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.

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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.