The St Anthony's Day procession was caught in a bitter, driving rainstorm, accompanied by thunder and lightning. We elected to carry on to the church, despite the weather and the sense of threat. By the time we reached our destination we were soaked through. Locals were happy for the rain and all it implied, students and faculty to have shared the powerful experience which appeared to close an affective gap with our hosts.

Veronica Strang has written a compelling statement about the importance of taking water's materiality seriously. By bringing the material properties of water to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as a material and social thing she shows how water is good to think with. The language we commonly use to describe the qualities of water is shown to be up to the task of also describing relations (human and non-human) established through water. Terms such as flow are not simple metaphors but refer quite specifically to what water can do.

Strang points us towards a range of theorists who are telling us the same thing – materials matter, are agentive, and have a say in their meanings. While drawing on theorists who stress the agentive or affective capacities of materials, Strang is critical of a tendency to take ‘flow’ or ‘flux’ as an overgeneralized model for materiality. She certainly has a point. Replacing a general model of stasis with one of movement does not let us off the hook in terms of explaining and demonstrating the specific types of movement involved. The point is illustrated by a narrative of the expanding relations water engenders through its properties in the Brisbane River Valley and beyond. Strang argues that just as humans are able to shift conceptual scales through reflexivity, water has the ability, because of its specific physical properties, to maintain relations between it and humans at all scales. Water is good to think because it can thus bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns. As such, water's properties – and she has a list – help build conceptual bridges that enable us to better understand sustainable resource use as the ‘orderly movement of things’ at a rate that all involved can keep up with. Water clearly works well in the way described here and has great potential to rearticulate debate. This is a clever use of the recent trend in non-anthropocentric theory which stresses non-human agency. Putting non-human agency at the fore is thus seen to be an ethical imperative, one that can be used to challenge forms of resource exploitation.

There is also an odd tension in the paper, which results from a long-standing conundrum, that of the relationship between matter and meaning. To my mind, the central theoretical challenge to the paper, and one of the thorniest questions for archaeology in general, is how to reconcile materials and meaning without introducing a representationalist logic where meaning is applied to matter by a thinking subject. The difficulty is to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism. It's one of those issues where even when one claims, with confidence, to have avoided it, someone will point out that in fact one has not. In Strang's case, I don't think she is making any claims to have resolved the issue. The paper is in fact much more about relationality than about meaning. The way in which the case study develops the language of water and mimics its structure does much that a cultural-construction argument could not; that is, I think Strang is on firmer ground when she writes of relations rather than meanings.

But the question of meaning remains. How are we to think about non-arbitrary categories, meanings and values without recourse to universal properties? I think all archaeologists struggle with this question, and I am thankful that Strang has presented us with one unapologetic response. The tension is produced by the language of ‘cultural construction’ that creeps into the paper. Materials that guide their own meanings through their properties are set alongside concessions to culturally inscribed values and ideas. Once the debate has been couched in those terms, the only choice really is to side with a quasi-universal experience of properties and hence commonalities of meanings across time and culture. Properties of things and people are not fixed, Strang argues, but offer some ‘relative . . . constants’ in a ‘flux’ (p. 140) of emergent relations in relation to universal human experiences of particular properties.

But this somewhat dodges the question of how different meanings can adhere to the same substances. What interests me is whether we can hold on to the insight that materials lend themselves to conceptual innovation and analysis because of their properties while simultaneously admitting that properties do in fact differ. Can we provincialize Strang's ideas without juxtaposing properties to meanings or arguing that meanings are the direct correlates of properties?

A concern with water is never far from the surface in northern New Mexico, usually due to its scarcity. Storms during religious processions are affectively powerful experiences in many ways. In our fieldwork,Footnote ¹ field crews from relatively wet, urban settings must be schooled daily in water conservation. Locally, the acequia system of water-sharing and control has existed for several hundred years in the area (Rodríguez Reference Rodriguez2007). The antiquity of the canal systems has archaeologists, Pueblos and Hispanic communities at loggerheads. A more knowledgeable person than I could write a narrative of flow similar to Strang's Brisbane example (see Arellano Reference Arellano2014; Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2007), though the differences might be telling – instead of consistency, inconsistent flows and the effects of inundation must be managed. The labour required to maintain the systems is becoming scarce, not because water is being willed away by a more agentive segment of the population, but due to the attraction of other kinds of work elsewhere. The power of the mayordomos, acequia managers, is weakened as control is given over to municipalities.

Is this water the same? Can we think of the stoppages, flows and power relationships established with hands, minds, vision, rock, histories, politics and so on as formative of its material properties? Or, at least, can we think of the entire phenomenon as one in which properties become determinate? I suggest we read Boivin's (Reference Boivin, Boivin and Owoc2004, 16–17) point that ‘properties . . . are imminent [sic] in embodied human engagement with that world’ in such a light. The body may be the first tool, but it does not work on a closed field of set properties. Feminist physicist Karen Barad (Reference Barad2007) states the case more strongly, writing that there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object. The proper referent for a property is instead a relation (or phenomenon, in her terminology). Properties, potential or otherwise, cannot be listed, as they only exist as such in relation. ‘Flow’, then, can be read as a property of water-in-relation (to a stream bed, for example). I suspect archaeologists will benefit from looking for ways in which not-quite-the-same properties are in evidence in other contexts. If water is always in relation, we can expect new properties from new relations, even given the undeniable set of affective responses noted by Strang.

The site of Kissing Fish is deep in a gully on the west rim of the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico. A magnet for rock art, the north wall of the gully reveals many years and layers of this practice. Pecking the basalt rock surface is a relatively new practice, however – the action of water on stone provoked by powerful, intermittent run-off has sculpted the basalt into smoothed, curved shapes. As Edgeworth (Reference Edgeworth2011) has noted, there has been a long-term relationship between special meanings and waters, especially sources, confluences and so on. Here we see such places repeatedly marked by rock art. But the rock art seems to respond to processes, not properties, mimicking movement rather than things. How can water continue to be good to think with in this context, but in a way that pushes us to think beyond what we perceive as the qualities that express its timeless properties? Can we think of the experience of water here as inseparable from that of rock? Rather than archaic foragers grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water, I suggest we think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place.

There are good reasons for taking the properties of a substance as generative of potential meanings common to all people. In the case of water, it enables the types of scheme transfer envisaged by Strang and put to good effect by her. Water as agent presents us, as she shows, with an ethical dimension to the substance itself that is belied by talk of it as a ‘resource’. But I argue that we need also to keep pushing beyond universal notions of properties, experience and scheme transfer, however well these respond to pressing contemporary concerns. There are many waters, not only many meanings of water.