Is the ‘material’ or ‘ontological’ turn a major new paradigm in archaeological theory? Or is it another iteration of the cycle of piecemeal innovation which has created a very fragmented discipline? While there are insights from recent scholarship in this vein which are certainly important, this paper will err toward the latter view. Even though ‘symmetrical’ and other object-agency approaches are still growing in mainstream archaeological debate, much of the source literature upon which they draw has been around for several decades, and accumulated a fair amount of critique. At the very least, therefore, we need to learn from the way the materiality debate is playing out in other sub-fields. Beyond that, I will argue, we should go back to the turn before this one—the practice turn—and explore that road a bit more thoroughly, if we are to find the most useful approaches to develop in the future.

中文翻译：

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走错路了？重新审视考古实践方法的潜力

“物质”或“本体论”是否会成为考古学理论的主要新范式？或者它是零碎创新循环的又一次迭代，它创造了一个非常分散的学科？虽然最近的学术研究中有一些关于这方面的见解当然很重要，但本文将倾向于后一种观点。尽管“对称”和其他对象代理方法在主流考古辩论中仍在增长，但他们所借鉴的许多原始文献已经存在了几十年，并积累了相当多的批评。因此，我们至少需要从其他子领域的重要性辩论方式中学习。除此之外，我会争辩说，我们应该回到这个转弯之前的转弯——练习转弯——并更彻底地探索那条路，