This paper presents a critical history of the concept of ‘structured deposition’. It examines the long-term development of this idea in archaeology, from its origins in the early 1980s through to the present day, looking at how it has been moulded and transformed. On the basis of this historical account, a number of problems are identified with the way that ‘structured deposition’ has generally been conceptualized and applied. It is suggested that the range of deposits described under a single banner as being ‘structured’ is unhelpfully broad, and that archaeologists have been too willing to view material culture patterning as intentionally produced – the result of symbolic or ritual action. It is also argued that the material signatures of ‘everyday’ practice have been undertheorized and all too often ignored. Ultimately, it is suggested that if we are ever to understand fully the archaeological signatures of past practice, it is vital to consider the ‘everyday’ as well as the ‘ritual’ processes which lie behind the patterns we uncover in the ground.

Archaeological dialogues has always been dedicated to finding novel ways to stimulate discussion. With issue 19(1), we introduce a new space in the journal designed to further this quest to promote productive debate: in addition to our signature discussion articles, interviews, review articles and notes, a new section called ‘Reactions’ is being added. This is intended to offer a venue for readers who wish to engage thoughtfully with pieces published previously in the journal. When a contributed article is chosen as a discussion piece, the editorial committee invites a panel of scholars to offer comments that are published with the main article and an author's reply. However, we recognize that there are always scholars beyond the selected group of commentators who have significant things to add to the conversation. Now a designated space for continuing the dialogue has been opened, and our readers are invited to take up the challenge.

Richard Bradley was critical of the hesitation he saw in British archaeology towards the use of the interpretive category ‘votive deposit’. The artefacts were instead interpreted in practical terms, as lost things or hidden treasures. This was published in 1990 in The passage of arms. Since then, or – as Garrow shows – since the mid-1980s, much has happened. Garrow has reacted against what he calls the hyperinterpretive turn in archaeology, where almost every patterning of material culture is regarded as intentional and symbolic. Instead, or as a complement, he wants to see a more developed discussion about material culture patterning as a result of everyday practices that just happen, without an attached symbolic meaning, but still varied and variable. So, is it time for the pendulum to swing back?

An interview with Evžen Neustupný opens up a range of issues regarding the theory and history of archaeology and its development in Central Europe. His view of the discipline differs in many ways from that of current global trends. His ‘artefact archaeology’ inverts the concept of adaptation and highlights the role of artefacts in the creation of the human world. The interview also shows that post-war archaeology even to the east of the Iron Curtain followed the trajectory from culture-history paradigm to processualism and onwards. It also testifies to the situation in the social sciences under the Communist regime and the ambiguous role of Marxist philosophy.

Duncan Garrow's article is a thought-provoking review of the concept of structured deposition and I agree with several of the points he makes. Thinking along the same lines, I would like to make a few additional remarks on structured deposition.

This article asks whether there is a role for weather in archaeological narratives. In archaeology, ideas of weather have been expressed almost solely through the aggregated measure of climate. A number of theoretical and practical problems arise from this, specifically in questioning how climatic change can be related to social change. The article reviews how other disciplines have developed a sense of climate that is more embedded in the human experience of landscape. A case study of a township in Cumbria uses the inhabited perspectives of two 18th-century diarists to explore how we might develop and apply these ideas in an archaeological context. The conclusion outlines some of the challenges for future research, arguing that we should consider weather as a material condition of the landscape – something as much open to archaeological investigation as any other aspect of the past.

I congratulate Duncan Garrow on his very engaging history of the concept of structured deposition, although I find it slightly terrifying that this history now extends over nearly 30 years. I find much to agree with in his account, notably the distressing point that what was originally intended as a heuristic has sometimes become an end in itself: the identification of a class of deposits that are ‘structured’. Thus, for instance, Bishop, Church and Rowley-Conwy argue (2009, 82) that pits in Neolithic Scotland may have represented ‘places of structured deposition rather than domestic settlements’, and that therefore the plant remains contained within them should be regarded as unrepresentative. Here, structured deposits take on the abject character that used to be afforded to ‘ritual’ phenomena in archaeology: having been identified as irrational and abnormal, their interpretation is considered beyond archaeological competence, and they are not subjected to further analysis.

