“Samantha's instigations”: Reflections on an archaeology of the future

Abstract

This article explores a new line of discussion within an archaeology of the future, aiming to develop a forward-looking perspective on how technological transformations may reshape our understandings of materiality and humanness. Contemporary technologies are generating entities that not only interact with and respond to human stimuli but may soon display increasing degrees of autonomy, subjectivity, and even self-awareness—giving rise to new forms of being and unprecedented human–nonhuman entanglements. These developments invite reflection on how ideas long associated with non-Western cosmologies—such as the continuity between humans and nonhumans—are reemerging within the modern Western project itself, through technocultural processes that both reproduce and unsettle its epistemological foundations. Drawing on selected science fiction films as speculative devices, the article envisions possible futures in which these entanglements take form, prompting a reexamination of the epistemological and ontological foundations that underlie archaeological practice. Ultimately, it argues that archaeology—through its sustained engagement with material traces and with the long-term coevolution of humans and nonhumans—is uniquely positioned to contribute to contemporary debates on materiality and the human.