These are interesting times for the exploration of the relationships between humans and other animals. The ‘animal turn’ is in full swing in a number of disciplines; anthropologists have started talking of the emergence of a multi-species ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich Reference Kirksey and Helmreich2010); and even archaeologists have, somehow hesitantly, started contributing to wider discussions within animal studies (e.g. see the recent – 2013 – special issue of the journal Society and animals devoted to archaeology; and Harris and Hamilakis, in press). Another indication that things are changing is the overwhelmingly positive response to our ‘manifesto’ by most commentators, who have offered many valuable thoughts which expand our reflections in many and interesting directions: we are grateful. Rather than trying to comment on every single point raised in this discussion, which in any case would have been impossible in the space provided, we have selected instead a couple of issues that, we hope, readers will find engaging and fruitful.

To start with, the degree to which all human behaviour has, as Mannermaa comments, been exploitation-oriented is an interesting point for future discussion. However, at the heart of such a description is the ultimately anthropocentric characterization of human ‘utilization’ of non-humans as explicit exploitation. The danger with confusing what she calls utilization (and which we would rather call engagement or interaction) with exploitation is twofold. First, in narratives of utilization/exploitation, one is put in mind of the idle shopper selecting ultimately objectified items from the supermarket shelf. The exclusive focus on the human extraction of necessary things from objectified animals negates the potential for non-humans to act, to act back, and ultimately affect human understandings, actions and relationships. In these exploitation narratives which refuse the agentic potential of animals it is unsurprising that the value or meaning of the remains of non-humans are, in Mannermaa's words, ‘dictated and created by humans’ (p. 161). An acknowledgement of non-human agency, as we demonstrate in our paper, enables the consideration of humans’ ‘utilization’ of non-humans in terms of the social, sensual and experiential relations that developed between humans and non-humans, which are in part constituted by the individual and sentient actions of the non-human co-relaters. Our consideration of the swan remains in Grave 8 at Vedbæk is one such exploration of the potential relations imbued within material remains. It moves beyond the reliance on human-imposed symbolism, which, as Mannermaa claims, renders the relative completeness of the wing ‘irrelevant’, and instead considers the roles and meanings specific elements and materials may have engendered, and how the actions of the other may impact on these understandings. This, in turn, highlights the second problem: in narratives of exploitation, in which humans are driven exclusively by the need for the extraction and acquisition of resources, the only type of relation that exists between humans and, in this case, swans is hunting (save for the subsequent, strictly utilitarian consumption of the ‘prey’). Such accounts only need to begin with the hunt, and usually only with the moment of dispatch, the moment of exploitation. However, in considering the development of relationships between human and non-human entities, as they lived, coexisted and co-shaped one another's lives, we are required to think about those moments that occurred before dispatch; envisage, in other words, a diversity of relationships between living, sentient beings, relationships that are not defined exclusively by the roles of the hunter and the hunted.

The consideration of ‘local-scale’ relations and engagements, as advocated in our exploration of the interactions between humans and whooper swans, presents a contrast to Mannermaa's call for ‘broader discussion of the meanings of swans for hunter-gatherers’ (p. 162). To what extent can particular relationships developed at specific sites be extrapolated to a pan-European consideration of the meaning of swans for hunter-gatherers? The mention of work on swans in Russia presents an interesting prospect; whooper swans are present in summer in Russia, where they mate, nest, raise their young and, potentially most significantly, moult. As a result, they are, for a time, flightless, far less mobile, and predominantly terrestrial (cf Brazil Reference Brazil2003); a close exploration of human–swan interactions in this scenario may have contributed to the formation of distinctly different relationships, compared to the winter sites of Aggersund or Vedbæk. A local perspective from a single site may not be sufficient to properly describe the wider relationships between humans and swans. Generalized descriptions, however, run the risk of homogenizing the specificities of interactions at particular sites, overshadowing thus the potential agentic impact of the very swans with which humans engaged. It is only when we define these specific, individual relationships at multiple sites that we will begin to understand whether the relationships with, or the treatment of, non-humans at any site represent the exception or the rule, in terms of broader narratives.

A number of commentators, most notably Argent and Pluciennik, have raised the ethical and political implications of a non-anthropocentric archaeology, an important issue that our original paper did not have the space to develop. We agree with them that a politically aware or a even politically sensitive archaeology cannot afford to ignore such an issue, especially since it is becoming more and more acute by the day, given the worsening food crises worldwide, the frequent health scares with regard to factory farming of animals, and the ongoing debates and clashes over experiments on animals and cloning. The ‘animal rights’ movement, of course, has a long history and counts a number of victories over these years. But, as has been noted by recent commentators within a non-anthropocentric philosophy (e.g. Wolfe Reference Wolfe2013), the ‘animal rights’ discourse often fails to avoid the homogenization that the term ‘animal’ implies, and which has been critiqued by Derrida and others; a homogenization that assumes the singularity and uniqueness of one species, the humans, grouping at the same time all other sentient organisms under the rubric of the animal. Moreover, as Wolfe has noted (ibid.), non-human animals today are not subjected to the same fortunes and fates, and do not receive the same treatment. Compare, for example, the pet industry with the factory farming industry involving animals: today, about 10 billion animals are killed for food every year in the USA alone (excluding fish and sea creatures),Footnote ¹ a figure that has doubled since 1980. At the same time, the pet care and pet products industry in the same country in 2012 was worth c.53 billion dollars, a figure three times the amount in 1994.Footnote ² Some animals thus have become ‘members of the family’ of humans and receive care and protection on par with them, albeit within a power relationship that, more often than not, treats them as property, and subjects them to control and domination. At the same time, some others, in fact the vast majority of mammals that come into contact with humans, live mostly in horrendous conditions, and are treated as livestock that becomes ‘deadstock’ (terms that zooarchaeologists also use) to satisfy mostly the carnivorous appetite of Western, capitalist consumerism.

