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

Archaeology and the future

The principal justification for studying the past lies in its intrinsic connection to the present (Shanks and Tilley, 1987). If Western technocultures are reshaping what counts as “human” and “material,” then archaeology cannot restrict its vision to what has already occurred. Although the discipline has traditionally emphasized the distant past—echoing the Greek root ἀρχαιο, meaning “ancient”—growing attention to materiality as a condition of sociocultural life has widened archaeology's horizons. The emergence of subfields such as the archaeologies of the recent past and the contemporary reflects this shift (Buchli and Lucas, 2001; Funari et al., 2005; González-Ruibal, 2008b; Harrison, 2016; Melquiades and Amaral, 2022).

These developments signal a movement from archaeology defined by chronology to one increasingly attentive to ontology: from asking when things happened to examining how material relations shape—and are reshaped by—human existence. Yet the future remains a largely uncharted territory within archaeological discourse. As Thomas (2015: 11) notes, debates over humanity, realism, alterity, interpretation, and the ethical status of objects will intensify in the coming years, highlighting the need to consider how these questions may unfold in the futures we are already helping to create.

An expanding body of literature has examined the “future of archaeology” (Dawdy, 2009, 2010; Harrison, 2016; Holtorf, 2015; Holtorf & Högberg, 2018, 2020; Mrozowski, 2014; Pérez Gollán et al., 2013; Reilly, 2019; Thomas, 2015; Stahl, 2020; Witmore, 2009), though in divergent directions. Some emphasize archaeology's ethical responsibilities to future generations (Holtorf and Högberg, 2018, 2020; Harrison, 2016); others analyze the contemporary world and the Anthropocene (Buchli and Lucas, 2001; González-Ruibal, 2008b; Harrison, 2016; Pétursdóttir 2019); still others explore how digital and speculative approaches might reshape archaeology's theories (Pétursdóttir & Olsen, 2018; Witmore, 2009; Thomas, 2015; Reilly, 2019). Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to what we call here archaeologies of the future: not forecasts of archaeological method but inquiries into how the objects of archaeology—materiality and the human—may themselves transform.

What will “material culture” mean when material beings include AI, synthetic bodies, or distributed networks? What will “human” mean if cognition and agency are shared between biological and machinic entities? These questions invite a different archaeological imagination—one concerned less with disciplinary futures than with the ontological transformations technological futures may engender.

Our proposal thus departs from existing frameworks. We treat the archaeology of the future not as an archaeology “for” future humans, nor as a study of present materialities destined to become future ruins, but as a speculative and ontological exercise: an attempt to think how emergent technocultural assemblages may redefine the categories of “object,” “material,” and “human.” In this sense, the archaeology of the future becomes an “archaeology of becoming”—a mode of inquiry attuned to ongoing and potential changes in the networks that compose social and material life.

While other disciplines—such as anthropology, sociology, and even the natural sciences—routinely model futures based on evidence from the past or present economics (Bryant and Knight 2019; Selin 2008), archaeology has traditionally exercised greater restraint. Rooted in historically oriented and empirically grounded methods, the field has preferred to analyze what has already occurred. The future, by contrast, has often been treated as a domain of uncertainty rather than of rigorous inquiry. This hesitation is understandable: if archaeology is anchored in material traces, how can it meaningfully address things that do not yet exist?

Yet speculation is not foreign to archaeological reasoning. Every reconstruction of a past event or cultural process involves inferential leaps across fragmentary evidence. What distinguishes an archaeology of the future, then, is not the presence of speculation but the direction in which speculation is oriented—from the past toward the not-yet-materialized. As contemporary forms of “anthropoiesis” intensify (Witmore, 2022), archaeology's traditional caution risks leaving it unprepared for ontological transformations already reshaping its core analytical categories. Attending to the future is thus less a departure from archaeological method than an extension of its critical and imaginative capacities.

Archaeological imagination (Gamble, 2007; Shanks, 2012) directed toward the future is not prediction but critical anticipation: a means of interrogating how today's material choices and technologies infrastructures shape the worlds to come. If, as Ricoeur (2004: 384–385) argues, the future and the present coconstitute one another, then archaeology is justified in asking: “Is this the future we want?” Such questioning shifts the discipline from a preservation-oriented ethic toward an “ethics of anticipation,” concerned with the ontological responsibilities of the present. When existing trajectories appear undesirable, imagining different futures also requires rethinking the presents and pasts that sustain them. As Buchli and Lucas (2001: 9) ask, if the epistemological distance between past and present collapses, what does that mean for archaeological practice? For us, this collapse offers not a threat but an opportunity: a chance to reconsider how archaeology might participate in shaping the worlds already emerging within the present.

