Archaeology as a discipline has deeply transformed over the last 25 years. Indeed, today there seem to be as many forms of archaeology as archaeologists. One could argue that this is the success of pluralism. Still, others might contend that the current fragmentation is a post-hypercritical state which exists simply because the fragment is most resistant to critique. Whatever the response our complicity in this state of affairs is the easiest way to turn our back on archaeology's unique, and rather tortured, state stretched across the divide between the humanities and the sciences and plagued by the divides between ideas and things, past and present, and so on. A symmetrical archaeology holds that these are divides of our own making. It argues that there is indeed a great deal of common ground to be had.

Furthermore, in excavating underneath such divides, a symmetrical archaeology recharacterizes the world, not in terms of dualisms or oppositions, but in terms of mixtures and entanglements. It poses that we treat humans and things in the same terms, both in our articulations of the material world and in the reflexive analyses of our own practices. A symmetrical archaeology accords the things of the past action today. Such matters of concern hold profound implications for a discipline which considers the past to be separate, distant and distinct. They offer substantial possibilities for grasping what it is to be human; for engaging in precisely how humans are blended with things; for understanding that just as things are 'us' that various pasts percolate 'now.'

This paper will limn the symmetrical project by rummaging through the discipline's tool kit and addressing some of the most fundamental questions in archaeology concerning agency, materiality, space and time.

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