A renewed adoption of relational perspectives by archaeologists working in eastern North America has created an opportunity to move beyond categorical approaches, those reliant on the top-down implementation of essentialist models or “types.” Instead, emerging approaches, concerned with highlighting the agential power of relationships between individuals, communities, and institutions, and, more generally, with simply moving beyond categories, are allowing archaeologists to move from the bottom-up, focusing instead on the relationships that underlie, and indeed constitute, social, political, and economic phenomena. In this paper, I synthesize recent archaeological work from across eastern North America in which archaeologists have productively moved beyond a reliance on categorical perspectives. I explicitly focus on the potential for relational perspectives to recalibrate our social and temporal referents in crafting archaeological narratives.

在北美东部工作的考古学家重新采用关系视角，创造了一个超越分类方法的机会，这些方法依赖于自上而下实施本质主义模型或“类型”。相反，新兴的方法关注强调个人、社区和机构之间关系的代理力量，更一般地说，简单地超越类别，使考古学家能够自下而上地进行研究，转而关注潜在的关系。 ，并且确实构成了社会、政治和经济现象。在本文中，我综合了北美东部地区最近的考古工作，其中考古学家卓有成效地摆脱了对分类观点的依赖。我明确关注关系视角在制作考古叙事时重新调整我们的社会和时间参照物的潜力。