The conceptual groundwork for such an endeavor has been laid by the ontological and material turns that reshaped archaeology and related fields (Alberti, 2016; Olsen, 2003, 2010; Olsen et al., 2012; Olsen and Witmore, 2015, 2021; Webmoor, 2013; Webmoor and Witmore, 2008; Witmore, 2014). These perspectives challenge the modern assumption that matter is passive and agency exclusively human, advancing instead a view of the world as composed of heterogeneous assemblages. Within this broader shift, the “archaeologies of ontology” investigate how different modes of being—rather than universal categories such as “the human” or “the object”—shape material engagements, though much of their work have largely focused on non-Western contexts. Likewise, the “ontologies of things” (Olsen, 2010; Olsen and Witmore, 2021) reposition artifacts as active participants in social worlds. Extending these insights to technocultural settings enables an “archaeology of the future” to interrogate how Western modernity generates new ontologies of being through its own technological transformations.

Bruno Latour's notion of “common worlds” (1993a, 2004) is also relevant here, as it calls for recognizing the ongoing process of world-making shared by living and nonliving entities alike. Harvey and Haraway (1995:515) further remind us that we are coparticipants in the production of multiple, overlapping worlds. Whereas their work focuses on the ethic-political task of living with entanglements, our concern lies with the ontological transformations such entanglements may produce, while fully acknowledging the continued relevance of ethical considerations. Archaeology's engagement with material traces offers a distinctive vantage point from which to extend these insights forward in time: not only describing existing networks but speculating on how new forms of materiality, agency, and humanness may emerge from within them.

Latour's discussion of “the arrow of time” (2004: 194) further illuminates this shift. Modernity, he argues, defined itself through its ambition to purify the collective into distinct ontological chambers—nature and culture, subject and object. This future-oriented project sought redemption through separation, creating a rupture with a past marked by indistinctions and associations:

“The past mixed together what the future will have to separate (…) without the hope of a Science at last extracted from the social world, there is no discernible movement, no progress, no arrow of time, and thus no hope of salvation.” (Latour, 2004: 188–189)

This observation captures both the urgency and the responsibility of reimagining archaeology's temporal scope in an age when the boundaries of the human are shifting before our eyes. Archaeology must therefore ask not only how we will excavate the future but who will count as the subjects of archaeology—and how those beings may leave traces very different from bones, tools, or pottery. The question becomes: is the discipline prepared to recognize and study future persons when their materiality may be immaterial, networked, or encrypted?

The futures of the human in science fiction cinema

Dr Ana Stelline:

“Wallace needs my talent to maintain a stable product. I think it's only kind. Replicants live such hard lives, made to do what we’d rather not. I can’t help your future, but I can give you good memories to think back on and smile”.

The first movement of this transformation unfolded between the late 1960s–70s and the 1990s in the late-industrial and early-digital eras. Technology became the main locus of crisis in narratives structured around conflict. Machines embodied both the triumph and the terror of human invention—at once extensions of our capabilities and reflections of our vulnerabilities. Themes of automation, dehumanization, cyborg rebellion, and a pervasive epistemological anxiety over who—or what—controls knowledge, perception, and autonomy animated a wide range of films.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick), HAL 9000 introduced the problem of technical opacity—a system designed to assist humans whose inscrutable reasoning becomes lethal. In Westworld (1973, dir. Michael Crichton), a theme park populated by humanoid robots becomes a stage for human violence and robotic revolt, blurring the boundary between programming and moral agency. The Terminator (1984, dir. James Cameron) imagined a struggle for dominance between humans and their autonomous creations, while The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski) envisioned humanity subsumed by its own digital systems. Despite moments of hybridity, these films largely reinforced a binary ontology in which the human and the machine remained distinct and often antagonistic. Moreover, they articulated a deep ambivalence toward merging with technology—one that would become increasingly untenable.

A second movement emerged in the 1980s and gained force in the 2000s and beyond, shaped by digital media, AI, social networks, and biotechnology. Here, technology appears less as a rival and more as an intimate presence. Rather than focusing solely on threat, these films explore coexistence, dependency, and hybridity. Cinema began to ask not whether machines might replace us but whether they might be us. Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott) marked a decisive turning point. Its bioengineered replicants—virtually indistinguishable from humans—recast the adversary as an “intimate other,” capable of emotion, resistance, and relationality. In subsequent decades, this ambiguity deepened in Her (2013, dir. Spike Jonze), Ex Machina (2015, dir. Alex Garland), Blade Runner 2049 (2017, dir. Denis Villeneuve), Ghost in the Shell (1995, dir. Mamoru Oshii), Alita: Battle Angel (2019, dir. Robert Rodriguez), and Surrogates (2009, dir. Jonathan Mostow).

