Since the 1970s, the concepts of ‘systemic context’ and ‘archaeological context’, developed within the framework of behavioural archaeology by Michael Schiffer, have significantly influenced archaeological reasoning and language. However, these fundamental theoretical foundations have undergone few substantial changes over the years, and a re-evaluation of the notion of systemic context could prove beneficial, especially for archaeologists working on deeply stratified sites that have hosted human occupation for centuries, such as urban sites. This paper proposes a shift from the current understanding of systemic context to a palimpsestic perspective, wherein multiple systemic contexts are viewed as sequential time-slices. Each slice represents a living system within a specific time frame, varying in width depending on the accuracy of our chronological phasing. By replacing a single, non-temporally defined systemic context with a sequence of chronologically framed systemic contexts, each characterized by distinct cultural and ecological attributes, we can better address issues that are typical of studying urban sites from both archaeological (residuality, false residuality, phasing, etc.) and historical perspectives (rhythms of change, urban development or contraction, etc.).

This paper proposes an ecological framework for understanding medieval mining towns as dynamic socio-ecological systems shaped by flows of matter, energy, capital and information. Drawing on concepts from human and political ecology, it examines how mining, technology and power structures interacted to produce feedback loops and tipping points that transformed both society and the environment. A case study of Kutná Hora (Czechia) illustrates these mechanisms, showing how the discovery of silver triggered cycles of population growth, technological innovation and capital accumulation, whilst also causing deforestation, pollution and social stratification. The study highlights how medieval mining towns functioned as adaptive, self-organizing systems embedded in global economic networks, revealing early forms of extractive capitalism and environmental change. This ecological perspective offers a heuristic model for analysing historical urban environments and their long-term sustainability, bridging archaeology, history and environmental science.

This conversation began as a roundtable at the 2023 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto. The roundtable was part of the Executive Program and was intended as a follow-up to Kisha Supernant’s keynote presentation, which was entitled ‘Truth before transition. Reimagining anthropology as restorative justice.’ Considering the sensitive nature of the topic, we responded to a selection of written questions from the audience rather than taking open questions. The discussion was webcast, then transcribed and redacted. This article includes a portion of the question period as well as a contextual introduction that was not part of the initial conversation.

Amidst a high-profile ecoclimate crisis, archaeology is rightly revisiting its relationship with ecology and seeking to orient its work towards pressing environmental concerns. Compelling proposals have been made for the potential of archaeological science to directly inform ecological problems and practices. We consider the strengths of and challenges for these scientific approaches here, alongside raising the prospect that archaeology can also harness less tangible analytical strengths – its expertise in human–landscape relationships (people in nature) and in landscape change (time) in attending to wider, but equally important, correlates of an ecological emergency.

Despite the clear divisions in current archaeological theories, in the last 30 years a ‘new consensus’ is emerging; this is the recognition that materials can actively shape human behaviour and cognition. While this recognition offers major opportunities for explaining changes in the archaeological record without just succumbing to individual simplistic models – such as migration or diffusion, or acculturation or convergence – there is still a need to formulate a framework that allows schematising this new consensus into our classifications and analyses of archaeological materials. Our paper aims to take a first step in this direction by formalising some mechanisms through which human behaviour and cognition can be modified by the material world. Operating at the interstices between theories about material engagement, cognition, and practice, three mechanisms of transformation are formalised, i.e., visual enchantment, mechanical degradation and obtrusion. As a further step to integrate these mechanisms, we stress the need to factor in human expectations, the changing states of materials and contingent situations into our schematisations and reconstructions of human–material relations.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

This paper puts forward a new interpretation of Deleuzian philosophy for prehistoric archaeology through an examination of the ontology of prehistoric rock art. Whereas Deleuzian philosophy is commonly defined as a relational conception of the real, I argue that one must distinguish between three different ways in which Deleuze’s conception of the real can operate: (1) transcendental empiricism, (2) simulacrum and (3) prehistory. This distinction is dependent upon the different ways in which the realm of virtuality and the realm of actuality can relate to one another. In the case of prehistoric rock art, we are dealing with a non-hierarchical relation between virtual and actual in which there is a simultaneous movement from virtual to actual, and from actual to virtual. This is distinct from a relational conception of the real, which is based on the loss of distinction between virtual and actual. Through an analysis of the cup-and-ring rock art of Neolithic Britain and the cave art of Upper Palaeolithic Europe, I argue that it was in prehistoric rock art and not in modern art that the true ontological condition of art manifested itself.