Towards a post-colonial artefact analysis

This paper argues that material culture should be brought even more to the forefront in post-colonial archaeology. At present, post-colonial analyses start from a baseline of pinned-down, delineated things as processed through artefact analysis, to proceed to interpretations of how these things were used in fluid, multidirectional, ambivalent social and cultural interactions. But what if things themselves can be fluid rather than bounded? Can we look into the various ways in which things were defined in the past, and the various relations they enabled? Such a change of perspective can also help redress the imbalance within post-colonial studies between, on the one hand, consumption as the field in which meaning is negotiated and, on the other hand, production as offering merely a template for the inscription of that meaning. A case study of so-called pre-sigillata production in southern Gaul articulates the benefit to be gained from considering these issues.