Becoming post-human: identity and the ontological turn

Within archaeology a range of new approaches, which we might broadly term relational, or post-human, are developing a radical critique of many areas of our disciplinary thought and practice. For example, they have challenged archaeologists to reconceptualise categories of person and thing and the relations, or mixtures, through which both are produced. So far, however, such approaches have had little to say directly on the concept of identity, despite the latter’s importance to archaeology over the last 30 years. Nevertheless, it is clear that these approaches’ avowedly ontological level of critique have the potential to make a dramatic impact on how we think about identity in archaeology, because of the challenge they make to approaches that prioritise humans over things. In this paper I explore the potential consequences of post-humanism for archaeologies of identity, and set out how our approaches in this vital and vibrant area must be reworked in the light of this emerging challenge.