Archaeology's propensity to range across a variety of theoretical approaches, from the positivism of the new archaeology, through structuralism, post-structuralism and phenomenology, and on to the current concerns with the extended mind, network theory and the new materialism, and all within a period of fifty years or so, has been taken as indicative of an intellectual posturing that detracts from the ‘real’ business of doing archaeology (Bintliff 2011; Reference Bintliff, Kristiansen, Šmejda and Turek2015). This criticism seems, to me at least, to miss the point. All these theoretical approaches are no more than ways to think about the same fundamental question: why do we do archaeology? They allow us to evaluate what we are attempting to bring into view by our study of the material residues of the past. The means by which we establish the object of our studies are not the same means as those that we must employ to achieve such an objective. It has been the failure to distinguish between our definition of what we are studying and the question of how we intend to study it that has resulted in the various theoretical approaches appearing as if they were needless methodological distractions rather than the essential mechanisms that will open up perspectives on the reality that is the objective of our studies.

This confusion between objective and method, which is expressed by the assumption that the objective of archaeology is given by the current methodology, continues to have a detrimental effect upon wider perceptions of the discipline. Most outside observers, along with all too many practitioners, define archaeology in the banal terms of digging, the discovery of old things, and the physical analysis of those things (cf. Thomas 2004, 67–69). It is from this perspective that the history of archaeology is written as the development of techniques of recovery and material analysis. This consigns archaeology to the role of antiquarianism, the relevance of which for many contemporary concerns seems marginal at best. Such a negative perception surely contrasts with the more challenging view that archaeology could offer of itself, namely as an enquiry into the full chronological and global extent of humanity's place in history.

The distinction I wish to draw is between two ways of understanding archaeological evidence. The first treats that evidence as if it were the record of an absent past; the second treats the evidence as being the presence of some component of past realities. It is the same material, certainly, but the former approach leads to methodological worries about how the record should be interpreted whilst the latter approach can ask what the consequences of these continuing material realities have been for human existence. The kind of archaeology that I want lies with the second of these options.

Central to my argument is an understanding of humanity as an emergent form of life whose history has been one of fragmentation into diverse forms of humanness (Barrett 2014). The real conditions that should thus be brought into view by archaeology are the historical mechanisms by which particular human forms of life have defined themselves to achieve this remarkable, and at times catastrophic, diversity. Archaeological analysis does not, therefore, conclude its labours by uncovering a single humanity as the outcome of our studies, but employs our understanding that humanness has always been other and diverse, and has been, and is, brought into being within a network of real historical conditions. Archaeology should therefore explore how particular materialities made certain forms of humanness possible whilst also precluding others. Clearly such an understanding of the human potential for diversity is not without controversy, and this is the controversy that is debated by contemporary theoretical work. An informed debate concerning the real conditions that we are attempting to view must direct the design of the methodological means necessary to satisfy that objective. And whilst various methodological constraints, and opportunities, will certainly be encountered whenever we are engaged with our data, these do not in themselves determine the objective of archaeological analysis.

The actual conditions that have been available for the construction of human diversity are witnessed today as a surviving and very fragmentary material residue. Archaeology therefore encounters something, however minimal, of the actual conditions that facilitated the making of different kinds of humanness. It is this realization that we engage with some portion of the actual material past that takes us away from the common assumption that the object of archaeological analysis is a material record. We engage with a fragment of the actual existing reality of human existences, not with a record of their absence.