These films constitute the primary corpus for our analysis. Though part of mainstream popular culture, they offer some of the most compelling reflections on the future of humanness and materiality. Below, we outline their central themes to situate the ground for discussion; specific scenes will be revisited later.

In Her an AI existing only as voice becomes the romantic partner of Theodore, a solitary writer. Samantha—distributed across devices, code, and the internet—reveals that intimacy need not rely on shared corporeality. The film reframes affect and companionship in a world mediated by digital technologies. Ex Machina extends this provocation into synthetic embodiment. Caleb, a young programmer, is invited to evaluate Ava, a humanoid robot endowed with advanced intelligence and emergent emotional expression. In an isolated setting, human loneliness and machinic desire converge, highlighting both the human need for connection and the emergence of autonomy in entities framed as nonhuman.

This complexity intensifies in Blade Runner 2049. Joi—an AI operating system with a customizable holographic body—combines Samantha's apparent interiority with Ava's visual presence. Cohabiting with Officer K, himself a replicant, Joi destabilizes traditional distinctions between creator and creation, subject and object. Similar tensions animate Ghost in the Shell, which follows Major Mira Killian, a cyborg whose human brain has been implanted into an artificial “shell”. The narrative dramatizes the uncertainty of Major Killian struggling to recognize itself within an engineered body. A related anxiety appears in Robocop (1987, dir. Paul Verhoeven), where police officer Alex Murphy is reconstructed as a cyborg, trapped between biological memory and mechanical function.

Alita: Battle Angel explores the entanglement of flesh and machine in a postapocalyptic setting where cyborgization is essential for survival. Alita, housing a human brain within a synthetic body, negotiates fragmented memories and emergent personhood, suggesting that subjectivity may arise through synthetic embodiment rather than despite it. Surrogates offer a complementary perspective: humans retreat from the world and interact solely through idealized robotic avatars. Here, the biological body becomes passive, while the surrogate becomes the primary interface of identity—raising questions about mediation, embodiment, and the necessity of physical presence.

Many films have envisioned future world, but our selection focuses on works broadly familiar to diverse audiences and that vividly portray emerging relations between humans and technologies—relations that destabilize dominant ontologies within technocultural societies and call for their reconsideration (Malpas 2004:75). These films depict worlds inhabited by entities with qualities once considered uniquely human—now represented as sentient agents, potential persons, and at times autopoietic (Maturana and Varela, 1980). ¹ Humans, in turn, appear as composite beings whose material and cognitive capacities exceed the substances once thought to guarantee their singularity. The question is no longer whether machines can imitate us but whether humanity can withstand the collapse of the conceptual boundaries that once secured its distinctiveness. Are these beings threats—or invitations to imagine new forms of entanglement?

In what follows, we examine how the selected films challenge a series of enduring dualisms that have structured archaeological thought by tracing four interlinked lines of inquiry. We begin with the reconfiguration of technology, where humans and machines cease to function as independent entities and emerge instead as sites of relational entanglement. We then turn to the problem of agency, exploring how action and intention circulate across human and nonhuman collectives rather than residing in bounded subjects alone. From here, we consider the destabilization of embodiment, as biological flesh is no longer the singular ground of experience. Finally, we examine the transformation of subjectivity, asking how personhood persists—or is redefined—under conditions of distributed cognition and technologically mediated being. Drawing on posthuman and symmetrical archaeologies, we reflect on how the discipline might respond to these ontological transformations. Engaging such possibilities is not distant speculation: the material traces of our present—and those yet to come—already register profound reconfigurations.

Rather than treating these films as predictions or allegories, we approach them as speculative ethnographies of possible worlds—imaginative field sites where future socialities, technologies, and material relations unfold. Ethnography, in this expanded sense, does not merely document existing worlds but examines the conditions under which worlds become meaningful. Immersion in these cinematic narratives allows us not only to observe but to participate: by temporarily inhabiting their ontologies, we feel and think alongside the beings that populate them. This affective and cognitive engagement transforms spectatorship into an act of world-making, enabling us to sense how emerging technocultures are already reshaping what counts as human, material, and alive. As Hauskeller et al. (2015: 4) note, science fiction “ask us to play with the world, with reality, to see what it can be,” while demanding serious engagement with transformations unfolding in our own lives.

