This paper argues that material culture should be brought even more to the forefront in post-colonial archaeology. At present, post-colonial analyses start from a baseline of pinned-down, delineated things as processed through artefact analysis, to proceed to interpretations of how these things were used in fluid, multidirectional, ambivalent social and cultural interactions. But what if things themselves can be fluid rather than bounded? Can we look into the various ways in which things were defined in the past, and the various relations they enabled? Such a change of perspective can also help redress the imbalance within post-colonial studies between, on the one hand, consumption as the field in which meaning is negotiated and, on the other hand, production as offering merely a template for the inscription of that meaning. A case study of so-called pre-sigillata production in southern Gaul articulates the benefit to be gained from considering these issues.

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis, and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then 'finding relations' in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed 'relational constellations'. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of ceramic fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC-third century AD): the fluid, the categorical and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such, a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.In an era of archaeological scholarship without-or beyond-master narratives (Hegmon 2003;Wylie 1993), one of the closest things to a paradigm shift over the last decade has been the adoption of relational approaches. The 'relational turn' has affected both analytical models, such as formal network analysis, and more interpretive J Archaeol Method Theory

Within the recent popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in material culture studies, scholars tend to lose sight of its origin in ethnography of laboratory work. In particular, ANT studied how scientific facts are constructed and stabilized in laboratories so that they become universally accepted, seemingly platonic, categories. This paper returns to this initial insight, and links it to the long-standing issue of archaeological types. Analysis of the practices of production, consumption, and distribution of terra sigillata-Roman archaeology's most salient pottery type-shows how it became a category, how it was stabilized as such, and how this process imbued sigillata with specific agentic properties that allowed it to shape the range of possible actions in the past. By reframing platonic types as constructed categories, they can become active elements in our historical narratives.

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This book meets the requirements of ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation -Paper for documents -Requirements for permanence. Cover illustrations: Above: Terra sigillata bowl (form Drag. 37) with moulded decoration and intra-decorative stamp by Paternus (Lezoux, second half 2nd century AD). Photo by Richard Delage. Below: Italian terra sigillata (Marzuolo, AD 50-70). Photo by Emanuele Vaccaro © Roman Peasant Project.