Materiality and the Social

In this contribution I intend to consider some problems concerning material things and social relations, which arguably derive from the intellectual structure of our own discipline. Archaeologists, obviously, study the material traces that human beings leave behind them, and on that basis they attempt to understand past societies. Necessarily, this means that we are placed in the position of having to reflect on the relationship between the social and the material, because this directly affects the kinds of statement which we can legitimately make about the past.