These things become part of and alter the material culture, which in turn exerts an influence on other people. The influences move in both directions, from people to things and from things to people. It is the system, New Archaeology claimed, that is powerful, and people adapt to it. In his view, human beings do not just act out scripts dictated by a system. Human beings form strategies, create and adapt social roles, invent technologies, and cooperate with some people while trying to dominate others.
Human beings are resourceful and capable.
Of course, people do not operate in perfect freedom. They inherit various structures of thought and meaning, from the political arrangements under which they live to the languages they speak. However, people have choices, and even when they try to re-create received forms of thought and meaning, they inevitably change them and create them anew. Hodder understood, moreover, that no two people understand the world in exactly the same way. For example, my experience of America as a Greek student was very different from the experiences of my American friends.