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The emergent ‘uses of the past’ literature challenges traditional perspectives on history as an objective constraint for organizational action. It does so by putting forward an interpretivist view that highlights the moulding and shaping of history as a resource that enables action. We build upon and extend this approach by demonstrating how a more explicit attention to materiality reveals ‘the dual nature of the past’ as not simply constraining and/or enabling but also actively orienting organizational action in the present. We draw upon research on organizational remembering and the concept of affordance to theorize the entanglement of organizational remembering and the material technologies of memory. We examine the dynamics of organizational remembering and materiality in the context of the British Museum’s digitization efforts. We show how narratives about the past enable organizational actors to make sense …