The central proposition of Toby Pillatt is that in developing an understanding of past human affairs weather is as important as, or more so than, climate. Climate may be simply defined as average weather, whilst weather is the day-to-day occurrence of atmospheric phenomena which impact in perceptible ways on people's lives. The general proposition is sound enough; the challenges come in implementing these ideas in ways which advance our understanding of past people–environment relationships.

Pillatt's research provides exactly the type of critique needed to stimulate debate surrounding the role of archaeology and history in climate studies. The perceptive micro-scale deconstruction of weather, landscape and people in early modern Mosser highlights the precarious disjuncture between the human experience of weather and the processes of climate variability. However, I am certainly a lot more optimistic and positive about the role that archaeology and history have to play in this debate and will perhaps provide a more macro-scale contribution to this particular archaeological dialogue. I would argue that the time-depth of human experience will always be essential in offering context and understanding to individual weather events and longer-term climate variability.

In his paper on structured deposition the author exclusively focuses on the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeology of Britain. He shows the wide range of discussions from the the key paper by Richards and Thomas in 1984 to the most recent papers of the ‘hyperinterpretive turn’.

It is a pleasure to be invited to contribute to a debate on the nature of ‘structured deposition’, even though I do not have the expertise to comment on much of the detailed discussion of British prehistoric material presented in this excellent paper. The way in which my commentary approaches structured deposition is by posing two questions relating to the field of deliberate object fragmentation – an important aspect of many sites where structured deposition has been claimed (such as Kilverstone, Etton or Windmill Hill) – (a) can the identification of deliberate object fragmentation contribute to the understanding of specific deposits, sites or landscapes? (b) To what extent does the agency of humans and objects relate to structured deposition and deliberate object fragmentation?

As a palaeo-ecologist, working with historians has made me look critically at the strengths and limitations of my discipline. Resisting the temptation to defer to documents that, however partial or biased, remain far closer to human experience of the land than any pollen sequence, is essential (see Davies and Watson 2007; Hamilton et al. 2009). Richard Tipping (2004) recognized this lure when he distinguished two philosophical approaches to interpreting historic landscape change. These are my starting point for offering an environmental archaeologist's response to the archaeological and interdisciplinary challenges discussed by Toby Pillatt. First, Tipping defined a ‘confirmatory’ approach, in which palaeo-ecologists have sought correlations with written records, but only to confirm documented events, not to challenge them. In this, they have usually relied on selective readings and secondary, often generalized, historical sources. Reading this paper, it is evident that this is not only a one-way process, as those discussing human experience of the environment have been led by models and issues from the environmental sciences, including contemporary concerns. Indeed, a reader of Dawson's (2009) history of Scotland's weather and climate may be forgiven for thinking that all weather was bad weather, with possibly unfavourable expectations for human experience.

Toby Pillatt is right. Weather is important. Weather is important every day, as is evident from almost every news broadcast we watch or hear. This is not only true for extreme weather situations – which currently abound in the news – but for ordinary weather conditions at any time. The importance is quite clearly reflected in the numerous weather channels and weather websites and the weather forecast at the end of every news programme. Despite the ‘benefits of civilization’ which today make us often independent of outside influences, many simple daily decisions are still based on the current weather situation. Weather is our first and most immediate environmental experience. It was no different in the past. On the contrary, weather-based decisions were much more important historically than at present, both for individuals and for entire societies. No doubt, then, weather should be of concern also for historical studies. Hence Toby Pillat is right. He is also correct in stating that by involving a palaeo-weather perspective we can add much to our understanding about how past societies operated.

