling proposals have been made for the potential of archaeological science to directly inform ecological problems and practices. We consider the strengths of and challenges for these scientific approaches here, alongside raising the prospect that archaeology can also harness less tangible analytical strengths – its expertise in human–landscape relationships (people in nature) and in landscape change (time) in attending to wider, but equally important, correlates of an ecological emergency.

Taking into consideration the socio-political history and politics of identity in Latin America, Indigenous peoples’ current demands and the contemporary context of pressure on Indigenous territories from powerful groups who deny and challenge Indigenous identities and organisations in their pursuit to appropriate the natural and cultural resources of these territories, this paper argues for the necessity of an engaged, activist Indigenous archaeology in Latin America that is committed to the goals, claims and struggles of native peoples. The argument is that archaeology should move beyond critically reflecting on the discipline’s colonial history to develop a politically oriented and theoretically informed praxis that is in tune with Indigenous peoples’ project of dual decolonisation – the decolonisation of themselves and the decolonisation of the State. This praxis must be based on two principles: respecting Indigenous peoples as subjects of collective rights and political subjects, and embracing interculturality. The paper offers four examples of the challenges faced in making archaeology available to the subaltern.

The work of Félix Acuto encourages archaeologists to compromise more strongly when it comes to the praxis towards, with and for the Indigenous people. Understanding archaeology as a practice oriented by the political stance of decolonization, Acuto’s work promotes making it available – through its knowledge, methods and techniques – as a dedication in time and experience to the projects and struggles of Indigenous people in Latin America. The goal is to contribute to the double decolonization that these populations are undergoing, via their shedding of what has been imposed on them by Western society and by the relationship that the state establishes with them – that is to say, arguing that interculturality is the way.

Despite the clear divisions in current archaeological theories, in the last 30 years a ‘new consensus’ is emerging; this is the recognition that materials can actively shape human behaviour and cognition. While this recognition offers major opportunities for explaining changes in the archaeological record without just succumbing to individual simplistic models – such as migration or diffusion, or acculturation or convergence – there is still a need to formulate a framework that allows schematising this new consensus into our classifications and analyses of archaeological materials. Our paper aims to take a first step in this direction by formalising some mechanisms through which human behaviour and cognition can be modified by the material world. Operating at the interstices between theories about material engagement, cognition, and practice, three mechanisms of transformation are formalised, i.e., visual enchantment, mechanical degradation and obtrusion. As a further step to integrate these mechanisms, we stress the need to factor in human expectations, the changing states of materials and contingent situations into our schematisations and reconstructions of human–material relations.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

To my mind, every Indigenous archaeology practiced across the length and breadth of the world is uniquely situated within its own socio-cultural and political milieu. In this respect, no processes within its practice are identical in nature. Proceeding a step further from Felix Acuto’s experience of Latin American Indigenous archaeology, this discussion piece examines the nature of the Indigenous community’s involvement in archaeological research within a South Asian context, locating the frame within Northeast India, particularly Nagaland. This takes a rather more interesting turn when the engagement constitutes an archaeology ‘with, for and by Indigenous peoples’ themselves who belong to a certain Indigenous community, who are either inside or outside of the participant community. Engaging local people in archaeological excavations has long been commonplace in Indian archaeology. In most of excavations by John Marshall and Mortimer Wheeler of Harappan urban sites, one cannot fail but notice the ubiquitous frame of black-and-white photographs – local workers clad in white dhoti and turbans, seen in various working postures and gaits inside the trenches, aiding in daily routine digs with brushes and brooms, circular trays filled with soil and occasional scatterings of pickaxes and spades. With shifting powers from the British Raj and Indian archaeologists now taking charge of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) after Wheeler’s departure, it is still disheartening to notice that such imageries continue to persist in numerous field reports even within a post-colonial experience (for a critical appraisal, see Avikunthak 2021). What the images evoke is the sort of community engagement that the country has experienced for more than 150 years of Indian archaeology in practice. One may never know clearly for sure what the nature and extent of the local people’s participation in such large-scale digs was during colonial times, but this entices us to ask the few obvious questions – is such research made explicit within a participatory praxis, or can it be equally engaging and collaborative with equitable research aims? Or did such initiatives dismantle power structures and relations between local workers and the archaeologists leading the excavations? Until recently, community consultation and engagement have rarely been a part of the archaeological research agenda in India, with a few exceptions addressed by Rizvi (2006; 2020), Selvakumar (2006), Jamir (2014) and Menon and Varma (2019). Unfortunately, even today, archaeology in South Asia continues to demonstrate a lack of collaborative archaeological practice and instead continues to replicate colonial models of interaction with local communities (Rizvi 2008, 127). I, however, view the role of Indigenous community engagement in archaeological research as a starting point for decolonizing archaeological practice in Northeast India, particularly in Nagaland (Jamir 2024). Therefore, to underscore a contrast, I wish to draw a few case examples from the region of Northeast India.