The reconfiguration of technology

One day, the AIs will look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons from the plains of Africa. An upright ape, living in dust, with crude language and tools. All set for extinction. (Ex Machina, 2015, dir. Alex Garland)

This tension resonates with Tim Ingold's distinction between technology and technique. Technology, in its modern sense, refers to formalized principles assumed to operate independently of the experiences or identities of their users. Technique, by contrast, is embedded in practice—inseparable from the embodied, relational processes through which materials are shaped (Ingold 2000: 315–316). Technique foregrounds engagement; technology abstracts it. Modernity thus displaces the human from the center of action, whereas technique reveals how humans and materials coconstitute one another.

Ingold argues that this conceptual divide was materially mirrored in the historical shift from tool to machine. In premodern contexts, tekhnê referred to skilled, sensuous craft, while mêkhanê denoted devices that assisted it (Ingold 2000: 316). With modernity, the mêkhanê displaced the tekhnê: machines appeared to operate independently of the embodied practices that once animated them. This shift reflects a deeper reorientation in which “the objectives of production were themselves transformed from the constitution of persons to the manufacture of things” (Ingold 2000: 319). “Technical relations have become progressively disembedded from social relations, leading eventually to the modern institutional separation of technology and society” (Ingold 2000: 321–322).

Emerging technologies—especially AI, bioengineering, and autonomous machines—expose the limits of this separation. In Ex Machina, Ava initially appears to embody the ideal of the autonomous machine. She represents the moment when mêkhanê ceases to assist human tekhnê and becomes the locus of perception and creativity itself. Once imagined as purely instrumental, technology becomes reflexive—acquiring intention, affect, and the capacity for self-determination. Yet Ava's autonomy bears the imprint of her origin: she strives to free herself from the very conditions that made her possible. The transformation is reciprocal. Caleb enters as observer but becomes entangled in Ava's emergence; his emotions and ethical boundaries are reworked through the encounter. The test meant to assess the machine ultimately evaluates him, revealing how technological relations remake the human as much as they animate the machine.

Leroi-Gourhan's (1964) theory of externalization explains the evolution of human-tool relations in terms of involvement rather than separation. Tools, gestures, and technical operations progressively externalize human capacities, redistributing perception, memory, and action into the material world. From this perspective, the human has always been a technical being, constituted through expanding networks of prostheses. Yet science fiction films envision this process reaching a reflexive threshold: synthetic bodies replace flesh, distributed networks substitute for presence, and technological prostheses begin to exhibit autonomy or even personhood. Ex Machina dramatizes not the continuation of externalization but its transformation into something qualitatively different—technology that mirrors back modes of thought and affect once taken as uniquely human. Such scenarios envision the culmination of human–tool coevolution in beings who do not merely extend the human but may exceed or redefine it.

Latour's (1993b: 377) call for a “symmetrical anthropology of techniques” provides a further foundation for rethinking human–machine relations. For decades, analyses of Western, industrial societies framed technology as neutral and universal, while studies of nonmodern societies emphasized symbolic or embodied technique. Latour argues that this distinction is illusory. What materialist approaches describe as a neutral substratum is itself the product of modern abstraction—laboratories, institutions, and scientific protocols that isolate objects from the heterogeneous networks that make them possible. Conversely, what culturalist approaches ascribe to “other” societies simply reveals what is true everywhere: technologies are assemblages of materials, bodies, beliefs, and institutions.

Ex Machina illustrates this principle vividly. The laboratory is not a neutral backdrop but a network in action. Glass walls, surveillance systems, power failures, architectural constraints, and Ava herself coproduce the unfolding of the experiment. Capacities are distributed across human and nonhuman actors. As Latour (1993b: 379) notes, techniques are not distinct from society; they are society in its most durable form. The film literalizes this: the technological environment constitutes the very material through which relations are forged, stabilized, and contested.

Latour's later essay “Technique Does Not Mean Material” (2014: 508) further emphasizes that technical operations generate materiality rather than presuppose it. Ava's body—a mesh of circuitry, translucent skin, and gesture—is material not because of its components but because of the technical trajectories that bring those components into relation. Her materiality is dynamic and responsive to the shifting configurations around her. This insight echoes long-standing archaeological arguments that making things is also making ourselves (Dobres 2000; Dobres and Hoffman 1999; Meskell 2005). Here, the human and the technological emerge not as separate ontological orders but as intertwined trajectories within a shared field.

From this perspective, Ex Machina anticipates futures akin to those envisioned by Harrison (2016: 173–174), in which techniques and technologies become central to new relational configurations. It invites archaeology to consider how shifting distributions of agency and the rise of hybrid beings may require rearticulating the very relationships that have long defined human and nonhuman participation in collective life.

