LAUSR

In her preface, A. Van Oyen announces that her Ph.D. research, of which this is an outcome, was guided by (ix) a clear sense that Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and the Science and Technology Studies (STS) to which it belonged, held the key to some central conceptual problems in Roman archaeology and, more broadly, archaeological theory. Chapter 1 (“On avoiding retrospection”) sets out the theoretical framework of her approach to her material. Material culture studies of the last two decades have insisted that material culture (pp. 1 and 2) does not just tell us about processes, events, and associations, it also actively does things. It enables, constrains, shapes, affects, acts, or forces. “Doing” more overtly becomes the criterion for agency in Actor-Network Theory ... whose analytical program consists of a “flat ontology”: a refusal to ascribe differential roles a priori to humans, things, animals, dreams, etc. So agency can be ascribed to things, though (2) it is important to flag from the very start that ANT’s flat ontology should be taken as a method, not as a description of the real nature of the world. This leads on to the concept that ‘things do things’ and therefore that ‘things make history’, as in the title of the work.