Wolfe (Reference Wolfe2013) has suggested that the concept of bio-politics and of bio-power, developed by Foucault and expanded upon more recently by Agamben (e.g. Reference Agamben1998) and Esposito (Reference Esposito2008), amongst others, could be an appropriate lens through which to revisit the ethics and politics of interactions between humans and other animals: as with some humans such as undocumented African and South Asian immigrants in European countries today, factory farm animals are ‘bare lives’ who have been denied the right of zoe and of bios, the entitlement to a full social and political life. In the racist discourse in those countries and elsewhere, these immigrants are even ‘animals’, merging speciesism and racism, and can be killed with impunity, as has happened with many racist homicides that are never or are rarely investigated to a fruitful conclusion. They have acquired the status of home sacer, to use Agamben's term. Factory animals are also killed with impunity, by the billions. This has been the logical extension of the ‘anthropological machine’ that gave rise to the autonomous and omnipresent, individuated human being, the anthropos of colonial conquest and capitalist modernity. It was a process enmeshed with the ‘question of the animal’ and with the fear of the ‘animalistic’ that needed to be suppressed (cf. Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2014). A more powerful and politically effective stance thus would be to show the connections between colonialism, racism, capitalist logic and the entrenched anthropocentrism that render ever-increasing numbers of animals and humans ‘bare lives’, and keep them outside the frame of rightful bios (cf. Nibert Reference Nibert2013). In this affirmative and empowering biopolitical stance, alliances are created across the species lines, defeating not only anthropocentrism, but also its ideological and political supporting devices.

Boyd raises a crucial question: is it at all possible to overcome an anthropocentric position on the exploration of the relationships between human and non-human animals? Such a question is most likely to remain in the spotlight within animal studies, at least for the near future. In thinking of the task at hand, however, we too find Calarco's work to be an extremely useful guide, especially with regard to the poverty of Western modernist philosophy on the matter, hence our recourse to diverse, non-Western ethnographic accounts, and to our personal experiences, which, as Larsson here demonstrates, can be invaluable. Can anthropocentrism be circumnavigated as simply as just ‘letting go’ the opposed and bounded categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ in our narratives of the past (Calarco Reference Calarco2008)? Perhaps it sounds simplistic, but why should we cling so tightly to such terms, which have come under increasing attack, eroding the once abyssal gap between the two? Maintaining this division only serves to allow modern categorizations to ride roughshod over those potentially different modes of understanding in the past. Of course, simplicity does not equate to ease; anthropocentrism is deeply engrained in much modern thinking. It is only after the discarding of these monolithic opposed terms, however, in what Calarco has termed ‘the space of surrender’, that a truly legitimate meeting with ‘the animal’ can occur. Articulations of such spaces are beginning to be explored within archaeology; for example, rhythm has been considered as a means to explore human–non-human engagements in a shared space, without the need to explicitly ground the narrative in the human realm, nor needing an ‘analytical bridge’ to span between separated human and animal spheres (e.g. Brittain and Overton Reference Brittain and Overton2013). A social zooarchaeology that explores the formation and unfurling of conceptions of the non-human other through engagements, experiences and subsequent understandings presents an archaeologically workable ‘space of surrender’, a space which, as Argent notes, is a ground of interspecies sociality. The faunal material, the remains of the very individuals humans met, experienced, engaged with, killed, consumed and deposited, offer the data required to explore the specific engagements in the space of surrender between humans and non-humans, through which past human perceptions of non-humans, as opposed to our anthropocentrically tainted conceptions, can be explored and traced.

Finally, as some commentators, most prominently Pluciennik, note, this endeavour has implications far wider than zooarchaeology itself, and even wider than what Larsson calls for; that is, social bioarchaeology (a call which we endorse). A rethinking of the relationship between human and non-human animals is an inquiry of ontological nature. Our project is inscribed into current and ongoing ontological explorations in a number of fields, including archaeology, but we contend that such explorations should not limit themselves to the investigation of non-Western ontologies, and the need for archaeology to come to terms with them, but rather include the ontological foundations of the discipline itself, as we collectively attempt to produce an alter-modern archaeology. Elsewhere (Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2014), we show how this alter-modern archaeology should not replace the problematic heritage of anthropocentrism with an equally problematic pragmato-centrism, which neglects non-human animals and conceives of things as bounded and rigid entities, albeit invested with agency. We propose instead an ontology of flows and of sensoriality, advocating that we should ground our inquiries in the in-between space of sensorial and embodied interaction, the space of flows and exchanges, through human and non-human bodies, of substances, experiences, memories and affects.

This cannot but be a multi-species archaeology in many senses: in the sense of coming to terms with alternative ontologies, including zoontologies, ontologies which may include in fact hybridic conceptions that cannot be accommodated by the rigidity and generalized emptiness of the terms ‘human’ and ‘animal’; in the sense of recognizing that the constitution of the world, including its cultural dimensions, is the shared achievement of all sentient beings, not just humans; and in the sense of attempting to imagine and conjure up, as much as possible, and despite the inherent limitations, how archaeological narratives would have looked from the standpoint of non-human animals.