1 TOWARDS AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF PEASANT AGENCY: A THEORETICAL APPROACH Juan Antonio Quirós-Castillo (Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea) Catarina Tente (NOVA FCSH - Lisboa) Carlos Tejerizo-García (Institute of Heritage Sciences, Spanish National Research Council) In a seminal work written almost forty years ago, French anthropologist Henri Mendras polemically stated that 'there is no longer peasant civilizations in our Europe'. For the anthropologist, the impact of post-war industrial policies were strong enough to virtually eliminate what was left of traditional peasant societies in Europe. New insights on peasant studies in the context of globalization in the 90s, like the one defended by M. Kearney, took this standpoint to the limit and defended the abandonment of the concept of 'peasant', as it became useless to analyse current globalize and transnational rural societies. He then proposed new categories, such as 'polybian', to approach these new type of peasants, characterised by their high mobility and their interaction with several economic and social environments. The consequence of these positions, which are quite popular, was that there is no more space or interest for peasant studies, at least as they were conceived in the history of the discipline until the 90s. However, scholars such as Göran Djurfeldt have criticized Kearney's vision as it was built on a new type of essentialism which created a clear gap between ancient peasant societies and the new 'polybians' of postmodern and transnational times. These critics stated that, from this point of view, current peasants are, paradoxically, 'essentially non-peasants'. New peasantries, or polybians, were not the consequence of a long- lasting process but a new beginning deprived of a history. Disconnection that, in the last instance, denied History itself. This does not correspond with the actual situation of the rural world. Today, at the dawn of the Third Millenium, there are far more