Humanness as performance

Abstract If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material residue, then one way in which these conditions might be characterized is as the different ways they had enabled the development of different forms of humanness. The historical construction of this diversity is discussed here as the ways that the relationships between humans and things had been performed. This means that the practice of archaeology must question the recent desire to adopt a flat ontology that defines archaeology as the ‘discipline of things’. It is argued that it was by means of the performances established between humans and their various objects of concern that different forms of human life were able to define themselves. The implications of this argument for the practice of archaeology are explored.