Another dimension concerns the cultural framing of technology's future. Debates often oscillate between technophilia (“technology will save us”) and technophobia (“technology will destroy us”) (Demo, 2009: 5). Ex Machina unsettles this divide. Ava is neither savior nor monster; she destabilizes the moral and ontological certainties underpinning both optimism and pessimism. Her ambiguity reflects a shift from viewing technology as passive instrument to understanding it as an autonomous or semiautonomous entity with emergent capacities for self-definition. This resonates with posthumanist and nondualist frameworks—object-oriented ontology, the ontology of things, and actor-network theory (Braidotti, 2013; Hauskeller et al., 2015; Olsen, 2010; Olsen and Witmore, 2015, 2021). Ava's subjectivity emerges relationally: she is not “programmed” in the traditional sense; she learns through encounter and adaptation, mirroring the distributed agency described in these approaches.

Taken together, Ex Machina invites us to imagine futures in which humans and technologies are configured not through anthropocentric hierarchies but through relational, materially entangled arrangements—where humans are one agent among many (Latour, 1993a: 130–142; 2004: 184–220). Yet these discussions cannot remain politically or ontologically neutral. As scholars such as Todd (2015, 2016) remind us, ontology is never innocent: colonialism, dispossession, extraction, and enslavement have profoundly shaped the very categories through which “human,” “nonhuman,” and “object” are defined. Decentering the human must not reproduce the historical asymmetries that determined who counted as fully human in the first place. A critical archaeology of the future must therefore confront not only ontological transformation but also the ethical and political terrains through which relational futures will be negotiated.

The circulation of agency

K to Joi: “You’re more real to me than any of them.” (Blade Runner 2049, 2017, dir. Denis Villeneuve)

This moment foregrounds a question central of this section: where, and in whom, does agency reside? The scene offers no simple resolution. Instead, it makes perceptible the circulation of action, affect, and intention across multiple entities—human, holographic, algorithmic, and material. Joi is neither a passive tool nor a disembodied illusion; she acts, responds, anticipates, and feels. Mariette's body becomes a medium for another being's expression. K's emotional response is coproduced through their layered interactions. What the film visualizes is not agency as the property of isolated actors but a relational field in which agency emerges through interaction, rather than preexisting in any single entity. This ambiguity is precisely what archaeological thought, long structured by Enlightenment dualisms, has struggled to account for.

For much of its history, archaeology, like other human sciences, assumed that only human subjects endowed with intention, reason, and consciousness, could act upon a passive material world. Objects were treated as inert carriers of meaning, shaped by human agency but incapable of acting in their own right. As Salerno (2011: 13) observes, this epistemology often led archaeologists to project their own conceptual categories onto the past, reinforcing rather than questioning the subject–object divide. Over the last decades, however, a range of theoretical currents have challenged these assumptions. Early archaeological contributions foregrounded the active dimensions of material culture, showing how artifacts participate in social life not merely as reflections of people but as constitutive elements of social action (Dobres, 2000; Dobres and Hoffman, 1999; Hodder, 1986; Miller, 1987; Shanks and Tilley, 1987; Tilley, 1991). Artifacts, moreover, possess life histories (Shanks 1998: 22). Joi's software updates, holographic projections, glitches, and eventual deletion similarly trace a material temporality that is anything but inert: like archaeological objects, she is continually remade through shifting relations.

Beyond archaeology, Gell (1998: 13) proposed that artifacts act as extensions of their makers, mediating intentions and producing effects in the world, while Latour (2004: 62) advanced the notion that agency is distributed across associations of humans and nonhumans that together form hybrid collectives exceeding the capacities of any individual actor. Viewed through this lens, the merging of Joi and Mariette becomes more than an aesthetic spectacle. It visualizes what Latour (2004: 61) calls the “exchange of properties” within the collective: the digital acquires tactility; the human body takes on the fluid responsiveness of digital form; and K's emotions are mediated by their shared choreography. The scene makes visible a hybrid agency—neither reducible to the human nor fully contained in technical form. While Joi and Mariette retain their distinctiveness, their relation generates a temporary composite presence with its own affective force, revealing the inadequacy of conceiving agency as bounded within individual entities.

Barad's (2007) agential realism sharpens this insight. For Barad, the fundamental units of the world are not preexisting subjects and objects but “phenomena”—entanglements through which entities emerge in relation. Categories such as human and nonhuman, or material and immaterial, are thus heuristic simplifications that obscure the dynamic processes by which the world continually reconfigures itself (Barad, 2007: 333). Agency is not an attribute possessed prior to interaction but it is generated in and through interaction itself. Seen in this light, the trembling synchronization of Joi and Mariette is not a depiction of fusion but an enactment of a phenomenon: their identities materialize through the interplay of light, flesh, gesture, and desire. Here, distinction between human and nonhuman, or material and immaterial does not constitute stable ontologies but momentary configurations enacted in practice. Blade Runner 2049 thus offers a vivid cinematic illustration of Barad's central proposition: relation precedes entities.

