Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/ Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology TIMOTHY WEBMOOR and CHRISTOPHER L. WITMORE What work does the adjective ‘social’ in social archaeology do? What is the character of human/things relations under the rubric of social archaeology? We raise these questions in relation to the recent Companion to Social Archaeology by Meskell and Preucel. While the corrective of the ‘social’ has been extremely productive, in broaching these questions we enter very murky waters. Our task in this article is to show where meanings of the ‘social’ have broken down; our charge is to demonstrate how frames of reference in understanding people/things relations have become muddled. By building on the strength of archaeology with regard to things, we seek to revisit the question: what is it to be human? THE SOCIAL OF ENCHANTMENT, THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE SOCIAL The enchantment of the ‘social’ has achieved orthodoxy in archaeology, as it has in the other social sciences. To modify the title (and scope) of Alfred Gell’s (1992) piece, ‘the social of enchantment, the enchantment of the social’ envelops archaeological reasoning so completely that the social seems to enchant archaeologists as archaeologists enchant the social. 1 That is, the social seems to become both the explanandum and the explanans for archaeological inquiry. How can we explain the complexities of the archaeological past (or present) by attri- buting a Durkheimian ‘force’ behind the scenes which directs and compels events but which nonetheless is not itself explained? This indeed appears to be a puzzling (enchanting) spell. In stating that social processes, or social meanings, or social discourse accounts for the events of the past, we seem to be stating less than we would like to. Something fundamental and potent is at work with the ‘social’, but our explanations have come to be cloaked in a shroud of secrecy with regard to what the social is. Or perhaps there simply is a tautology at work, as the social is not, in fact, doing any work whatsoever. The ‘social’ comes as a stand-in, a modifier, a catch-all prefix. It attaches itself, as if by super glue, first to domains of study: ‘social lives’, ‘social meaning’, ‘social body’, ‘social structure’, ‘social landscape’; then it goes on to define the very fields undertaking research into these domains: ‘social archae- ology’. What does the ‘social’ do? What does it qualify? Much like Ian Hacking’s Timothy Webmoor, Archaeology Center, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA. E-mail: tim.webmoor@stanford.edu Christopher L. Witmore, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, USA. E-mail: cwitmore@brown.edu ARTICLE Norwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2008 DOI: 10.1080/00293650701698423 # 2008 Taylor & Francis