As archaeologists grapple with the international curation crisis, new attention is being given to the problem of ‘orphaned’ archaeological collections and collections that are underanalysed and underreported. The common rationale for curating such collections is to restore research potential, but such efforts are met with frustration because of the difficulties of re-establishing provenance and quantitative control for artefacts long separated from their original archaeological context. Moreover, most archaeologists view curation as a process that manages, rather than investigates, archaeological collections. To the contrary, this article argues that accessioning, inventory, cataloguing, rehousing and conservation are not simply precursors to research, but rather meaningful generative encounters between scholars and objects. Examples from the curation of the Market Street Chinatown archaeological collection illustrate how the process of curation can generate innovative research undertakings. Because archaeological research on this collection cannot proceed in a typical way, the research developed through the curation process departs from archaeological conventions to bring new perspectives on the social history of the Overseas Chinese diaspora.

Although it is easy to agree with Toby Pillatt that the role of weather in the archaeological record has been understated, it is more difficult to provide a clear method for incorporating the weather into archaeological interpretation. His concerns about the dominance of climate in interpretations are also acknowledged. Whereas climate and weather are indeed important to the interpretation of past ways of life, when we do try to recognize a direct correlation between, for example, a climate proxy record and any specific human behaviour, it is common to discover that any neighbouring proxy record will show a different set of relationships. Although there is a long history critiquing this approach, there is still a tendency for the uncritical to draw simplistic conclusions.

What is the place of imagination in archaeology? This paper works with a set of materials from the deep archive of the South African archaeologist John Goodwin (1900–59) to explore the relationship between archaeology and imagination. The first half of the paper focuses on a short story written by Goodwin, describing the accidental creation and subsequent ‘uncreation’ of an indigenous person of the Cape (described in the story as a ‘Hottentot’) by the gods on Olympus. The second half of the paper describes two encounters in life between Goodwin and indigenous people of the Cape (the first with the so-called ‘Tweerivieren Bushmen’, exhibited in life at the Empire Exhibition of 1936; the second with the human remains from Oakhurst Cave). Encounters in life, in death and in imagination, the terms of these three episodes double and repeat one another in the different forms of writing to which they give rise (the imagined world of the short story, and the ‘bare description’ of Goodwin's archaeological texts). At the centre of each is the haunted figure of the ‘Bushman’/‘Hottentot’, a being whose status is figured as a kind of ‘death-in-life’. In my telling, forms of actual and epistemic violence are never far from these events. Looking, showing and telling are described as activities which range across a set of characteristic sites: the body, the archive and the grave. In so doing, they summon their counterparts, the categories of the unspeakable and the untellable.

The aim of my article is to stimulate debate about the roles weather and climate might play in archaeological interpretations. It is, therefore, encouraging that the respondents have sought to develop and build upon the theoretical themes highlighted. Respondents have tended to agree with me that weather is and was an integral part of people's lives, and also that this is a subject worthy of archaeological research. This was by no means a certainty when we are considering something so ephemeral as weather in a discipline often held in thrall by the imprecisions of chronologies, and which has a penchant for the broad scale and the long term. Of course, these concerns do partly remain, yet the importance of weather, both as the lived experience of climate and as a medium through which people live their daily lives, is not questioned. As Wilkinson points out, the record of Michael the Syrian illuminates the many and varied environmental trials faced by past people, but Davies's anecdote concerning her perception of the Highland landscape warns against assuming that all people recognized and responded to similar weather (or climate) events in similar ways. This suggests that there is value in exploring a weather-based perspective. The question is, how do we get at the human experience of climate in the deeper past, when chronological resolution is coarser and where the lack of written records restricts access to people's perceptions?

This is a response to Rachel Pope's paper on processual archaeology and gender politics. As a female archaeologist in England I have experienced much of what she describes: I was educated in England in the 1950s and 1960s, I have been a lecturer in Cambridge since 1977, and I was present at the 2006 Personal Histories event in Cambridge which sparked Rachel's thoughts. But my own experience has been different to Rachel's in many ways. I belong to a different generation and have had a different life: but I think it is important to recognize how context-determined all accounts of the past are, and how difficult it is to avoid oversimplification and bias. It is easy to use the evidence which supports an argument, and discard what does not, from which a very different picture might be created – as indeed Rachel is arguing, in parts of her paper. If we cannot achieve that for living memory then how can we approach the real complexity of life in the distant past? So this is my alternative take on some of these themes, as another, contrasting, version of events.