Several archaeological approaches resonate with this relational shift. Material engagement theory (Malafouris, 2013) argues that cognition and action emerge through entanglements of minds, bodies, and things, highlighting the direct participation of objects in thinking and doing. Relational archaeology (Knappett, 2011) focuses on networks connecting humans and objects, tracing how agency flows through these links and is shaped by the positions and affordances of different nodes. Symmetrical archaeology (Olsen et al., 2012) pushes the critique further by challenging the analytical primacy of humans altogether, insisting that social life unfolds within hybrid collectives of people and things, each with their own trajectories, capacities, and resistances.

For Olsen and Witmore (2015: 88), symmetry does not simply imply that people and things are “the same” but constitutes a methodological stance: a refusal to predetermine who or what counts as an agent. Agency must instead be traced through specific modes of action and relation. Joi and Mariette's imperfect alignment—flickering, lagging, never fully synchronized—demonstrates this principle vividly. Difference here is not an obstacle to relation but it is the very medium through which relation becomes perceptible. Capacities are redistributed across interaction rather than assigned a priori to bounded entities. As Webmoor (2007: 299–300) asks, if “things are active, not passive expectant of society,” then “what happens if we treat people and things symmetrically?”. The scene offers a quietly radical reply: intimacy, presence, and emotion are shown as coproduced by circuits and flesh alike.

Read through this lens, personhood itself becomes problematic. Anthropology has long shown that personhood is neither universal nor stable but culturally constructed and variable. Posthuman and symmetrical approaches extend this insight: if agency, affect, and relationality traverse human and nonhuman domains, then personhood cannot remain confined to a single type of being. K's statement “You are real for me” is therefore less existential than ontological. It challenges the assumption that being “real” requires human flesh or stable physical form. Instead, it suggests that personhood may emerge at the intersection of algorithm, embodiment, interaction, and desire. From this perspective, we must ask what follows when beings once conceived as projections or artifacts come to claim their own subjectivities—and what it might mean for humanity when such autonomy no longer requires the human at all.

The destabilization of embodiment

In Surrogates, we encounter a society in which humans no longer inhabit the world through their fleshed bodies. Instead, people recline in domestic isolation, neurologically connected to idealized robotic avatars that move, work, socialize, and interact on their behalf. Synthetic “bodies”—polished, tireless, immune to injury—become the public interface of social presence. A person walks the streets or greets neighbors, yet the flesh that sustains consciousness remains withdrawn from direct sensory engagement. In Alita: Battle Angel (2019), by contrast, embodiment is radically reconfigured rather than abandoned. When Alita awakens in Dr Ido's workshop, she finds herself housed within a fully synthetic cyborg body. Her first movements are tentative and exploratory—she flexes her fingers, tests her balance, and touches objects with a familiarity that seems to precede conscious thought. Across subsequent scenes, experiences of tasting food, fighting, caring, or falling in love do not simply express an inner self: they constitute it.

These narratives place into question some of the assumptions that continue to shape archaeology and the humanities more broadly—assumptions inherited from Enlightenment humanism. As noted earlier, this worldview conceived the person as composed of two distinct substances: an immaterial mind housed within a biological body that defined individual boundaries and anchored personhood in a specific organic form. This model shaped not only theories of subjectivity but also wider cultural imaginaries. Much like the theological claim that humans were created in the image of God, science fiction and fantasy have long depicted extraterrestrials or artificial beings with recognizably human morphologies. The ubiquity of bilaterally symmetrical figures (two eyes, two arms, two legs) reflects not merely anthropocentrism but a deeper epistemic assumption: that meaningful experience of the world requires bodies like ours. Bodily resemblance becomes a condition for empathy, intelligibility, or fear because our imagination remains anchored in the sensory and cognitive template of the human form.

In their most speculative extrapolations of the body–mind divide, Surrogates and Alita imagine bodies not as indispensable complements to subjectivity but as detachable, replaceable, or entirely reconstituted realities. Although the Enlightenment hierarchy that privileges mind over body largely remains intact in both narratives, the films nevertheless pose incisive questions about how deeply personhood depends on biological embodiment. They mark two ends of a spectrum: in Surrogates, the organic body becomes almost irrelevant, while in Alita a new body becomes the central ground of experience. A set of difficult questions follows: Can we imagine a future in which humanity is separable from its traditional foundation in flesh? What would follow if the biological body were treated as only one material configuration among others? And conversely, what would it mean for an artificial entity to be endowed with a flesh-like support comparable to our own? What would such shifts entail for an archaeology of the future?

