Finding the Future in the Past

Bringing together innovative contributions from archaeology, anthropology, and material culture studies, this volume reframes objects as active participants in shaping the future. 

From ancient technologies to ritual assemblages and global networks, each chapter shows how things orient human action toward possibilities not yet realized. Drawing on case studies that range from ancient Rome to pastoral Eurasia, the contributors foreground the material and relational foundations of creative action, bringing close contextual analysis into dialogue with recent work in new materialism, distributed creativity, and possibility studies. Finding the Future in the Past shows that archaeology can recover not just what was, but also what might become—and, in turn, reopen our sense of what might still be possible.