Paper short abstract

Manifestos assert positions that are intended to stir debate and action. Archaeology, as a practice of tracing human entanglements with nonhumans through their material disturbances, needs to confront the slippery nature of things, matter, reality, and the singularities we construct when we speak about traces as if they were bounded and static.

Paper long abstract

Let us begin as a manifesto should, by a series of assertions:

given that archaeology is a set of practices

given that these practices are directed at discerning material traces as evidence of human lives

given that the traces archaeologists discern are mediated through nonhumans of various kinds

given that archaeologists discern traces through contrasts, or what I will call disturbances

it is proposed that archaeological practices construe traces as bounded and static singularities when they would be better thought of as unfolding relations.