Archaeology has begun to challenge anthropocentric approaches, appreciating the way that relations cross-cut categories such as human/animal/object and individual/group/species. Relational thinking challenges the divide between active human agents and passive animal resources. Instead, relational archaeologies consider the possibility that this boundary was blurred in the past. This enables discussions of potential transformations between human and animal states; the process of becoming human or animal; past societies' dependency on, and orientation around, animals; animal sociality and agency; and action that defies categories like 'nature' or 'culture'. From this perspective, material culture can be understood as a medium to negotiate 'animal-ness' and 'human-ness'-or to transcend the binary altogether. What does an archaeology of animals that embraces these insights look like? This section explores the multifaceted ways animal-human relations have been explored in a breadth of different archaeological contexts, from Neanderthal hunting strategies to the conceptualisation of dogs in the Viking period. Becoming with Animals: Relational Provocations in Archaeology The recent turn to relational thinking in archaeological discourse has provoked a ground-up reappraisal of the way we discuss and conceive of past behaviours, encouraging more holistic, context-sensitive approaches (Fowler 2013; Lucas 2012; Shanks 2007). At the root of this movement is a shift in emphasis from being, in which people, animals, or things can be isolated as stable entities, to becoming, in which entities emerge through collaborative processes over time (Braidotti 2002; Deleuze and Guattari 1977). In this view, nothing simply is; the question is how humans and non-humans come into existence and take on forms, qualities and capacities by interacting with one another. In pursuing this question, a number of traditional dualisms in Western thinking stand out as suspiciously tidy: mind/body, nature/culture, human/non-human, male/female. If we are all cyborgs, grafted together out of organisms, objects and discourses (Haraway 1985; cf. "bodies without organs", Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 19), then partitioning human social life off from the 'natural' or 'material' world can only hobble our understanding. Becoming steadily cross-cuts these categories. Archaeologists have generally welcomed the relational turn in the humanities and social sciences, correctly perceiving its potential to elevate our discipline's position in the mix (Boivin 2008; Jervis 2018; Olsen 2010). After all, we have spent almost two centuries studying human society through the lens of material things. In a relational view, we are no longer cast as a derivative discipline, working from the material dregs of past 'culture' to produce a dull approximation of what ethnographers and historians can more directly study. The potsherds and post holes we lay hands on are not indicators of "the person behind the artefact" or approximations of an historical text (Hodder 1986); they are surviving actors from the past in their own right (Fowler and Harris 2015; Lucas 2012). However, because of archaeology's traditional attempt to mimic the analytic terms of history and ethnography, our thing-oriented discipline carries its fair share of dualistic baggage. 130 130 For many of us, our first instinct, inculcated deeply from our undergraduate days onward, is to think about a past that is first and foremost living, human and tacitly male. The pasts of animals, things, queer people, women and children are cast as secondary; they are insensate resources for (adult cis-male) human action, rather than collaborators in the mutual becoming of social worlds. Although the relational turn and different archaeologies (e.g. queer, feminist, indigenous) have sought to challenge this engrained perspective of the past (e.g. Arthur