Introduction

Over the past 20 years, agency has become an important concept in the toolbox of archaeological theory. Understood generally, if rather simplistically, as emphasizing the role of the individual in the creation of social conditions and outcomes, agency theory has had a common-sense appeal to archaeologists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. With the collapse of consensus regarding a unitary approach to the past that has left in the wake of processual archaeology, agency theory became de rigueur in the discipline beginning in the late 1980s. As various scholars have noted, however, the concept of agency has been uncritically adopted by many as ‘good to think with’. As a result, there is considerable ambiguity surrounding the notion of agency as used within archaeology.

Generally speaking, ‘agency’ may be understood as an umbrella term for the more subject-centered approaches to archaeological inquiry. The focus in agency theory is on the individual, human action, intentionality, and indeterminacy. While the concept has been fairly malleable in the hands of archaeologists, there are a few common elements within its various constructions that help to define a general sense of the term. These include a recognition of the importance of actions and motivations of agents; the idea that agency must be a socially significant quality of action rather than being simply reducible to action itself; that social life is materially and historically enabled and constrained; and that agency and structure exist in a dialectic relationship. Overall, agency may be understood as a key element in action-oriented social theory that views people as active agents in prehistory.