Material culture and consciousness: a thought experiment

ABSTRACT Archaeology has become good at using metaphors for the person-like properties of material culture, seeing objects as accruing life-histories and biographies. This paper seeks to further this debate by introducing an old concept – known as panpsychism – which has experienced a resurgence in modern physics. It holds that sentience is a universally distributed property of the material world, meaning that all matter must be, to some extent, conscious. This theory is applied to an existing study of the person-like characteristic of early medieval swords, as a first step in understanding that all of the objects with which we deal may have some quality of consciousness. One implication of this is the seriousness with which archaeologists can afford to take animist beliefs.