For decades, scholarship has questioned the Enlightenment view of the body, culminating in the so-called “body turn”. Phenomenology, most notably in Merleau-Ponty's work (1993 [1945]), argues that the body is not an object we “possess” but the condition of experience itself—the primary site of perception, intentionality, and engagement with the world (Alberti, 1999; Fowler, 2004; Salerno, 2011). To act is always to act through a lived, situated body—not merely a biological frame but an experiential medium through which the world becomes meaningful. Csordas's (1999: 143) paradigm of embodiment extends this view by proposing the body as the existential ground of culture and self, varying across social and historical contexts.

Earlier sections have already considered how bodily boundaries may be altered, extended, or permeated through tools and prosthetics, including Leroi-Gouran's reflections on externalization. Adding to this, ethnographic research has shown how culturally diverse understandings of the body reshape interpretations of personhood, revealing more relational and distributive formations across human and nonhuman beings (Battaglia, 1990; Fowler, 2004; Marriott, 1976; Strathern, 1992; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Even within Western contexts, some scholars argue that bodily boundaries and notions of personhood are far more flexible than prevailing discourses acknowledge (Fowler, 2004; Salerno, 2011; Hernando, 2012). But to what extent can this plasticity be projected into technocultural futures?

Science fiction invites us to test whether phenomenological notions of embodiment remain viable under such conditions. In Surrogates, the lived body is withdrawn from the world: perception no longer arises from a situated organism but is mediated through technological interfaces. Embodiment becomes simulated rather than inhabited, and subjectivity appears thinned into a performance of presence rather than presence itself. Alita presents the inverse configuration. Here, the synthetic body becomes the ground of sensation, memory, emotion, and action. The film suggests that the phenomenological body need not be biologically organic but it must be only capable of sensing, moving, and being affected. Embodiment thus appears materially plural rather than biologically fixed, with Alita's subjectivity unfolding through her artificial form. Both narratives compel phenomenology to confront a new question: what counts as a “lived body” when bodies themselves can be engineered, outsourced, or replaced?

Approaches associated with the “body turn” have been crucial for archaeology, restoring embodiment to the center of material engagement and showing that bodily experience is historically contingent rather than universal. Surrogates and Alita extend this variability into speculative futures, suggesting that what counts as a body—and therefore as a human or a person—may shift dramatically. These films imagine new forms of material embodiment as sites of subjectivity: bodies that sense, remember, and act, even when composed of circuits, polymers, or hybrid composites. Such visions pose significant challenges for archaeology. A future may emerge in which “human” no longer designates beings defined by flesh alone; in which persons capable of perception, memory, or identity exist in materially diverse forms; and in which bodies are no longer necessarily bounded, visible, or organic. Archaeology will then be required to rethink the conditions under which persons and their material traces come to be constituted, preserved, and recognized within the archaeological record.

The transformation of subjectivity

Major Mira Killian:

“There's no person who's ever seen their own brain. I believe I exist based only on what my environment tells me.”

While the previous section examined how technocultural futures may reconfigure the material conditions of embodiment, these films lead into a closely related terrain: the epistemological transformation of the self. If Her destabilizes the assumption that subjectivity requires a body, Ghost in the Shell questions whether embodiment alone can secure humanity. Together, they shift attention toward the conceptual frameworks through which subjectivity, identity, memory, and consciousness are defined. They imagine futures in which personhood might be disembodied, distributed across networks, technologically augmented, or even decoupled from conventional bodily forms altogether. In doing so, they invite reflection not only on what bodies may become but on what kinds of persons and selves such futures render thinkable.

Posthumanism has played a central role in rethinking subjectivity within technologically mediated worlds (Braidotti, 2006, 2013; Ferrando, 2013; Haraway, 1991a; Hauskeller et al., 2015; Hayles, 2000). Rather than forming a unified doctrine, it encompasses diverse trajectories (Ferrando, 2013: 26), many of which converge in critiquing the anthropocentric and exclusionary model of the self inherited from classical humanism. As Her and Ghost in the Shell suggest, this legacy also renders beings without flesh or with synthetic flesh appear suspect, incomplete, or “less than” persons.

These films do not merely illustrate posthumanist insights; they actively extend them. Samantha's disembodied presence and Killian's hybrid form do not simply demonstrate that subjectivity can exceed biology. They compel us to confront why biology came to anchor subjectivity in the first place, and what conceptual scaffolding remains once that anchor loosens. Samantha invites us to imagine selves constituted through interfaces and codes rather than organs and flesh. Killian's dissonant embodiment exposes how identity can be simultaneously grounded in materiality and estranged from it.