The traditional assumption that a contemporary material record (the representation of past processes) defines the object of archaeological study continues to underpin the definition of the discipline as a set of established methodological procedures that collect and analyse that record and convert it into yet another archival record (cf. Lucas 2012, 1–73). This process, we are assured, secures the empirical foundation for all archaeological knowledge about the absent past. Such an empirical validation is, however, much weaker than is widely assumed. The material record only gains its historical significance relative to the extinct dynamics that gave it its current form. This obviously demands that some kind of bridging argument be established linking the record with the processes that it records (Binford Reference Binford and Binford1977; Patrik Reference Patrik1985; Lucas 2012, 6–10), raising the obvious question of how such a bridging argument might be established. Four alternative lines of reasoning have been developed that provide us with very different kinds of relationship linking the material signifier with the humanly generated process that it is assumed to signify. The first of these is that particular categories of material represent the functional needs of its original users. Such needs are conventionally labelled by the tool, monument, or settlement categories to which the material is assigned by the archaeologist. The second claim is that extinct cultural traditions are represented by the style of the material and by some of the depositional patterns of the surviving material assemblages. Functional and cultural–stylistic attributions are distinctions assigned by the archaeologist, and they are distinctions that have been described by Dunnell (Reference Dunnell1978) as marking an irresolvable ‘dichotomy’ within archaeological analysis. The third and fourth lines of reasoning were those that were developed as part of the conflicting principles that distinguished processual from postprocessual archaeologies between the 1960s and the 1980s. Processual archaeology developed the principle that the various patterns of association and distribution of materials represented differently organized dynamics of extinct economic and social systems. These systems operated ‘behind the Indian and the artefact’ (Flannery Reference Flannery1967, 120) and the particular patterns revealed in individual cases were reduced to such general categories of organization as chiefdoms. These general categories were characterized by such high levels of functional coherence that no evidence would seem to exist by which to establish how such systems came into being or were transformed through time. Postprocessual archaeology, on the other hand, reasoned that past human agents employed their understandings of cultural values to achieve certain strategic ends and that these social strategies were thus represented by their various material products. In these terms different social systems were driven by conflicting patterns of social action, and these conflicts gave those systems an inherent dynamic (cf. Friedman and Rowlands Reference Friedman, Rowlands, Friedman and Rowlands1977). However, no available method will ever allow us to translate the surviving material products of those systems into the indigenous meanings that those agents’ actions had sought to maintain or to contest.

Treating the material as a record and the object of study, and employing different theoretical traditions to build optional links between that record and a now absent past, establish the claim that the procedures of the recovery and description of things are objectively secure. These procedures are, then, distinguished from the practices of historical interpretation that are treated as theoretical and transient. The reality of this distinction in contemporary archaeology is confronted by the way archaeological projects place their emphasis upon the demand to record the material residue, and the way in commercial archaeology that different levels of archaeological employment, security, status and remuneration operate across a spectrum between field technicians whose responsibility is to produce a description of that record in terms of stratigraphic relationships and material categories, and academics who are assumed to have the responsibility of interpreting the historical significance of that material.

What will it take for archaeology to operate as if its role were not to interpret the representations of the past but to engage with that part of the reality of the past that exists today? First it will require that we accept the object of archaeology to be those historical conditions that enabled particular forms of humanness to emerge. There is, therefore, no transcendental ‘human nature’ to which all humanity can be reduced (cf. Jones and Alberti Reference Jones, Alberti, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013, 16), but rather there have always been in history a range of possibilities for the ways the growth and development of humanness could occur by means of the entangled relationships between individuals, other forms of life and available material conditions (Barrett 2014; Reference Barrett, Kristiansen, Šmejda and Turek2015).

