Well before the turn of the century, it had become clear that archaeology's aspiration to study the past was, true to the modern project, a pretext for a deeper desire to fabricate its objects. Material culture, materiality, the material past, material residues, heritage—the objects of interpretive (post-processual) archaeology could only be characterized as a continuation of this modern project. While finding symmetry was tied to an upheaval from this mode of disciplinary production, it may now be characterized as one cue among others in more agile archaeological theory. After briefly contrasting archaeological thought before and after the turn of the century, this article sketches out some of the core features of an object-oriented approach to things, including symmetry, irreduction, emergent causality, and strangeness, among others. It then outlines how, by finding our way alongside things, we might aspire to ever more creative work with archaeological objects and their pasts. Finally, it closes with a few words on Posthumanism.

中文翻译：

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找到对称性？考古学、物品和后人类主义

早在世纪之交之前，考古学研究过去的愿望已经很明显，对于现代项目来说，这是一个更深层次渴望制造其物品的借口。物质文化、物质性、物质过去、物质残余、遗产——解释（后过程）考古学的对象只能被描述为这个现代项目的延续。虽然发现对称性与这种学科生产模式的剧变有关，但现在它可能被描述为更灵活的考古学理论中的一个线索。在简要对比世纪之交前后的考古思想后，本文勾勒出面向对象处理事物的一些核心特征，包括对称性、归约性、紧急因果性和奇异性等。然后它概述了如何通过寻找与事物并存的方式，我们可能会渴望对考古物品及其过去进行更具创造性的工作。最后，它以关于后人类主义的几句话结束。