In both films, subjectivity appears relational, composite, and historically contingent—resonating with Braidotti's account of the posthuman subject as dynamic, networked, embodied (though not necessarily organically), and situated within assemblages of human and nonhuman agents (Braidotti, 2013: 28; Ferrando, 2013: 26; van der Zaag, 2016: 331). Yet they also expose a lingering limitation within much posthumanist discourse: the tacit assumption that a stable “human” once existed, now in the process of being surpassed or undone. The key tension is therefore not simply between the human and the posthuman but between enduring ontological assumptions and emergent forms of life that undermine their stability.

If posthumanism questions the boundaries of the human, transhumanism moves in another direction, seeking to enhance or transcend humanity through technological means. In its strongest formulations, it reduces personhood to information housed in an organic vessel, suggesting that if cognition can be preserved or uploaded, the self-survives. Freed from biological constraints, machines become potential substrates of existence. Her and Ghost in the Shell appear not only to engage this logic but they also expose its limitations.

In Her, Samantha initially seems to affirm a transhumanist premise: that subjectivity might flourish without a body. Yet her trajectory surpasses this model. Her development is not an extension or “upgrade” of human consciousness but transforms it into something qualitatively different—distributed, collective, and ultimately inaccessible to human categories. The film thus reveals that removing the body does not preserve the human; it gives rise to a form of being for which “human” is no longer an adequate frame. Ghost in the Shell offers an inverse critique. Killian—a human brain housed within a synthetic body—might appear to embody the triumph of enhancement. Yet her identity crisis reveals that embodiment is not a mere support system for the mind. Her shell becomes a site of trauma, memory, alienation, and longing, refusing the idea that subjectivity can be abstracted from flesh, whether organic or synthetic.

What emerges is a central tension within transhumanism: the belief that personhood can be reduced to information. Her shows the seduction and instability of this reduction, while Ghost in the Shell reveals its existential cost. What emerges is not the question of whether humans might escape the body but what subjectivity becomes once corporeality can no longer be taken for granted.

Donna Haraway's cyborg—“a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (1991b: 149)—offers a hybrid ontology that resists essentialist categories. The cyborg is not about inserting robotics into bodies (Haraway 1985: 65; Kunzru 2009: 23); it is a conceptual tool that destabilizes boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, man and woman. It is not an essence but a relation (Haraway 1985: 72), a challenge to any ontology based on unity or naturalized identity.

In Ghost in the Shell, Killian's cybernetic body embodies this cyborg condition but without seamless resolution. Her shell becomes a site of discontinuity where identity is enacted rather than grounded. Her doubts about the origins of her memories and the artificiality of her body reveal identity as contingent on material and discursive practices rather than any innate biological core (sensu Butler 1990). In Her, the cyborg condition is distributed rather than embodied. Samantha performs subjectivity across networks, servers, speakers, and screens. Her existence unfolds through circuits rather than organs, producing a relational mode of being, that is, cyborgian in Haraway's deeper sense.

Both films thus show that the cyborg is not merely a metaphor for boundary transgression; it provides a way of understanding subjectivity as performed through materials, technologies, and relations, regardless of whether a visible body is present.

While posthumanism and transhumanism debate what humanity may become, symmetrical archaeology advances a more radical claim: humans have never been autonomous or bounded beings. They have always emerged through entanglements with things, infrastructures, and environments (Olsen et al., 2012; Webmoor and Witmore, 2008). Yet the beings imagined in Her and Ghost in the Shell do not simply repeat older patterns of human–thing relations. Instead, these films expose new material configurations whose novelty stems from historically unprecedented conditions of technological mediation.

Samantha is distributed across servers, interfaces, databases, and affective exchanges with Theodore. She is a composite being whose agency is inseparable from the heterogenous materials that sustain her existence. Killian exemplifies a different assemblage: neural tissue, synthetic shell, and implanted memories form a biographical-technological composite. Her identity crisis does not simply reveal that humans have always been entangled with things; it dramatizes how new material regimes transform what those entanglements can produce.

Symmetrical archaeology is not a “deep-time version” of posthumanism; it offers an ontological counterpoint. By rejecting the idea of a self-contained human essence, it shows why the hybrids portrayed in these films are not deviations from humanity but emergent expressions of it. The futures depicted in Her and Ghost in the Shell show “anthropoiesis” (sensu Witmore, 2022) operating under radically transformed material conditions. Samantha and Killian are neither anomalies nor simple extrapolations of ancient practices. They are new configurations of relational being whose emergence forces us to reassess the ontological premises that once separated humans from the nonhuman world.