From Emotional Geographies to Assemblages of Affect: Emotion in archaeology in the light of the ontological turn

As this collection of papers shows, emotion is increasingly becoming more mainstream in archaeological theory. Building on the pioneering work of authors like Susan Kus (1992)and Sarah Tarlow (1999;2000) more and more conferences, publications and PhD theses are emerging, each attempting to think through questions of emotion from an archaeological perspective. The range of topics covered has grown enormously, from the experiences around funerary practice and litanies in Byzantium (Manolopoulou 2013; Moore 2013), via the atmospheric qualities of passage graves in the Neolithic of Southern Scandinavia (Sørensen 2015)and the affective properties of art (DeMarrais 2013),to the way in which fear and anxiety can shape human engagement with the world (papers in Fleisher and Norman 2016). Whilst lacuna remain, as Tarlow (2012) has pointed out in a recent review, the transformation in the range of literature from when I first became interested in this topic (c. 2003) is remarkable.