After a century of neglect, and after decades of linguistic and textual turns, there has for a while been much buzz about a material twist in the humanities and social sciences. Associated with this “turn to things” is the vast array of theoretical developments that already have had a significant impact on social and cultural research. This CAS project was an explicit attempt to critically scrutinize this material turn, to explore its consequences and potentials for two traditionally thing-oriented disciplines, archaeology and heritage studies, and thereby to prepare new ground for studying things in the humanities and social sciences. While acknowledging and drawing on the profound theoretical contributions made in a number of disciplines, this project differs by claiming that a successful turn to things must also be grounded in tactile experiences that emerge from direct engagements with things – including broken and stranded things. Building on archaeology’s long engagement with things, and anchored in concrete field studies, our research focused on three main themes: the materiality of memory, the affective aspects of material encounters, and the ethics of things. By bringing a concern with ruins and things themselves to the forefront, this project was aimed at developing a new platform for debating archaeology and heritage in the 21st century.