First of all, congratulations to Nick Overton and Yannis Hamilakis for an excellent and stimulating paper, made all the better for including two considered and rich case studies. Though in no way an animal-bone specialist, I find myself in general agreement with their approach, which attempts to persuade zooarchaeologists of the value of engaging further with particular trends within theory in archaeology (and other disciplines) from the last decade or so. It is with the implications of relational archaeologies that I particularly wish to engage: I concur with the authors that zooarchaeology (and other subfields), as well as archaeology more generally, could benefit from challenges to anthropocentrism, whether expressed in ontological or other forms, and ultimately produce more holistic as well as more diverse pasts. My comments are thus more an exploration of some of the issues raised in this paper than a commentary upon the contents per se.

In recent years, some archaeologists and anthropologists have become interested in exploring alternative and plural ontologies (see e.g. Alberti et al. Reference Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall and Witmore2011; Olsen Reference Olsen2003; Henare, Holbraad and Wastell Reference Henare, Holbraad and Wastell2007). What is sometimes called symmetrical archaeology (Witmore Reference Witmore2007) has drawn especially heavily on Latour's insights and notions of entangled and hybrid objects (and their associated agencies), particularly the human and material, forming complex networks (Latour Reference Latour and Porter1993; Reference Latour2005). These concerns are not just ours, of course. In human or cultural geography, for example, what is called ‘non-representational theory’ (see Lorimer Reference Lorimer2005; Thrift Reference Thrift2007) asks for explorations of multi-scalar and alternative ontologies and experiential approaches. There is also interesting environmentally related work in both geography and sociology (e.g. Castree Reference Castree2003; Goodman Reference Goodman2001; Whatmore Reference Whatmore2002). Some anarchist political theory, such as Bookchin's ‘social ecology’, also asks us to think about an ‘equality of unequals’ – specifically mentioning diverse ontologies – within societies and across ecosystems (Bookchin Reference Bookchin2005, 411–47).

Following Latour, some ‘symmetrical archaeologists’ demand that ‘things’, by which they generally mean archaeological artefacts, are paid more attention (e.g. Olsen Reference Olsen2010; Webmoor and Witmore Reference Webmoor and Witmore2008). In particular, they ask that the ontologies or ways of being of other, non-human (and non-living) ‘things’ should be treated as equivalent, and the nature, capacities and agencies, especially of materiality, recognized in particular ways and foregrounded far more than has been traditional. However, in much of this ‘symmetrical’ archaeology there tends to be, as Ingold (Reference Ingold2012) especially has pointed out, a noticeable lack of concern for other living entities, let alone consideration of what living in the world might be like from their, non-human, perspectives also. This is where Overton and Hamilakis offer valuable examples and insights. Another underrepresented aspect of a potentially interesting theoretical shift in emphasis is how past people (and not just present-day archaeologists) might have related to, shaped and been shaped by, co-habited with, experienced, expressed and engaged with ‘things’ (I much prefer the broader ‘entities’) and participated in processes, networks or ‘meshworks’ (Ingold's term). Two related examples of the difference such concerns might make to zooarchaeology are represented in this paper. What should be clear is that conceptualizing these kinds of participation, and thinking about resonances and interrelationships, is useful not only for archaeologists when considering past humans, but potentially for and between other entities and groupings too, whatever the exact nuances of equivalent or ‘flat’ ontologies. Thus Overton and Hamilakis briefly make room for spiritual beings, though their particular interest here is in people and swans, as (mutually?) recognizable individuals, groups and communities within overlapping meshworks and places. They also refreshingly note that exploitation of others as a resource, and economic or other values, can still play a part in various relationships. This is an important counter to the tendency in some ‘symmetrical archaeology’ to value and essentialize ‘things’ in themselves and completely reject any approach in the present or past which might be seen as ‘modern’ in a Cartesian sense. Yet, for example, many scientific and other methodologies demand as a starting point that we do separate, describe and objectify for the purposes of analysis (cf Holbraad's (Reference Holbraad2011, 908) ‘ontography’). We might add in other contexts that objectification in the form, say, of prey from the point of view of a predator can occur across and between many species and in various directions, depending on contexts, capacities and co-presence. Work such as that by Harris and Robb (Reference Harris and Robb2012) and Tarlow (Reference Tarlow2011) on ideas of the body and belief argues that categorical thinking demanding concepts of complete ontological separation and otherness is unhelpful, or even unworkable. They also show that people at least, as individuals and groups, are perfectly capable of having, sometimes simultaneously, many differing ideas, beliefs, feelings and indeed practices which may be contradictory as well as overlapping or complementary, whether they involve bodies, animals, things or other entities such as spiritual beings. As far as humans are concerned, perceptions, feelings, relations with and meanings of swans in places in Mesolithic Denmark are therefore likely to have been equally complex and sometimes to have been, and/or archaeologically appear to be saying, different things.

