1 Archaeologies of the present and tomorrow’s museums: or, how to open the relationship between Heritage and Commons Antonio Lafuente & Paz Sastre Few areas have been more thoroughly explored than that whose borders are delimited by the notions of museum, heritage, technology and market. So it never ceases to be a paradox that we still have no explanation for one surprising and symptomatic fact: the early museums of the eighteenth century do not show exceptional pieces, but stones, bones, shells, feathers, maps, models, microscopes, looms, ploughs and so on. But what are all these ordinary things doing in a museum? They are there to reconfigure the sign of the times, to invent a common past and present. Enlightened thinkers questioned the limits of the social order by changing the arrangement of things in an open space. Things are indistinguishable from the new technologies that mobilize them for the first time as objects, independent from inherited usage and from individuals. The ordinary is analysed, dated, located, classified and preserved, making the museum a true house of the (new) Commons. These pieces evoke a common inherited world (Lafuente, 2008). This rock, for example, testifies to the crystallization processes of inert matter; this skeleton evokes a byway in the planet's history; and that cloth shows the technological level of a remote community. Everything is both common and important. Its importance is acquired, and involves the mobilization of new cognitive tools, from the barometer and the test‐tube to pressing plants and systems of classification, as well as laboratories, expeditions, salons and prizes. With the same gesture, enlightenment man discovered the role of technology in the production of objects and in the building of consensus. Things are now re‐encodable. But to assign properties is to give value, and inevitably to set a price within the new growing market for civilizing objects, at the same time replacing the culture of wonders by the wonders of culture. And so, together with the plethora of amateurs who formed the Royal Society or the scientific expeditions, there arises a host of collectors, connoisseurs, dealers and appraisers. Assigning properties and