Finding the Future in the Past
Orientations Between Innovation and Anticipation
Distributed for Bard Graduate Center
Finding the Future in the Past
Orientations Between Innovation and Anticipation
Bringing together innovative contributions from archaeology, anthropology, and material culture studies, this volume reframes objects as active participants in shaping the future.
From ancient technologies to ritual assemblages and global networks, each chapter shows how things orient human action toward possibilities not yet realized. Drawing on case studies that range from ancient Rome to pastoral Eurasia, the contributors foreground the material and relational foundations of creative action, bringing close contextual analysis into dialogue with recent work in new materialism, distributed creativity, and possibility studies. Finding the Future in the Past shows that archaeology can recover not just what was, but also what might become—and, in turn, reopen our sense of what might still be possible.
336 pages | 34 halftones, 7 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2026
Bard Graduate Center - Cultural Histories of the Material World
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Table of Contents
Edited by Caspar Meyer and Miguel John Versluys
Series Preface
Foreword
Introduction Finding Our Future in the Past
Caspar Meyer
One Affordance, Possibility, and the Emergent Nature of Things
Vlad Glaveanu and Wendy Ross
Two Ad Hoc Categories, Container Technologies, and Creative Solutions
Carl Knappett
Three The Flows from Past to Future
Ian Hodder
Four Diffracting Roman Future-Making: Four Modes of Material Mediation
Astrid Van Oyen
Five Rhythms of Change: Crafting “Traditional” Futures in Pastoral Eurasia
Caspar Meyer
Six Contaminating Material Encounters and Long-Term Change
Martin Pitts
Seven How Objects Shape the World: The Case of Bronze Age Europe
David Fontijn
Eight Out of Time into an Eternal Future: Temporality, Mythology, and Imagined Metal in Early Rome
Eva Mol
Nine Mental Time Travel: On Image Systems in Human History
David Wengrow
Ten Coda: Who Gets to Have a Future?
Matthew C. Reilly
List of Contributors
Index