Recent years have seen increased archaeological interest in the study of mutuality, cooperation, consensus and interdependence. In Scandinavian Iron Age archaeology, relevant works tend to treat voluntary cooperation as something different from and opposed to power. This paper suggests the alternative of the term ‘power with’, drawn from political theory, as a name for the power of joint action. The term is applied to an analysis of mound construction and communal feasting and assembly at Hundorp, present-day Norway. Hundorp is often presented as a centre of power and dynastic rule. I argue instead that there is much material from Hundorp that speaks of large-scale joint action and cooperation and less that speaks of hierarchisation and differentiation. This does not mean the place was not a centre of power, but indicates that power at Hundorp may have been jointly owned, representing communal ‘power with’ rather than exclusive ‘power over’. I do not dispute the existence of ‘power over’ in Iron Age Scandinavia but here I propose that the mounds of Hundorp expressed a different kind of collective agency.

The last decade has seen a significant change in the way the humanities have approached the study of botanical life. Termed ‘the plant turn’, this questions traditional views of plants as a largely passive form of life, seeing them instead as living beings capable of acting upon and with other elements of the world. This paper argues that such a perspective offers significant potential for the archaeological study of human-plant relationships. Using a case-study on the lives of trees and humans at the early Mesolithic settlement at Star Carr (UK) it shows that by viewing plants as active participants in past worlds we can achieve a richer understanding of both non-human and human life, and the complex ways they interacted with each other. It also suggests that by making more of this approach, archaeology can help address our own, contemporary relationship with the botanical world.

As of today, archaeological theory is represented by numerous simultaneously developing approaches. Some of them feature the ways archaeological theory conceptualizes the past. Others are self-reflexive and explore the political and social dimensions of contemporary archaeological practice. However, these different ways to discuss today’s archaeology rarely approach it in a holistic way, while recent advances in the studies of arts and culture, namely metamodern studies, suggest another perspective and foster looking at archaeology as a whole, drawing connections between the philosophical aspects of archaeological knowledge and the social and cultural features of archaeology as practiced by 21st-century scholars. This paper tests metamodernism as a theory capable of structuring and coherently describing contemporary archaeological practice. After outlining the most prominent structures of feeling of the 20th century – modernism and postmodernism, – it introduces metamodernism as a theoretical framework that describes the culture and society of 21st century. While this framework does not present any novel paradigm or suggest any new way of conducting archaeology, it aims to structure the existing practices more clearly. This paper explores the capacity of metamodern concepts to bridge posthumanism, actor-network theory, and epistemic scaffolding and reveals their logical connection to the structure of today’s archaeological research.

Contrasting Western views of colour as a de-materialised, abstract value, this paper approaches the technologies of colourant production in Mediterranean antiquity as the active processes of colour materialization by examining the late Hellenistic workshop found on the Aegean Island of Kos as a case study. The challenging pyrotechnological process of Egyptian blue production is the focus of this paper, which aims to illustrate the sequence of material transformations followed to create this saturated blue pigment. Despite the widespread use of Egyptian blue in the ancient Mediterranean world, only scarce archaeological evidence of production sites exists. The Koan workshop, containing an assemblage of successfully and unsuccessfully produced Egyptian blue pellets alongside amorphous lead lumps, litharge rods, and earth pigments, provides the material remains to study the pigment’s manufacture. The process of making blue in the context of this workshop can be broken down into two phases. The first phase includes the production of the initial Egyptian blue pellets and the second the further processing for the creation of different tonalities of blue. Bridging the dematerialised notion of colour to the material remains of production, this paper brings us closer to appreciating ancient conceptualizations of colour.

This paper investigates the excavation diaries recorded under the principles of a reflexive method, as defined by Ian Hodder and his colleagues of the Çatalhöyük Research Project. The primary goal is to examine their content and assess their epistemic value for creating a more robust and better-contextualised archive. This study defines such epistemic value by considering the information types found in entries, the textual format of diaries, their relationship to the project’s research agenda and usefulness for writing up excavation reports. Ultimately, this analysis is useful for advancing an alternative approach for reflexive recording, which takes better account of previous criteria and is unrestricted to excavation diaries.

This paper explores possibilities for recognizing and analytically using culturally-specific understandings of artefacts and spaces at an ancient Maya archaeological site. In the case study that we present, we use Classic Maya material categories – derived from hieroglyphic texts – to re-envision our representations of artefactual distributions and accompanying interpretations. We take inspiration from countermapping as an approach that recognizes the positionality of spatial representations and makes space for multiple/alternative spatial perspectives. We present spatial analyses based on our work at the Classic Maya archaeological site of Say Kah, Belize, juxtaposing modern modes of visualizing the results of multiple seasons of excavations with visualizations that instead draw upon reconstructed elements of ancient inhabitants’ perspectives on the site, its spaces, and usages (based on information drawn from Classic Maya textual ‘property qualifiers’). We argue that even incomplete information, such as that available for archaeological contexts, allows us to reimagine past spatial perspectives and experiences. Furthermore, doing so represents a move towards inclusion that changes our understanding of sites in terms of ancient experience and usage. The outcome is a shifted perspective on the spaces of the site that decentres the modern, archaeological vision, accompanied by a more reflexive awareness of the processes we use to construct our interpretations. We end with larger reflections useful for archaeologists curious about translating these ideas to other cultural settings.