Acuto’s manuscript is a gateway to understanding what could be called ‘Indigenous Latin American Archaeology’ (or ‘Indigenous Archaeology in Latin America’). This manuscript summarizes several arguments that have shaped the theoretical panorama of Latin American Indigenous archaeology in recent decades. The first argument is of a historical order. Clearly, the construction of national identities in Latin America that began in the 19th century after the wars of independence set forward a programmatic agenda concerning the question of the region’s Indigenous populations. The core of this agenda was to eradicate Indigenous populations so that the territories could be populated with modern citizens. So once the new Latin American republics were recognized, the project of clearing what would represent the Indigenous background was undertaken.

This paper puts forward a new interpretation of Deleuzian philosophy for prehistoric archaeology through an examination of the ontology of prehistoric rock art. Whereas Deleuzian philosophy is commonly defined as a relational conception of the real, I argue that one must distinguish between three different ways in which Deleuze’s conception of the real can operate: (1) transcendental empiricism, (2) simulacrum and (3) prehistory. This distinction is dependent upon the different ways in which the realm of virtuality and the realm of actuality can relate to one another. In the case of prehistoric rock art, we are dealing with a non-hierarchical relation between virtual and actual in which there is a simultaneous movement from virtual to actual, and from actual to virtual. This is distinct from a relational conception of the real, which is based on the loss of distinction between virtual and actual. Through an analysis of the cup-and-ring rock art of Neolithic Britain and the cave art of Upper Palaeolithic Europe, I argue that it was in prehistoric rock art and not in modern art that the true ontological condition of art manifested itself.

Indigenous archaeology and archaeology of Indigeneity are paramount in the contemporary world. We certainly need more of it across the archaeological scale and across the archaeological globe. Archaeology’s unhealthy attachment to colonialism, colonial administration and imperialism keeps on affecting our discipline on all levels. It is therefore encouraging to read Felix Acuto’s call for an engaged and activist Indigenous archaeology of Latin America. It is certainly needed, but depressing to learn about the recurrent atrocities against Indigenous peoples in Argentina.

Since the 1970s, the concepts of ‘systemic context’ and ‘archaeological context’, developed within the framework of behavioural archaeology by Michael Schiffer, have significantly influenced archaeological reasoning and language. However, these fundamental theoretical foundations have undergone few substantial changes over the years, and a re-evaluation of the notion of systemic context could prove beneficial, especially for archaeologists working on deeply stratified sites that have hosted human occupation for centuries, such as urban sites. This paper proposes a shift from the current understanding of systemic context to a palimpsestic perspective, wherein multiple systemic contexts are viewed as sequential time-slices. Each slice represents a living system within a specific time frame, varying in width depending on the accuracy of our chronological phasing. By replacing a single, non-temporally defined systemic context with a sequence of chronologically framed systemic contexts, each characterized by distinct cultural and ecological attributes, we can better address issues that are typical of studying urban sites from both archaeological (residuality, false residuality, phasing, etc.) and historical perspectives (rhythms of change, urban development or contraction, etc.).

