As an archaeologist, I regard human beings as more than living beings solely. For me, a concern with things, an obligation to 'materiality', a commitment to landscape runs to the heart of the profession. Drawing on archaeological thinking and practice over the last 150 years and engaging with actor-network-theory and posthumanism, Archaeology: The discipline of things (co-authored with Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor) explores how things, companion species, and humans beings come together in networks of association to co-constitute societies over the very long term. The book addresses topics ranging from the development of agriculture and early cities in the Near East to the antiquarian experience of monuments in Britain to the articulation of knowledge on an archaeological survey in Mesoamerica to understanding how a Leica IIIc camera impacts human sensation in experiencing the Greek landscape. Our proposition: humanity begins with things. This proposition rests on an understanding of things as rich mixtures, as entangled aspects of what it is to be human. Returning to the etymology of a thing as ‘gathering,’ I regard the material infrastructures and mundane goods of society, whether carts, watermills, houses, olive presses, or glass vases as complex assemblages of human achievements which took place at a distance in time and space. I have characterized this project, which builds on the strengths of what archaeologists do, as a symmetrical archaeology. A symmetrical archaeology holds that the capacity for action in, for example, building society is not limited to human beings alone.