This volume comprises the texts of a workshop that took place at the UCLouvain in May 2022 that brought together anthropologists and archaeologists to present ontology-oriented research and discussed the impact of the ontological turn on both disciplines. Although the broad range of recent approaches with an interest in the material and a focus on solid matters are in no way a homogenous field of research, they still share some common ground. For example, they do not dismiss human agency but call for – more or less radically – a displacement in perspective, allowing a greater importance to the material world. How do we move from investigating people and/or things – with a preferential focus on one or the other depending on the discipline – to approach society or culture to understanding networks of actants or meshworks of beings, now or in the past? What does this theoretical shift in perspective entail in terms of methodology? How do we trace and document relations in a less anthropocentric way? Could this focus on relationality somehow help to build bridges between archaeology and anthropology?
1. Wading through a Flood of Information 7
Quentin Letesson
Lionel Simon
2. Welcome to the End Period. 25
Laurent Olivier
3. The Anthropocene: Deep or Shallow? 37
Christopher Witmore
4. For Want of an Anthropocene Archaeology 65
Laurent Olivier
Christopher Witmore
5. Making Ontologies with Reduced-Scale Models 83
Carl Knappett
6. Ontology in the Making or Ontogenesis? 95
Ludovic Coupaye
7. Ontologies in the Making 115
Carl Knappett
Ludovic Coupaye
8. 'Mindful' Techniques of the Body in Contemporary Amazonia 123
Laura Rival
9. Tentacular Thinking in Bronze Age Crete 145
Andrew Shapland
10. Between Realism and Pluralism 173
Laura Rival
Andrew Shapland
11. Exploring the Transmedial Worlds of Woodland Geometric Designs 187
Christopher Watts
12. Father Saint-Onge, a Missionary and an Anthropologist in the Margins 211
Marie-Charlotte Franco
13. Studying the Social Lives and (postcolonial) Afterlives of Things 245
Christopher Watts
Marie-Charlotte Franco