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.

北美东部的考古学家对关系观点的重新采用为创造机会，超越了依靠自上而下实施本质主义模型或“类型”的分类方法。取而代之的是，新兴的方法关注突出个人，社区和机构之间关系的代理力量，并且更广泛地讲，只要超越类别，就可以使考古学家从下而上，而侧重于基础的关系。并确实构成了社会，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，在这些工作中，考古学家已经有效地超越了对分类观点的依赖。