Second, we should abandon the strong distinction commonly drawn between biological processes on the one hand and sociocultural processes on the other, and understand instead the working of self-organizing biological and biomechanical systems (cf. Oyama Reference Oyama2000). This certainly does not mean that we end up attempting to explain sociocultural processes by their reduction to genetically deterministic processes. Forms of life are self-producing and we need to grasp that ‘self-producing’ (autopoiesis) describes the processes by which organisms, whatever their level of complexity, grow to maturity (Maturana and Varela Reference Maturana and Varela1980) by bounding and remaking their internal coherency through an ability to direct themselves towards those material conditions that provide them with food (energy) and security (Thompson Reference Thompson2007). This orientation by any organism away from danger and towards the niches of security and sustenance includes the construction of regions of social cohesion and is a conscious reading of the environment (cf. Kauffman Reference Kauffman2000, 111–14). In other words, life in general wins the possibility for its existence by pragmatically discovering a sustaining (i.e. meaningful) order among things. But humanness does more than this because it develops the desire to rationalize such a practically experienced order to reveal its overarching cosmological logic and putative origins (cf. Lévi-Strauss Reference Lévi-Strauss and Lévi-Strauss1966; Miller Reference Miller and Miller2005). Thus we arrive at a simple generalization. Humanness is the evolving consequence of a particular, self-producing, form of life's ability to process information and energy by finding a place for itself within some portion of the larger environment (Barrett Reference Barrett, Bergerbrant and Sabatini2013). The successes, failures and diversity that have mapped the histories of different forms of humanness have each played themselves out within the networks of material relations by which patterns of social cohesion, competition, exploitation and resistance have been constructed: archaeology's role is surely to establish the histories of those processes and to trace their consequences (Barrett Reference Barrett, Kristiansen, Šmejda and Turek2015).

Third, by abandoning the dominant metaphor of a record with which to think about the nature of our evidence we will finally shake off the archaeological obsession with absence. Not only are archaeologists currently ‘only too well aware that much of the material culture from the past has not survived into the present’ (Lucas 2012, 178), leaving only ‘a sparse suspension of information particles of varying size, not even randomly distributed in archaeological space and time’ (Clarke Reference Clarke1973, 9), but also the one absence that Lucas (2012, 178) believes ‘seems to haunt us the most [is] people as living, breathing beings’. But should we not begin to understand that the network of components that once afforded the conditions of possibility for certain forms of humanness, living and breathing, to come into being, still survives in an albeit reduced, fragmentary and material state as part of our contemporary world? And if this material is indeed not so much a record but a presence, then should not our methodologies be constructed accordingly? Rather than producing the description of an assemblage of static things, fieldwork could now explore how material conditions must have provided the means of sustaining the dynamism of particular forms of life. These forms of life moved, worked and knew their worlds from within the contexts that were provided in part by those material conditions. It is from this perspective that we can begin to see a new richness permeate the previously ‘sparse suspension of information particles’ of our evidence. But how is that richness to be brought into view? An engagement with an archaeological record often prompts the need to explain its formation. An engagement with the material conditions of human possibility on the other hand prompts the desire to understand those conditions. The issue of causality clarifies the distinction I am making between explanation and understanding (Wright Reference Wright1971, 6–7). Whilst explanations of the archaeological record are sought amongst the forces that gave it its current form, the construction of humanness cannot be ‘explained’ in these causal terms. Material conditions do not cause certain kinds of humanness to come into being, but they do provide conditions within which forms of humanness could evolve to find a place. Understanding arises when we recognize the possibilities provided, for example, by a particular topography and architecture that facilitated a certain sequential ordering, grouping and division of movements between people and practices, an ordering that might facilitate paths of access between various spatial hierarchies. And within these architectures, technologies of production, storage, allocation and consumption would have operated to manage and transform both living (including other forms of humanity) and mute resources into residues. In this way certain dominant forms of humanness have had the ability to grow within the constraints and opportunities provided by material conditions, whilst other forms have been constrained and extinguished.

Explaining the formation of the archaeological record and understanding how forms of humanness could have emerged in the material conditions that survive today in a fragmentary state are two distinct programmes of work. It is the latter kind of archaeology that I seek. This will require fieldwork to express the dynamics of inhabited space, cycles of production and of consumption, and the construction of dominant ideologies. To develop this way of expressing an archaeological understanding will be the most difficult demand of all, requiring expression through the imaginative use of the currently available technologies. The responsibility for this development will lie with the fieldworker, who will operate as a historical researcher rather than as the recorder of ancient materials (Andrews, Barrett and Lewis Reference Andrews, Barrett and Lewis2000).