The Emergent Past

The Emergent Past approaches archaeological research as an engagement within an assemblage - a particular configuration of materials, things, places, humans, animals, plants, techniques, technologies, forces, and ideas. Fowler develops a new interpretative method for that engagement, exploring how archaeological research can, and does, reconfigure each assemblage. Recognising the successive relationships that give rise to and reshaped assemblages overtime, he proposes a relational realist understanding of archaeological evidence based on a reading of relational and non-representational theories. The volume explores this new approach through the first eversynthesis of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age mortuary practices in Northeast England (c.2500-1500 BC). His study moves from analyses of changing types of mortuary practices and associated things and places, to a vivid discussion of how past relationships unfolded over time and gave rise to specific patterns in the material remains we have today.