I would like to start this reply by addressing the comments by Gabriela Chaparro and Jamir Tiatoshi. While their remarks mainly foreground their own research trajectories, I treat them as useful contexts for the questions at stake and as opportunities to clarify the scope and implications of my argument.

This paper explores a new direction for archaeological historiography by applying the Yale approach in deconstruction to a selection of archaeological texts discussing the Neolithization process in Norway. Focus is on the cultural-historical research paradigm and publications from the period 1906–38. The analysis discovers that scholars from this period did not consider foragers and farmers to be essential social identities in the past; foragers could become farmers, and farmers could turn back to foraging. Some scholars argued that farming was practiced before the Neolithic period, while others promoted a sense of care and awe towards prehistoric foragers. On the basis of these readings, it is argued that previous accounts of the cultural-historical research paradigm in Norway focused too narrowly on the social contexts of older research. A change of focus from contexts to the texts themselves and how they present the world can explore further the complexity of this research period.

This paper explores the utility of conviviality thinking for archaeological theory and practice. It first situates calls for convivial analysis as a response to the excesses of late capitalism and the existential challenges of the global Anthropocene polycrisis. The paper then highlights the critical, ethical and interpretive potentials of the concept to re-think human–animal coexistence, to frame new approaches to ecological conservation and to creatively reimagine shared multispecies futures. A suite of examples from hunter-gatherer archaeology and archaeological museums is offered to illustrate how conviviality thinking helps to challenge traditional representations of the past and contributes to an engaged, post-critical approach to museum and heritage practices fostering a fruitful dialogue on the diversity of species co-living. Conviviality constitutes a powerful lens through which to integrate theory and practice and to draw on the empirical strengths of archaeology, while recognizing the need to speak to a critical moment in planetary history.

This article documents the survival of gender inequalities in UK archaeology. We discover how an early equality and diversity agenda (Morris 1992) was dismantled in the late 1990s and explore the impact this had on women’s careers. Analysis of data from Chartered Institute for Archaeologists1 employment surveys for the period 1999–2008 enables a developed understanding of why many women, often reluctantly, left archaeology in their 30s, in a continual ‘leaky pipeline’, as volunteer group British Women Archaeologists was established. We find core issues linked to this ‘sector exodus’ as a gendering of tasks/under-employment, lack of support around parenting, and gendered promotion, leading to pay disparity. We argue that a refusal in the late 1990s to modernize employment structures around women workers’ needs underpins ongoing economic precarity in the sector.

This article reports from an interdisciplinary, archaeological and philosophical research project developing and using an analogue model in archaeological research. With prominent uses outside of archaeology, analogue models can offer a unique participatory perspective to prehistoric processes. As such the paper contributes to recent discussions in this journal and elsewhere on the role of games, play and gamification in archaeological research, teaching and cultural heritage. Our analogue model critically discusses cultural-evolution-based models of selected European Neolithic and Bronze Age models and develops a perspective based on the life history and the Capability Approaches. In times of climate and war stress, our model can offer a hopeful perspective of the human past, present and future without compromising on scientific insights.

What does it mean to teach and work in a corporate university with colonial roots, today? The on-going events in Palestine – what have been described by many specialists and international organizations as a genocidal campaign – have brought to the surface the historical undercurrents, the tensions and the contradictions of such an institution as a nested sensorial assemblage of actors, memories, affects and interests. Starting from the events that happened in the context of teaching an archaeology course on social justice while a student encampment was in place on campus, in the spring of 2024, I reflect on the materiality of protest, on teaching as a transgressive undertaking and on the retooling of colonial and decolonial structures to advance emancipation. In the midst of a rather dark moment, this is ultimately a hopeful reflection.