As Overton and Hamilakis consider, there may be perceived and/or constructed resonances between behaviours, appearances, qualities, potentialities and perceptions, such as family groupings and communication, within and across species and other entities. A different example of how one can think about such resonances in human and non-human relationships (and hybrid entities) is the work of Argent concerning horses. Using a partly phenomenological approach she has examined social and physical relationships between horses, horses and people, and horse–rider entities in the present and the past (Argent Reference Argent2010; Reference Argent, Smith and Mitchell2012). Elsewhere she has argued that aspects of horses and horse herd behaviour with which Iron Age peoples of the Russian steppes would have been familiar may have shaped and indeed co-produced particular patterns of human and horse socialities and horse–human mobility and warfare. One could equally consider in various ways how plants and trees (and humans and other animals) are co-related and interdependent (for widely divergent approaches see e.g. Lorimer Reference Lorimer2006; Rindos Reference Rindos1984; Rival Reference Rival1998). Walsh (Reference Walsh2008) shows another aspect in thinking how geological and human processes, interventions and relationships may be explored through Latourian actor-network theory. All this suggests that to capture the genuine richness of any human societal past one needs to be thinking more about some kind of ‘social palaeoecology’. The danger is that if more or less everything is connected, ontologically equivalent and able to be traced to anything else, how might one produce intellectual and narrative coherence, in order to help us think differently and interestingly about the present and the past?

Ian Hodder's (Reference Hodder2011; Reference Hodder2012) pursuit of ideas of the entanglement of objects, people, plants and materials at Çatal Höyuk offers one example. His explicit parallel entanglement of theories and methods (from evolutionary biology to social theory and material analyses) is also closely related to this general recent direction, and neatly demonstrates tendencies towards rhizomic thinking about connections, dynamic networks and intersections. His work is site-based and bounded in time and space, and one can imagine that this kind of starting point is likely to be the norm or template for much such archaeology (see also e.g. Webmoor Reference Webmoor2005). In the paper currently being considered, Overton and Hamilakis also begin with sites (or assemblages) linked in part by chronology as well as by swans. One could argue that this approach is, then, a helpful expansion of what we currently consider to constitute contexts, and to provide dynamics of process and directions for tracing similarities or ‘resonances’ such as, say, biographies of particular technologies within broadly contextual archaeologies. Are there even wider approaches possible which potentially offer symmetry to entities and communities of all kinds? How might they interrelate, and and how can we begin to explore what different perspectives might add, at different spatial and chronological scales, and from varied positions and starting points?

One challenge might be to produce imaginative but rigorous histories of hybrid networks deliberately starting from non-human perspectives – those might give a different insight into intersections with human-influenced agencies and processes, if that is what we are really concerned with. Because from our disciplinary point of view the researchers – or, better, ‘interlocutors’, and eventually authors – will be archaeologists, usually with a particular interest in where humans might fit into and participate in the places, networks, meshworks, assemblages, entanglements or other relational constructions. What might a story of Aggersund, or Vedbæk Grave 8, or a swan biography, seem like from a swan's point of view? Or given the bone assemblage from Aggersund, one could explore the intersecting biographies, communities, places and histories of the deer, boar, fox, pine marten and shellfish, artefacts and artefact materials, plants and shoreline topographies, as well as the indirectly represented humans. Different patterns, materials and biographies would develop from Vedbæk, for example, though also with overlap and potential intersections.

For archaeologists, an archaeological assemblage of some kind, whether in situ or in a museum, will typically provide a disciplinary starting point. But such broadening of choice will of course lead through many different networks (and hence various pasts and stories, temporalities and entities), and will require many different expertises and imaginations. Agreeing that special consideration be given to shared nodes in hybrid networks, places and themes, or intellectually parallel paths and processes, will often provide focus and coherence. But the perspectives, the voices, the politics, the salience and the priorities of different aspects and encounters will perhaps equally often lead one away from archaeology and explicitly human pasts, and perhaps to a more authentic or at least balanced notion of what symmetrical or equally valued but different relational ontologies might imply politically. Just as postcolonial critiques gave rise to exploration of how descendant and other communities might or should be involved in the process of producing archaeologies, so giving some kind of ontological and other equivalence to various non-human entities surely also implies some equivalence in moral value and hence within our concerns – the ethics of those inevitable entanglements in the present and with the past. The so-called ‘ethical turn’ was a feature of much 1990s thought across many disciplines, including archaeology. Some ethical aspects in relation to hybrid or other entities have been recognized in ecofeminist and other approaches to the contemporary world (e.g. Whatmore Reference Whatmore1997), as well as within fields such as animal rights. However, such consideration has not, to my knowledge, particularly occurred in relation to archaeology, beyond recognition of possible responsibilities towards past peoples (Tarlow Reference Tarlow, Scarre and Scarre2006).

Another aspect that Overton and Hamilakis's work, and relational approaches more generally, might be thought to point towards is the potential importance of multiple authorship. Could this help overcome the loss of dialogical exchanges between apparently divergent intra-disciplinary subfields such as zooarchaeology, as well as between other interested groups? It is not new in archaeology to criticize the ways in which ‘specialist’ reports such as those dealing with the lithics, the human bones, the animal bones, categories of artefact and so forth are often considered separately from excavation reports and project syntheses. In my own experience, zooarchaeologists have certainly long been among those complaining about the status and positioning of their contributions in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. However, the demands of accountancy and competition within contract archaeology and the production of ‘commodified pasts’, as well as similar trends within higher-education systems and the ‘audit cultures’ that go with them, make this difficult for most academic as well as commercial archaeologists (Shore and Wright Reference Shore, Wright and Strathern2000; Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2004).

Overton and Hamilakis suggest that there often have been and are other constraints upon the form and nature of zooarchaeological investigations, but demonstrate and point to fruitful directions of theoretical travel. Working out some of the future contours of a social zooarchaeology will be challenging and exciting, and with implications well beyond this particular subdiscipline.